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Where (some of) my Uni fees are going

What else am I to do when I’m in the city with time to use up between events than go to Uni and do some downloading of some of my favourite content distributed on the internet.

Most people would realise that this is content is coming down faster than I think any connection available to consumers anywhere in Australia, maybe even for a business.

It’s great to know my (and my families) money is being spent on worth while things like internet connections and the stupidly large salary of the University Dean.</sarcasm>.

-james

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Why poorly designed search sucks.

Rececntly, for an assignment for Uni I was writing researching consumer and business security and user privacy in relation to IT.
Using the UTS Library search tool to find academic papers on such topics I came back with the following group of results in response to the query “computer security” or “computer privacy” (one of the two, not sure which one).
bad search resultsA
This result particularly caused a great lack of faith in the tools the Library has put in place.
Bad search resultsB

I hope that all library search tools don’t suck as much as the one here at UTS does.

In other news, it’s another horribly grey and rainy day here in Sydney. I hope where you are it’s nice and sunny!

-james

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Where in the world have I been?

Since it’s been quite a while since the hype that surrounded CeBIT AU (and I’ve still got some reviews to write up when I get a chance), I thought I’d let you know what I’ve been up to of late!
I’ve been doing a lot of Uni related activities of late – assignments, some paid work here and there, more assignments, and meeting people here and there. Uni has certainly kept me busy – and I’m looking forward to my break from studies (except for the one final exam I have) on Thursday afternoon.
I’m continuing to work at McDonalds, but I’m currently looking around for a new job. I really like working with the people I work with (especially the management, they’re all really great), but I’d like to find something I’m a little more interested in. Something up the tech side or something to do with photography would be great.
Here’s a few projects I’ve been working on at the moment, some old and some new.

  • St. Faith’s Youth website was launched recently, and proved to be a pretty big hit. We’re hoping to implement podcasts and vidcasts when I the time to do it. I’m trying to get a better production workflow happening, but that is proving difficult with only one computer.
  • As well as the youth website, I’m also producing a series of videos in the lead up to our yearly Youth Camp called Mission Impossible, with the theme this year looking to be Aliens, and based on 1 Peter. I’m also doing the technical production for the weekend, so I’m organising sound, lighting, AV and potentially a small scale radio station to run over the course of the weekend.
  • Various paid jobs mainly doing web design/consultancy and a few photography/media jobs on the odd occasion.
  • I’ve been elected as Computer Systems Officer for the UTS Programmers Society, which has taken quite alot of my time over the past few weeks. We’ve just swapped to a new file server with a much larger storage capacity and RAID, and I’ve had quite a few teething problems [1] that are yet to be resolved.

So, as you can see I’ve been pretty busy. But of course, that’s no excuse for not finding the time to write anything. Hopefully I’ll get back into writing once Uni finishes up. I’ve got a few things that I’d like to share with you all, but you’re just going to have to wait!

-james

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Help this guy out!

Just quickly browsing through a few of the blogs from the IPTV people I love to watch and found a link to Paul Stamatiou’s blog from AmberMac.com
From what I’ve just read quickly, Paul seems like a great tech blogger and as a student in a situation similar to his I thought I’d give him some credit. He’s in the running for a $5000 scholarship which you can read about here. If you like what he’s writing, vote for him, because being a poor Uni/College student isn’t the best feeling!

-james

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We’re back!!

After the 2nd server crash in a month (the 2nd time being my own fault) we’re back!!! Hopefuly I wont go and stuff up the kernel images and boot sequence of my Debian install now and make my server redundant. I’ve moved from Fedora Core to Debian, and so far it seems a far nicer Linux distribution to work with (apt-get saves my butt over and over again).

Also, now I’ve moved to Debian, I’ll be setting up decent FTP and web-hosting fairly soon, so if you’d like to have something stored or hosted, let me know. I’m going to wait a few weeks and see how the hardware holds up, and get some data backup systems in place, but once that’s done I’m all set to go!

I’m back down in Sydney tomorrow to start the 2nd half of my first semester at UTS on Monday. I have an exam the first day back, and then ANZAC day off, so I’ll have to see how I go with all that. Spending time at home has been good, and its been good to see all my friends again – shoutouts to all my friends!!

Anyway, as always, feel free to leave comments and suggestions!!

-james

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