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I've been quite busy lately, but - with my previous blog post being two months old - you probably already figured that out. So let's get down to business and give you an update.
Exams
I've had exams. Yeah, really. Two of them, and I failed both. Yay for me. Let's move on to more interesting subjects.
UK and Italy
I spent the last two weeks of my summer holidays away from home. The last week I was forced to visit Italy with my parents.. All I have to say about it is that I don't like the average Italian and that northern Italy has far too many tourists.
My trip to the UK however, was much more interesting. I was welcomed by my good friend Tom, and together we visited London. We got a hotel room close to Victoria station, which is pretty much at the very heart of London. We took two days to go sightseeing and I took plenty of pictures; they will be uploaded as soon as I get my hands on a card reader.
At the end of the second day, we went to Birmingham, the city where Tom goes to university. One thing worth mentioning about the Birmingham university, besides it's beautiful old buildings, is that the main computer rooms run on Linux. If you want to use a Windows machine, you have to go down to the basement. At the University of Ghent, us IT students have to bring our own live CD if we want to run Linux.
After two more days in Birmingham, I visited Tom's home town, Derby. We walked around town, and met up with another friend, Neil. We took a walk in a park at least twice the size of anything I've ever seen in Belgium, and then went to Neil's house to do the geeky thing: play video games and eat pizza.
I've also got 3 new addictions since my visit to the United Kingdom:
- Tic tacs
- Tea
- Freeciv
I can't wait to go back.
Development
Fast file transfers
With all the new hardware I got (read 'New toys' below), I've been transferring a lot of files back and forth. While transferring my music from my Mac to my new desktop, using a crossed cable to connect the two, the transfer rate was good enough, considering the files were sent over a TCP connection, which limits the speed of the transfers, but the time it took to transfer the files was not what you would expect when transferring so little data over such a fast link.
I found out that the limiting factor in this case was the FTP protocol. You see, whenever FTP transfers a file to a client, it tells the client to open a new connection. Opening a connection takes some time, but overall the delay is neglectable when using big enough files or a slow enough connection. When transferring smallish files (like songs) over a 100MBit/s connection, the delay becomes monstrous. Transferring a file takes roughly as long as setting up the connection, so you end up spending half your time (and bandwidth) on administration overhead. When transferring something like a website, it gets even worse. I've been working on a solution, I'll give you some numbers when I've got proof that things can be much better.
Backup and restore
Me and a few of my friends have had several hard drive crashes in the past year. Eva wanted to avoid the risk of losing all her pictures, so she asked me for a good backup and restore tool. The one that came with her computer (an HP utility) does not support anything but DVD-R's for storing the backed up date (not even DVD-RW's would work), and she thought that would end up being a bit more expensive than she wanted.
I started looking for a decent, feature-full open source backup and restore tool, but it turns out there are no such things out there. There are several tools out there that look reliable, but they all require a backup server. I myself was pretty pleased with the backup tool that came with Vista, I used it for a few months, until I switched back to XP. Eva however, is not a big fan of Vista, to say the least.
So I decided to try and create a B&R tool myself, I'll let you know when anything worth mentioning happens to it.
Very secret project with Tom
I've been planning a software project with Tom, which, if it ever takes off, should earn us a little money. And yes, it will be open source.
New toys
This summer, I upgraded my Pentium II desktop to a AMD Athlon X2 setup with plenty of memory and an acceptable video card. It stands next to my eMac and they both use the same keyboard in a multihead-like setup using Synergy. If you have multiple computers on your desk, this is something I very much recommend. It supports all operating systems I've ever used (except for DOS, of course), and so far I haven't had any problems with it.
I've also traded my Sony Vaio for a slightly less powerful Thinkpad with my brother. I now have a 12" laptop, something I've always wanted. Kudos to Bart. If you're thinking of getting a laptop, Thinkpads really are rock solid workhorses. My guess is that they're stronger than diamond.
Bart also got a Wii, which has proven to be very addictive. To bad we don't have any multiplayer games besides Wii sports for the moment. I got me an MP3 player / smartphone as well, the Symbian-based Sony Ericsson W950i. It's got 4GB of storage and an excellent media player for only €180. I haven't played around with Symbian yet, and I hear it uses a vile subset of C++, so I'm not to eager to get started either.
That's all for now, I'll post again when the pictures of London are up.