Just a quick one, because I fully intend to go to bed soon. Right.

Installed Expression Web (after getting it gratis, thanks, Microsoft) and had a go at editing the theme for my blog.

Basically, it looks like it barfs horribly at that stage, because it doesn’t support PHP. Which the entirety of Wordpress is written in. Basically, it looks like I’m going to have to either:

1. Give up entirely
2. Write my own Wordpress theme from scratch, implementing some clever hacks so that all along Expression Web doesn’t think it’s actually dealing with PHP at all, and nothing breaks.

I think I’m going to go for 2 because I’m me, and frankly I love the intellectual challenge of fun hacks.

I might have to do some experiments to see what’ll work best, see if I can figure out a way of going with the grain rather than against it. We’ll see.

Check this out! If you’re a student (and your institution is down on the list - Imperial is, but I’m not sure about other places, I didn’t look too hard) you can get the following for FREE:

• Visual Studio 2008 Professional
• Windows Server 2003 Standard
• SQL Server 2005 Express
• Microsoft Expression Studio
• XNA Game Studio
• Visual Studio 2005 Professional

Buying this stuff individually would cost a fortune, this is an amazing deal, so if you’re at all interested in developer / web designer tools (or you know someone who is) this is well worth taking a gander at to see if you’re eligible.

Microsoft DreamSpark

The second probably being more recognisable than the first, so I’ll just start with that.

So my major gripe with it so far is getting it to connect to Imperial’s wireless, otherwise I’ve got a laptop I can only ever use when it’s tethered to a network cable. Somehow, this feels slightly like missing the point to my mind. The problem is that the EEE only supports the kind of wireless security used by home connections, WEP (which is dreadful, and nobody should ever use ever. It is less security, and more like a deterrent. Think of it as a waist-high fence) and WPA-Personal (or WPA-PSK, for the TLA minded) and the Imperial network uses WPA-Enterprise.

There were two real solutions before me, blow away the default Xandros install and go with Xubuntu (which would work) or try and hack WPA-Enterprise support into Xandros through the agency of bizarre text commands (none of which, sadly, were sudo make me a sandwich, although I did a lot of sudo nano) and a bucket-load of patience.

The first option I discarded because Xubuntu looked even harder to use than Xandros, and I was getting quite attached to the cute default tabs interface. And the second required more patience than even I possess.

As luck would have it, Imperial have an insecure network, through which one can use something called VPN (or Virtual Private Networking) to create a tunnel through to the real network. To start with, I though this would have been even more horrific than getting WPA to work so I didn’t even consider it, but as it turns out, it actually works out of the box using the default installed software. So it works! Hooray!

PLRW is Professor Lord Robert Winston, who today did a talk at Imperial to help launch the annual RCSU Science Challenge. The top prize is £2500, a MacBook (which I would immediately sell or install Windows on. Probably both.) and A TRIP TO CERN. Honestly, there was an actual audible gasp at that one. The guy organising the event is a physicist, so he took the opportunity to ask any medics to let him have the tickets if they happened to win. It’s one hell of a prize, never mind the free trip to the French-Swiss border, the chance to have a look around CERN is pretty much once in a lifetime for anyone who isn’t a high-energy physicist by trade.

My thoughts about the lecture itself will probably have to wait until sometime tomorrow.

Until we meet again.

So the Asus Eee is a pretty wonderful machine, all in all. In fact, I’m using it right now to type this, and apart from the occasional mistype it works pretty damn well.  The interface is easy and intuitive, it comes installed with more or less everything you need, and it plays well out of the box. It’s great.

So the other day (Friday) I took it to college as a shakedown run, I guess you could call it.

This threw up one rather major difficulty - WPA-Enterprise isn’t supported by default, and that’s what the Imperial wireless network uses. Bugger.

So support for WPA-E has to be rather hackily hacked back in. One ham-handed attempt by me has already cost me the use of the network monitor in the tray. No great loss, but kinda irritating.

Anyways, I’m right now running a specially customised version of Ubuntu Linux, which should fix the network issue, but the list of post-install tweaks on the wiki is frankly just frightening, and some of it is pretty important stuff, like fixing SD cards not mounting.

I’m starting to get the impression that Linux is an operating system designed for people who, a priori, know what the fuck they’re doing, and in the hands of these people it is an incredibly powerful tool. You can do anything you like, assuming you know how to do it.

In some ways it feels like the direct manifestation of the principle that the last 10% of the work takes 90% of the time, so they’ve only done 5% of that last 10%. Most everything works, and you can fix or disable anything that doesn’t, right? Because worst case scenario, you have to delve in to the command prompt, type in some arcane commands and poof, it works.

Thing is, I really don’t want to install Windows on here. I want to get to a point where I can use Linux, but not being able to get onto the Imperial Wireless network might really be a dealbreaker.

We’ll see.

So today I had a tutorial, in which I kinda had to admit that I didn’t actually know anything because I hadn’t done the problem sheet. So the tutor kept asking me if I understood what was going on. Rather luckily I did, he asked me to do a question up on the board and it actually went alright, all in all.

Then I took a bus up to Piccadilly Circus (because walking to South Ken tube is extremely tedious), somehow managing smack my little finger on something I was getting on, causing the tip of my nail to kinda crack in the middle and start bleeding. Which was kinda icky.

Anyways, got there and had a bit of a stroll. A purposeful stroll. I wandered over Leicester Square, up to the Seven Dials in Covent Garden. On a side note, the Seven Dials is rapidly becoming my favorite area of Central London. It’s just cool.

Got to Forbidden Planet and bought the new Buffy comic, then headed up past the Intrepid Fox (heavy metal pub. Interesting clientele) to  Tottenham Court Road, with the intention of buying a white Asus EEE 4g. First place said they hadn’t had stock in about two weeks, and that he wasn’t expecting any again ever.

Next place I tried was Micro Anvika, a sign outside said they were in stock, which is usually a good sign. I wandered over to the guy standing by the display model, pointed, and said “I want one of those, please”. Really. He then proceeded to sell me one. The weirdest part was the whole paying by card part. You do start to realise how easy it is to blow vast amounts of cash really, really fast.

Anyways, I took it home, and it’s now what I’m using to type this blog post. The keyboard takes some getting used to, but it’s really not that bad at all!

On other matters, on Tuesday, me, Sarah^2, Niro, Daisy, Rowan & Craig gathered at Sarah & Daisy’s place and made pancakes, which was awesome, and then went to the Temperance pub, which was really nice, and all in all it was a good night.

I think some of this is really funny

Holographs are created by mixing reflected laser light with a second laser beam to lay down a static image - typically a lengthy, complicated and delicate process.

Actually, an undergrad physicist can do it pretty easily. I know, because I’ve made holograms in lab this year. About 3-4 weeks ago, as a matter of fact. I feel that this is probably another science story where they’ve oversimplified it to the point of pointlessness. If that makes sense. I might see if I can dig out the original article from Nature later.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Holographic displays step closer

So according to here Steven Moffat is going to be the next Doctor Who showrunner. Given that he wrote last series’ fan-fucking-tastic “Blink”, I really hope it’s true.

And a guy sitting behind me has an Asus eee. Is it wrong I want to murder him and take it?