As this post finally wins the award for longest post title ever, and longest time between posts, I would like to welcome myself back to writing this blog.

I haven’t written for ages for a number of reasons. Firstly, mock exams are about to start, so revision has been heavy recently and secondly, lots of further development has been taking place, so there hasn’t really been time to write here.

But anyway, on with today’s post, and it’s going to be a bit of an essay to make up for all those days I didn’t post.

In development, Project Krystal has come on leaps and bounds, but is still most definitely in Alpha stage, as there are major flaws getting it to work. I am kitting out a friend with a copy of the latest ‘stable’ (I use the term loosely) build to test and find improvements, not only to the code but the web user interface too. He gets a free copy of my website management software to build his website, I get a tester. Symbiosis at its best.

In code, I am now building the final bit of the project, the products page with cataloguing system (fully sortable) and searching for the products. Also, the rich text editing system is officially integrated with the whole admin system, so it is as easy to use as any WYSIWYG word processor.

Christmas is also coming, so that means a new graphics card, the Geforce 6600, hopefully, to replace my current (rubbish) Geforce FX5200.

When will I be finished with Project Krystal? No idea as yet. Once all the features are done, the code will have to be seriously stablised to the point that I consider it something worth(y) of selling.

On the note of Hybrid, which will take over from Buttons Productions after the end of the year, my friend Chris is now on board to deal with the design of the future Hybrid site and our contracts. He’s good at building mock designs (albeit in Paint) and making them look good when I convert them to the cool XHTML.

OK, until next time, which I’m not sure when it will be,

Peter the Nerd

I hate to say it, but the dreaded Mock Exams will arrive soon (only a couple of weeks now), and so the amount I post to this blog is likely to decrease. If anyone reads this anyway, post a comment, but never mind.

Today I downloaded and installed Squid for my Linux system, and started playing about with it. Still can’t work out how to get the ACLs working properly, anyone with a good tutorial should post a comment if they find one. I also have started thinking about the PayPal integration of the Project Krystal Products system and its potential security implications. I don’t want to sell a hackable system, do I?

I’ll write again sometime.

Sorry I haven’t posted for ages, I’ve actually been quite busy.

I’ve now sold 8 copies of the Making Of (don’t ask if you don’t know), at £2 each, so I have finally made a profit from buying all those DVD+Rs.

Anyway, Young Enterprise was busy again, despite more than half of the people not being there. Project Krystal is going places, with a rich text editor being implemented now, to replace ageing and frankly clunky BBcode. Should be good, just the integration of that with my current PHP app to do.

Hopefully write again soon,

Peter

I think it’s about time I introduced you to a great forum and community for those less experienced in Linux (and even Windows). Linux-noob.com is a community run by anyweb, and it is really friendly to newbies to Linux. These guys will help you through anything, either on the forums or on their IRC channel, #linux-noob on EFNET.

In my news, did some work today, but no more dev for the moment. I’m going to write a SUSE 10 review for Linux-noob.com now.

I’m back and I have got very far with Project Krystal. I have got through two major development milestones and, well, let me just show you the URL to the rolling, working preview.

www.aurora.co.nr/pkalpha

The backend is about halfway there in terms of dev, but the frontend sucks right now. You didn’t need me to tell you that, but it does. If this system gets sold, though, it will obviously have a properly professional looking frontend to go with it.

Also, I better mention that I did all the dev up to Milestone 2 on my new SUSE 10 system. KDE 3.4 looks great, amazing what changes in 3 minor versions! It even has a K menu search system (like Vista’s upcoming Start Menu search). KDE’s is a bit clunky, but it shows the power of open source off a bit. Not too impressed with GNOME in SUSE 10, not that it’s bad, but SUSE haven’t bundled the good window themes and icon sets, so it doesn’t look as polished as KDE.

Oh no, the holiday appears to be escaping….

Project Krystal is coming on and making very good progress. We now have a homepage system, a news system with image upload features (now that is pretty cool) and soon to be a product inventory system and feature page system.

This project is finally going somewhere – I just wish that I could be more sure of what the final design will look like than the current ‘retro’ look I put together for the Alpha build, while I build. I might build a better UI for the Beta, but for now, it has to look pretty terrible.

I will be away from Tuesday – Thursday this week, so there will be no more blog entries for a while , but I’ll keep you posted (no pun intended) with the dev news as soon as I get back.

And I’m downloading the 5^th and final CD of SUSE 10 right now, so I should be able to do that too. I booted into YaST just to have a look, and it looks great.

Today was the first day of the holiday, and I have used it to mainly be geeky and do work on Project Krystal, which I’m sure you’ve heard about. I now have a dynamic homepage system and news features. All driven by a MySQL database backend and PHP. It’s going to be one of the biggest projects yet, especially getting the file uploading to work to have images for the news stories and online product inventory.

Well, see you tomorrow.

First of all, sorry about yesterday – I was very busy. A new major project has been unveiled for Buttons Productions, currently named Project Krystal, a competely dynamic website management system with loads of cool stuff. It will surely keep me occupied over this half term. Read the official Buttons news story here.

In other news, of course, school is now out for a week which is great news. Do have to do quite a lot of work, though. Should be good.

And I’m also starting to download OpenSUSE 10 (I’m currently running SUSE 9.0). Five CDs will take a while even on this connection. Glad I don’t still have 56k….

After colleges yesterday, careers fair today.

Was OK, saw all the college candidates and got prospectuses and stuff. Not made a decision yet.

Bit busy with YE stuff, so see you tomorrow.

Just had a look around a local college at the computing facilites. Was initially a bit worried I would be Microsoft-boxed-up in a Windows world, but there were mentions of FCR4, Solaris, all the big Unix players and some server OSs that even I (just kidding) hadn’t heard about.

Yeah, so it’s now to look around the other ones and make a decision. And whether to do something else as well…………………..