Nexus's Blog

The sky peels back

This blog entry is the first blog entry of which I am typing up on my brand new laptop which actually came in a bit earlier than I expected. According to my Dell order information on their website I should have gotten it last Friday but instead got it on the Monday. Everything was included rather nicely and I am really pleased with the end result. The only problem I have with it is the fact they installed Windows Media Center Edition 2002 and not 2005 as advertised but I had the disks there to do it myself and I wasn't intending on using it at all.

This leads me on to my next exciting point. I am actually not running Windows on this machine but rather Linux. In particular a distrobution called Kubuntu which is essentially the popular Ubuntu distrobution but with KDE as a desktop environment which I prefer. I am still configuring a lot of stuff and it is going to take ages for me to get it up and running as there is a lot of stuff to move and setup. After having a good look around Kubuntu I am considering not using my old favorite browser Opera and instead opting for Konqueror. I still love Opera but the integration with KDE that both Kontact, a KDE email/organizer and Konqueror it is so much more tempting.

Currently at school it is a few weeks from exams so I am revising a lot. Apparently a considerable amount more than other students whom I assumed studied a lot more. I am really hoping to get a great score for my exams and hopefully all of this work will pay off.

One of the reasons I really wanted to get this blog entry out was to lift the lid on several things. I just noticed a new thread on my forums complaining about the inactivity so I thought that I should explain a few things. Firstly over the last few months my site NRX Domain has been lacking in updates and forum activity. The site isn't a big one by no means but my brother and I mutually decided on letting it go for a bit to improve the quality of our school work which is unfortunately more important to us. I still regularly visit the site almost daily but wanted to accelerate the amount of time I had for school. At work I was getting more hours and with the increased work load at school something had to give or I would have been completely bogged down.

Please don't be angry for me about this, I have seen it happen to many other webmasters out there and I have some follow up plans. At the moment I see NRX as a great site full of excellent content but there are several problems that I don't think can easily be cleared up including:
-Web Accessibility. the site is plagued but the HTML table structure of MKPortal and the CSS is riddled with errors with a mixture of embedded CSS and external pages.
-Content Coverage, video games, graphics, programming, web design are all massive topics and one site cannot easily cover them all well. These topics are too broad.
-Site Additions, updating content at the moment is too time consuming for me to do right now.

Instead of addressing these issues my brother and I have made the joint agreement to shut the site down when the domain name expires next February. Now this probably sounds bad but please read on there is some very important stuff coming up.

After my final exams in a few weeks and even next year, Dan and I have organized ourselves to have more time on our hands. With this extra time we have several new projects coming up which will in our minds replace NRX, well. Let me explain these in more detail.

Firstly we both initially intend to properly setup our own blogs properly. They both will have their own domain name with a unique template. I am actually considering keeping a video blog for my new journal. I will post more about these in future entries.
Ontop of that we both have a new idea for a low maintenance website that will be created after our new blogs are up. I don't want to talk about this one but it should be a unique site that hasn't been seen before.

Most importantly though we will both be creating alongside a whole new set of staffers a network of several website covering Video Games, Programming, Web Graphics, Literature and more. I intend for these to replace NRX and possibly some work from NRX will migrate to these sites. These site will each be powered by some great ideas and I am sure many people will enjoy the end result.

I actually was intending on telling everyone about this after my exams but it doesn't matter now. All of these sites will take some time with many only in the planning stages but I will keep you posted on the details. These ideas are still temporary but I am feeling confident that they will go ahead.

Thanks guys for reading this extremely long entry.

Fedora, the move

The last week has been rather good, it is currently the school holidays and I have been catching up on school study and homework. Being school holidays my computer use has evidently increased. I have had the spare time to catch up with friends on line and organize my computer. Currently I am in the pre-purchasing stages of getting a new dell laptop. I have done my research and picked out an excellent model with plenty of grunt and features. My purchase has been delayed for a few weeks so I am rather annoyed but just a few days ago Dell Australia posted up a new deal in which I could get my laptop as well as a free TV tuner, not that I watch much TV if any but the freebie is nice. The big catch with getting this free TV tuner is that I must also get Windows MCE which I really don't want to use.

I have been a Windows user for a long time but recently have been having problems with the OS. Winamp and Opera have been seizing up on me which has not been common on my older Windows Installs. My most recent problem has been WMP not playing my new DVD which I picked up from JB Hifi at an amazing price today. This has lead me into deciding to use Linux. In the past I have dabbled with Mandrake(now Mandriva) and Ubuntu so I have a rough idea on how Linux works overall. My brother has recently been using Ubuntu on his laptop and I am pleased to say that he is considering making the permenant change from Windows to Linux. I was shocked today that he even started messing around with some Command Line stuff and got somethings working.

So here is my plan, the PC I am currently using will be using Windows MCE after I get my laptop and will act as a multimedia hub and a backup system for my brother and I while my Mum can record TV to the PC. I am planning of using Fedora Core 5 on my new laptop and then hopefully networking Windows MCE, my brothers Ubuntu Laptop and my laptop together wirelessly. I would really love to use the Multimedia features from Windows MCE throughout the network but I am not sure to what extend I can do this. Ontop of this I am planning on finally applying for ADSL.

In one of the forums I post to a member said that after Year 12 your life will accelerate and I can see this happening.

Thanks for reading.

Boiling Point

This week is trial exam week and it has definitely been one of the hardest weeks in terms of school work for this year. So far I have had three trial exams, Math Studies, Chinese and Physics. Chinese wasn't too bad and overall I think I did okay. Math Studies was a pretty average exam, the advanced statistics always really annoy me as well as the logarithmic problems. The Physics exam was the longest exam of my life, the booklet was rather thick and the amount of questions were insane. The exam was split into four sections, short answer, extended answer, practical skills and then two essays all in three hours. I missed about two pages of the exam and half of the second essay and some of my classmates were worse off than me.

Besides the stresses of school, I have been starting to lay the foundations for a new laptop and quite frankly a complete revamp of my computing use and setup. I was intending on ordering a new laptop from Dell this week but unfortunately ordering it has been delayed till next week. I am also planning on rearranging emails, feeds and other stuff. After I finally receive with new laptop I am also planning on making a complete swap over to Debian which is very exciting.

I think I may have already mentioned this before but I am not sure. I plan on releasing some new sites and other cool things over Christmas. Planning for these things should be starting as soon as I finish my final exams in around 6 weeks. One of these sites is the proper launch of Nexfinity.net, the future home for my blog. I will keep you guys posted.

Friday Jive

Tonight is Friday and I thought it would be a great time for another blog entry. Not much has been happening recently so there isn't a lot to talk about. School has been taking up most of my time with heaps of assignments and revision going on. I am feeling rather good about where I am at with all of my school work.

I released a new proxy site called Proxika on Monday which is rather nice. I am hoping that it will generate a little bit of money to pay for my server hosting. The service is fast and has very few ads.

I have been getting hooked on Podcasts recently thanks to the great Cubed3 podcasts. I am a subscriber to the Cubed3 Podcasts, AMN and Australian Gamer podcasts which are all excellent. I have also been branching out to a few programming ones which are rather boring.

Catchya

Railed

Tonight I have installed Instant Rails on my PC and it looks really interesting. Instant Railers is a prepackaged version of Apache, MySQL, PHP and Ruby on Rails. Usually I use WAMP servers to power my local web server but I have opted for a complete swap to Instant Rails. Instant Rails and WAMP are practically the same in terms of functionality except WAMP doesn't have Ruby on Rails installed and I can't be bothered manually installing it, especially when Instant Rails has the lovely configured menu's. I have already checked out the two pre-installed Rails applications, Typo and Quickbook which seem rather nice. Now if you have no idea about what Ruby on Rails is then be sure to check out, the official site and watch the sceencasts. I have also managed to find two very shorts books on Ruby which I plan to work on after I finish year twelve.

Several domain names that I have put down for should be mine sometime this week. Unfortunately I haven't setup my paypals account entirely so I am ordering them through cheque which is really slow. I am really peeved actually because someone pinched a name I put down for order, valveportal.com which I was intending on selling.

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