General update
Hmm... As I mentioned on WL, I do have some hosting now, which is handy for general filesharing purposes and such, and that's the only use people have seen it used for so far; on LC there's a MS Paint pictures thread, in which I posted this. Obviously, it's very rough, but its nice to have something encouraging me not to spend ages on a picture, but rather to get something sketched out quickly.
I also mentioned I'd not really decided how to use that space yet. I went with the cheapest shared hosting plan with these people, on a recommendation by Leiko - the disk space and bandwith limits are pretty high, but one other thing I mentioned was that I suspect the CPU usage limit (20% on a dual Opteron or something?) is the bottleneck - if that goes too high, then I'd get asked "please change to a dedicated hosting plan" or something.
I don't really anticipate running a website which gets that much attention (though I guess it could happen somehow), so my only concern is whether MediaWiki is resource-intensive enough that it'd cause problems. For the purpose I intend to use it for (i.e. organising info for an RP about five people really care about), I'm thinking it probably won't, but am still a little concerned. Time will tell, I suppose...
Something I didn't mention explicitly is that I also registered a domain name. I think this post is the first time I've specified it, since so far I've been following a "don't bother mentioning it until there's something worth looking at there" policy. I guess the Wiki's in a viewable state, but I've not even mentioned that yet because I want to get some structure in place before letting others in. Oh, and also set up the copyrights page.
A thought that occurred to me lately was to check computer component prices; I'm not intending to replace Umbra-tan or anything (due in part to not having anywhere near the funds to do that properly), but was considering doing something with the s939 Athlon 64 I have lying around. There are really two main directions I'd like to consider exploring, for computer building: small computers, and watercooled ones.
Watercooling is perhaps something to save for the next major project (Umbra-2? Nah, I guess it'll need a name of its own, and I'll need to figure out what to do with my current partner...), but I could get a micro ATX board for that processor for ~£45 or so. Add in, say, £20/£40 for some RAM, maybe around £30-50 for a hard disk, £30 for a DVD burner... that'd add up to somewhere around £125-£165 for a basic, but usable system (potentially less if I can scavenge bits). That's not counting a case or power supply, though.
I'm kinda playing with the idea of making a case out of acrylic, though. Might just be a side effect of reading this, but the idea is still interesting - though I'm slightly concerned about static...
In terms of Uni work, things are going okay. I messed up one assignment earlier, which could have bad consequences - but I'll find out that later. At the moment, I've only got a few things I have to do; the closest deadline is in a week or so, for an essay on some aspect of Japanese culture (which I think I could do fairly easily, if I could just figure out what to write about...), and then after that I have about three quite close together: the group project, and the last assignments for Databases and Web Technologies. The latter could be fun, though I need to make sure not to spend too little time on it. Databases I dunno about, and the group project is... interesting.
I've somewhat turned into the group's animator, for the moment, having volunteered to take on some of the task of getting animations done due to thinking "Well, I want to learn to animate in Blender anyway, so may as well...". This turned into me doing pretty much all of the animation because I got fairly good at it, and others are on other tasks. So it makes sense for me to work through the list of needed animations.
I dunno how transferable a skill it is that I've picked up, though; forward kinematic skeletal animation is not too uncommon, I think, but the fact that I'm doing it in 2D is unusual.
Also, I find it a little odd that probably my best animation was done in a bit of a rush while feeling rather sleepy. I was supposed to get a climbing animation done over the weekend, but ended up doing it at something like 5AM on Monday? I dunno if I did a great job due to sleepyness, or if I just chose how to lay it out very well, but in any case it turned out pretty nicely... O_o
I do like this project, though. A major point in its favour is that I have a nice group, with which it's easy to joke around and have fun with. Plus there's the fact that it's a games project, and that I don't need to try to lead because there are better programmers than myself in there. I spent too much of the first two years dealing only with the more incompetent students.
...I think I had other stuff to say too, but I am sleepy and so I will stop here for the moment, I guess.
I also mentioned I'd not really decided how to use that space yet. I went with the cheapest shared hosting plan with these people, on a recommendation by Leiko - the disk space and bandwith limits are pretty high, but one other thing I mentioned was that I suspect the CPU usage limit (20% on a dual Opteron or something?) is the bottleneck - if that goes too high, then I'd get asked "please change to a dedicated hosting plan" or something.
I don't really anticipate running a website which gets that much attention (though I guess it could happen somehow), so my only concern is whether MediaWiki is resource-intensive enough that it'd cause problems. For the purpose I intend to use it for (i.e. organising info for an RP about five people really care about), I'm thinking it probably won't, but am still a little concerned. Time will tell, I suppose...
Something I didn't mention explicitly is that I also registered a domain name. I think this post is the first time I've specified it, since so far I've been following a "don't bother mentioning it until there's something worth looking at there" policy. I guess the Wiki's in a viewable state, but I've not even mentioned that yet because I want to get some structure in place before letting others in. Oh, and also set up the copyrights page.
A thought that occurred to me lately was to check computer component prices; I'm not intending to replace Umbra-tan or anything (due in part to not having anywhere near the funds to do that properly), but was considering doing something with the s939 Athlon 64 I have lying around. There are really two main directions I'd like to consider exploring, for computer building: small computers, and watercooled ones.
Watercooling is perhaps something to save for the next major project (Umbra-2? Nah, I guess it'll need a name of its own, and I'll need to figure out what to do with my current partner...), but I could get a micro ATX board for that processor for ~£45 or so. Add in, say, £20/£40 for some RAM, maybe around £30-50 for a hard disk, £30 for a DVD burner... that'd add up to somewhere around £125-£165 for a basic, but usable system (potentially less if I can scavenge bits). That's not counting a case or power supply, though.
I'm kinda playing with the idea of making a case out of acrylic, though. Might just be a side effect of reading this, but the idea is still interesting - though I'm slightly concerned about static...
In terms of Uni work, things are going okay. I messed up one assignment earlier, which could have bad consequences - but I'll find out that later. At the moment, I've only got a few things I have to do; the closest deadline is in a week or so, for an essay on some aspect of Japanese culture (which I think I could do fairly easily, if I could just figure out what to write about...), and then after that I have about three quite close together: the group project, and the last assignments for Databases and Web Technologies. The latter could be fun, though I need to make sure not to spend too little time on it. Databases I dunno about, and the group project is... interesting.
I've somewhat turned into the group's animator, for the moment, having volunteered to take on some of the task of getting animations done due to thinking "Well, I want to learn to animate in Blender anyway, so may as well...". This turned into me doing pretty much all of the animation because I got fairly good at it, and others are on other tasks. So it makes sense for me to work through the list of needed animations.
I dunno how transferable a skill it is that I've picked up, though; forward kinematic skeletal animation is not too uncommon, I think, but the fact that I'm doing it in 2D is unusual.
Also, I find it a little odd that probably my best animation was done in a bit of a rush while feeling rather sleepy. I was supposed to get a climbing animation done over the weekend, but ended up doing it at something like 5AM on Monday? I dunno if I did a great job due to sleepyness, or if I just chose how to lay it out very well, but in any case it turned out pretty nicely... O_o
I do like this project, though. A major point in its favour is that I have a nice group, with which it's easy to joke around and have fun with. Plus there's the fact that it's a games project, and that I don't need to try to lead because there are better programmers than myself in there. I spent too much of the first two years dealing only with the more incompetent students.
...I think I had other stuff to say too, but I am sleepy and so I will stop here for the moment, I guess.