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.......................

Back to school today. Oh goody.

I've started mirroring my Windows Apache installation to my Linux one (I dual boot), because Linux is so much better as a server platform than Windows XP. To be fair, I haven't used Windows Server 2003/IIS as a web server, basically because I can't afford it (take note Microsoft: young people are going Apache because they can). So, hopefully I can build a better platform for my test web server. I do like the extra Unix-based security and the ability to do cool stuff like sendmail and easily use Perl (I tried and failed to install ActivePerl for Windows - hey an occasion where Linux has been an easier platform to install something on than Windows).

Another note to Microsoft: ASP(X) is not an easy platform for young people to experiment with, because of its cost to setup. I don't have the money to buy Win Server 2K3 and therefore I can't use ASP(X) (unless I jump through hoops like installing mod_perl for Apache, then do this and that - it's more effort than it's worth).

Wow, what an essay. See you all tomorrow.

PS: My Linux uptime (it sucks, I know).

Hi.

Feeling less work-stressed now that I have made a bit more progress with French and Media Studies. Bit of a drama this morning, the gateway's reset button might have been pressed, so all the internet settings were gone, so had to scramble for a backup of them. Found the backup and restored it, thankfully.

Had a response to my question on the Dhost forums, and now I can start building the photo uploading application next week. Also, installed the Uptime Project last night, so you can see how long my XP installation is running.

Forgot to post this: take a look at my themed XP box with Longhorn and Tiger themes:

Longhorn

Tiger

Pretty cool, huh?

I have given up on work after churning out about 200 words in 4 hours (yes, that bad). Neither am I going to do any dev projects, I don't have the brainpower left. I might get onto the Buttons improvements next week (it is half term), but don't expect any major improvements for next week.

Wow, I don't know why I haven't played with blogs before, but here I am now. Being a webnerd should mean I should be the first to play with these new technologies. Anyway...

It's Saturday, I have loads of work to do and I want to also do some more stuff on my latest project, our Young Enterprise company site www.buttons.co.nr, but I have too much work to do.

In case you're wondering, it's French, German and Media Studies this weekend.

I haven't had a chance to update my main site www.hybridweb.co.nr, so it's still using my old non-MySQL news system which, frankly, sucks compared to the Buttons system.

Well, hope to see you again soon, on Peter's Webdev Blog.