Term has finally been winding down at school this week; we finished at lunchtime and spent the morning of history lessons watching relevant videos. So for yesterday and tonight I decided to do some alternative activities to school work due to not having much to do, and in order to have a change. I will be commencing my holiday homework tomorrow if all goes to plan, and then of course it is on to revision. I also intend to try and catch up on my e-mails and other related activities but I fear already this is not going to happen. Really, I should have spent this time doing that rather than this.

I have opted to yet again redesign my website, seanwhitton.com – I think this is about version five. While this blog is presently as it has been for some time due to the comparative difficulty I will have trying to convert the blog’s complex template to the new layout, the new site didn’t take me too long to re-layout and I am pleased with the result. I did a direct transfer of the old site to the new by simply replacing the old template with my new code and this means that not all pages look quite as they should. Since I now have a site map on the home page, I was tempted to add some more pages to the listing and thus I have some things to fill in. It seems I naturally have site content now without having to work too hard to make it up which is a good thing. This blog has always been my main source of writing and so I aim to transfer this over eventually. It will be far from easy, however. My new design is supposed to be easy to use, simple and clean, so I would appreciate any feedback on whether it is this.

About a week and a half ago I decided to purchase a ’slug’ or what is actually called a Linksys NSLU2. It is a device designed to serve files with a built-in FTP and web server, that can easily be mounted on network machines. The idea is to add storage to a smallish network that can easily be accessed. However, since the thing is based on Linux anyway is has been hacked somewhat by fans and is now officially supported by Debian – in other words, I now have a mini-server with low power consumption that I can run useful things off and leave on all the time. It took me some time to get it working because my router was feeding it false information meaning it couldn’t properly connect to the Debian mirrors to get hold of the operating system files (I had to open another shell and edit /etc/resolv.conf manually). Getting the router to forward web, SSH and FTP ports was not easy either. Now it is running, with its cute 120GB WD Passport Drive, absolutely fine and you can see a picture here. I am very happy with this purchase.

I have decided to actually be a proper unix geek and learn how to use vi(m) efficiently. In general I use it on SilentFlame only because nano isn’t installed, but I realise that I am wasting keystrokes and vim is a good idea. I just need to work through vimtutor methodically and try to use the different methods presented where they are going to speed me up most. I need to get used to editing my site and other such things in SSH as it is a lot easier. Eventually I could of course set up Wikipedia to use vim for all editing, but this may be a bit far. Not sure at this stage – still trying to absorb.