You won't believe me
[Wed, 17 Nov 2004]

No one is going to believe me, but I might as well post this anyways - This site has become active again and will be kept up-to-date until at least May 2004. See I knew you wouldn't believe me!

So, how and why is this happening? Let's start with how badly it needs it. It does, reeeeal bad. My last update (if you can call a 'no more updates' notice that) was 1st June.. that's like .. 5 months ago! Then there is the issue that this site has also been broken since my PC died on me (of course I had a backup of the site! I'm me!). I woke up this morning having missed the 9am lecture I cared about, and decided that it just wasn't worth the effort and strain to get to me 11am Mobile Robotics lecture.. You'd be suprised just how boring a module with that name can be.. the lecturer actually put up a slide about how a push-switch works.. *sigh*.. When you consider compiler design and assembly language as pretty simple a push switch is a little too simple.

Secondly, I need the site. I've start my final year project and soon will be applying for employment and it'd be useful to have a website to dump more verbose details and hobby reports on.. For instance I'll probably put up some information about chipping an XboX in here, as that is something I did about a month ago.. probably I'll just annotate the pictures as there are plenty of site to explain chipping itself. So this will become something of an online portfolio (in theory anyway, I doubt it'll be as fancy as most I've seen) and I need it for my final year project. The only problem I see at the moment is that the University arn't keen for project work details to be publically accessable before you hand in your project report, which signiifies the end of the project... but we'll see. Certainly some sort of journal might be an idea, otherwise writing a report about how well I managed the project might be a bit tricky..

So when does this updating start? It already has. I've fixed the site so it once again works, and more over it once again works in DreamWeaver meaning I can edit it (mostly) painlessly. Also I finally fixed the splash screen, which had a file:// src instead of a normal http:// one.. my bad!

Updated the 'Rob' page, as I'm now 21 (shiver).

Yeah, yeah, I know..
[Tue, 1 Jun 2004]

I should update the site more, but I havn't. So sue me. Exams start on Friday, so you won't get the smallest of updates to this site till after June, as after exams I'll be quite busy celebrating the lack of exams.

What went wrong?
[Wed, 12 May 2004]

Things were going so well and it seemed as though some progress was finally going to be made, so what gives?

Well I got a client for some web design, this coupled with the looming exams has forced me to consider working hard for a change. While I still managed to mess about and avoid real work this past fortnight, I must now work. It's a pity as my work has involved me using a lot of Flash MX, which is what OH2 is made in! So far I have made a very nifty menu system in Flash's ActionScript, and I am quite pleased with it, I'll probably put it up on this site at some point, once I have finished tweaking the colour control and skinning issues. Hmm.. also I think I will move the settings into the source text files to simplfy things.. *rambles on some more*

Yeah, well, other than that not a lot has happened, sorry. Btw, there is a problem with the OH2 which is currently available for download - the "Play New" button does nowt, also it's out of date, I've done slightly more than you see. I can't be arsed to wait for it to fail to upload again and again, so until I make some more progress, I won't be fixing this 'Play New' button. (Anyone else notice the two types of quoting I did? " at first and then ' later.. tut tut.. sloppy work Rob!).

The website I am working on is www.chriswhiteconservative.com, though it probably won't show much for a while :) Also I have been spending an increasing amout of time in IRC, mostly on #azureus-users @ irc.freenode.org .. don't ask me why, I don't know - helping people with the same problem again and again is getting old, but somehow I can't seem to stop!

Hmm, and it's only 1:30am.. and earlier update than usual then! Perhaps I ought to eat something in celebration? Or maybe do the work I am avoiding.. heh heh

Site speed up
[Mon, 3 May 2004]

The site ought to load conserably faster now, it will still be close to 56k dial up standards, but this time much closer, not the unfathomably slow speeds of 0.8kbps we were hitting before. This slowness was caused by people downloading The Mysterious Citied of Gold off my of my machine using mutiple connections to the same IP... I've stop sharing these files using Apache, and instead do it witih BitTorrent now - resuilting in a speed boost for all my site pages!

Oratory Hell 2 Mirror
[Fri, 30 Apr 2004]

Just a quick note to let you all know I have moved the Oratory Hell 2 animation itself onto a much faster server - so while this site is damend slow and horrible, once you get to the Oratory Hell 2 preview page, the anmation ought to download very fast indeed.!

I've just tested it on my own connection ( max download rate of 120kbps ) and it hovered at a very reasonable 40kbps while downloading. Yay!

Some real updates!
[Thu, 29 Apr 2004]

There I was, minding my own business messing about in Flash practicing for a webdesign job I have lined up, and then I suddenly, without warning, I was updating this site! How long has it been since I bothered changing the look? Far too long!

So to make up for it I spent a good hour or so last night getting back into OH2! It took a lot longer than I though to pick up my trail of thought and realise what I wanted to see happen next, but I've storyboarded the whole thing and have edited the last scene to include better sound effects and a good start of race. You may have noticed the snails on the splash page (click here to view the splash page in a new window), well they are of course featuring in OH2, and the front view of the snail was made last night while getting back to grips with my tablet!

Actually as it happens, my current set up is quite suitable for editing projects - I've got a 3-screen set up which I am quite proud of!

It actually a little more spaced out when I am using it, but I couldn't seem to get a good photo without moving the laptop slightly closer to the middle. As you can see it makes use of a laptop screen as well, this is done through some nifty software I came across called MaxiVista, which allows you to add more monitors to your system by using any other PC's screen through a TCP/IP connection - so if you have a spare machine on a LAN, or one you'd like to use the screen of you can use this software for that! It's not good for doing graphic editing or watching video as it has bad lag ( even on the screen saver is lags ), but it is has no noticable lag when you're working with text or web pages - I tend to use the laptop screen for Winamp + Playlist, MSN Messenger and usually the explorer window for the files I'm using at the moment! :)

Interestingly, I've noticed windows is able to accomodate the fact that the screens are all at different heights, as this printscreen shows!

Anyways, I've updated most of the site to bring it inline, I've also rewritten the page about me (click "Rob" on the menu), and the page about Oratory Hell 2. Also some more minor things too, like adding a picture to the galleries page..

OH2 is coming along nicely, and I've decided to host the OH2 file on a much faster server, so once I manage to get it on that server it ought to achieve stupendous download speeds (as it's a T1 backbone connection.. don't you love University hosted stuff?). The problem seems to be getting it to upload.. stupid thing just won't go.. maybe I have too much going on with this PC...

Looks who's back!

Sat, 13 Mar 2004: After only 6 months, I have come back to my website! I know it took me forever, but I've been unreasonably busy these past 6 mothns! All that is set to change though!!

Yeterday was the end of spring term, and so that makes today the first day of the Easter holidays! I have 3 weeks in my house, just me and my 1Mbit connection.. :).

I've been meaning to update this site for ages, but the more it got out of date the more effort it seemed.. In fact I think this will be the last update to this site - I am going to remake this site completely, as it no longer serves the purpose it did when I designed it. Also I now know PHP and Flash ActionScript ( and some JavaScript / Perl ), so I ought to be able to make this site that much more awesome.

Apologies if it runs to damned slowly, but it's currently hosted by myself, on my desktop PC at home - so the fastest download you will ever achieve from here is 27kbps, but it much much more likely you will only hit about 6-7kbps ( as I use copious amounts of Azureus / eMule.. not to mention what my housemates get up to when they are around! ).

A lot happened since the last update.. I lost my digital camera, and got a new better one for £25 on my insurance, I've managed to persuade some girl to go out with me and became president of The University of Warwick's Anime & Manga Society - you ought to check out their site ( and Forum ) as I was their webführer last year, and set it all up!

Please note there is no forum, but as I don't have Photoshop on this machine ( and the installation CD is on loan ) I've just removed the link from it..

Victorious!

Want to see how hard it is to be a student at Warwick?

http://www.sunion.warwick.ac.uk/portal/Default.asp?url=NEWS_DISPLAY&article=108

News Coverage

I made the Warwick Boar (our student newpaper) a couple of week ago, when 'I' discovered the 'grave error' Endsleigh Insurance have made. It was actually a collection of people in AnimeSoc who noticed, but I was around to comment on it. The quote was true to what I have communicated, though they had slightly reworded it ( 'gave error'.. as if I would say that! )

Read all about it.

New PC

A few weeks ago ( or was it a month? ) I lost my PC to simultaneous harddrive failure AND primary IDE controller failure - and if you understand what that means, then you probably have a very good idea just how hard that was to discover. :)

My new machine has not been used for anything up until today, except for downloading anime and serving "The Mysterious Cities of Gold".. which really is a waste of a Athalon 2500XP+, 280Gb hdd, 6x USB, 2x IEEE1394 (aka Firewire) etc. All in all, this machine is going to be my media workstation - it has two firewire ports, so I plan to make use of them with lots of video editing - I need to get involved with WarwickTV.

Having said all that, I have managed to download about 100Gb of anime in the last month, and I have Azureus BitTorrent client downloading at 115kbps at the moment ( and my internet connection only reaches 128kbps ( 1Mbit = 128kbps )!

GameBoy Advance

It's been confirmed! I'm going to make something GBA related for my 3rd year project here at Uni (have I been here that long?), I've not quite decided yet what to do, but I know it's gonna be awesome, and probably involve using all 4 of my GameBoy Advances. Yes. I have 4 GBAs: 2x GBA, 1x GBA:SP and 1x GB Player (for my GameCube). I'm also looking into the possibility of programming my GameCube, as I found out that it is possible exploiting a security bug in the original release of Phatast Star Online.. I just need a broadband adaptor now..

MeerManga

David Purkis, who made the MeeRMaNia poster below, has utterly and completely failed to meet his very generous deadline at the end of January, and has made no apologies, because he has started work on a much bigger, more serious project he is calling "MeerManga". I am not sure how he plans to spell it, but basically it's got a great plot, centred around me and how I might contain a certain (super) power and the effort being made to protect / steal said power. It is a great idea. I'm not biased! :)

Oratory Hell II

This is almost certainly the part most of you care about.. I know I have sucked majorly getting anything done, but as I've said so many time I will get on with it. Now is that time - other than my girlfriend there is nothing to distract me for the next 3 weeks. She has a job on the weekends so that means I have at least 6 days ;)

I have actually done some work for this over Christmas, but never updated my website with it.. I've done a few more seconds ( o yay ) of the animation, but more importantly I have finished the storyboarding for it! I'll put some some snaps of them once I get my camera back (currenly on loan), and also once I have installed Adobe Photoshop 7 to edit them in!

So what is going to happen in OH2? Well, firstly it's going to have quite a different look from before, on account of it being about a year since I last worked on it, also I've been diligently studying the Japanese animated form ( heh heh ) so I think I have plenty of reference material. I think I'll save all the information until I have digital copies of the storyboard up on the new version of my website, the new site is going to be almost entirely OH2 based, as I think I am going to make it a "Project-oriented" website - so it ought to always show what I am working on at the time - be it GBA as my 3rd year project, OH2, or something else. Well then, you'd better check back in a week to see how progress is coming on, and:

THANKS TO EVERYONE WHO HASSLED ME TO FINISH OH2