Hot Off The WordPress

I last updated this blog in August, which was a quarter of a year ago. A lot’s happened since then. Not that anyone reads this anyway, but stuff that’s happened for me personally since then:

• I’ve had offers from 3 different universities to do AI & Robotics courses
• I’ve spent a night homeless (with 80 other people though)
• I’ve been sobre at parties I should’ve been drunk at
• I’ve met up with old friends and made plenty new ones
• I’ve taken lots of pictures…

There’s a lot which I can’t remember (or can’t list here ;P) but it’s been a good four months on the Slashing Edge side of things:

• I’ve designed one new site for a client and started work on another
• I’ve gotten a brand new dedicated server which is really fast, and will start offering webhosting on it soon
• I’ve been developing an array of web software under the SE name, although it’ll be released opensourced (and what it is I’ll keep under wraps ’til it’s functional)

So yeah. A lot’s happened. It’s all gravy!

I don’t update this blog enough. Then again, I’ve had a busy holiday. Right now, I’m sitting in a robotics lab at Newport University as a voluntary (unpaid) intern. My tasks at the moment are to get a cluster of computers running Ubuntu (20-blade HPC cluster) so the more demanding robotics programs can be ran with ease on it. My other task is to get a bunch of equipment working on a Pioneer mobile robot so that it can become sentient and kill a bunch of people. So far I have its eyes working.

It’s interesting stuff, I’ll give you that. This lab is cool. The coolest robots they have, though, have to be the humanoid, upright-walking Nao robots – they walk, and they talk to you. Wooo.

Why am I doing it as an unpaid/voluntary thing? Well… they weren’t going to offer me any money, ahha, but it’s also a very interesting experience, and something that looks good on a CV. If you’re in college and looking at doing an engineering/ComSci course at Uni, I strongly recommend doing something like this. If you’re lucky, it’ll rain heavily in the week you do it, meaning you haven’t wasted any holiday.

Ciao!

If you’re looking at my Twitter feed then you’ll probably notice more & more Tweets regarding the situation in Iran on it. Reason is, I’m providing internet services for the bloggers in Iran on various domains. I’m also spreading the word!

Switched to a new server a few days ago. Now have plenty more space (and RAM) to use for selling hosting on.

To celebrate, I added two new packages – one with 4Gb space, and one with 10Gb.

Click here to look at the hosting plans.

Mhmm. As a hobby kinda’ thing (I’m not going to make any serious money off it), I’m offering cheap but supportive webhosting:

http://vps.slashingedge.co.uk/hosting

I’ve got a single customer so far, and I’m also being a mirror for a small linux distro.

I’ve realized how good Twitter is for advertising these kinda’ services, too.

I’ve also realized how much stuff you have to do if you can’t afford cPanel licenses and things like that. My virtual hosting + its control panel etc. are completely hand-crafted.

…but, I don’t like all this political pressure revolving around The Pirate Bay’s court case. Seems like Sweden’s government is being forced to do a lot of things it rather wouldn’t do by institutions like the IFPI.

Is it me, or is that logic flawed? I can see a lot of people who’ll start using torrent sites a lot more because of the (in)famous Pirate Bay case, or who will completely cease to buy from major labels.BitTorrent isn’t software tailored for hoarding music and films – it’s tailored for distributing information over a huge network in an ingenious way. I remember, when it was first conceived, a lot of broadcasting corporations (such as the BBC) saw the potential of distributing their media over it, yet the film and music industry seems to have been left in the dust since. They could’ve embraced it; it’s a good software. But, no, they choose to condone it instead.

It’s much easier sharing resources over sites. Rather than code my own blog system, it seems easier to integrate WordPress. Just a note to anyone who thinks I’m being lazy

So, after weeks of tweaking my design and writing up content, Slashing Edge Design’s latest & greatest version is live!

Man it’s taken me a long time. That’s what you get for doing web-design on the side whilst you’re doing A-Levels. Nevertheless it’s been a learning experience. I now know how to do decent-looking layouts which work on *all* browsers – including IE

Now to start advertising our services, and actually get some work. Looking forward to it!