Now the printer I own I picked up on the road side of a house in Brighton, naturally being the money stricken student that I am I took it to see if it worked. After buying a new drum for it, I found there were no Windows 7 drivers for it, let alone 64bit ones.

Anyway, most sites say that the printer isn’t compatible with Windows 7 (32bit or 64bit) even Microsoft’s own compatibility site says so; however, simply downloading the VISTA 32 or 64bit drivers from Brother’s website and installing the printer manually (the driver will flag up as unsigned) it now works fine. I’d imagine the XP ones work fine as well.

Just something I felt like sharing seeing as everywhere on the web I looked, people had found a solution but hadn’t said how they came about it. If you’re looking for a more in-depth walkthrough on how to install such an old printer with a newer OS like Windows 7, feel free to give me a shout on twitter or send me an email.

These edits, in addition to updating the content within portfolio will tie-in with assignments given on my new degree.

The site will probably be buggy and broken in many places whilst I do all of this, users of Populous-Online wanting to contact me with an administrative related query should use the contact form on there.

In Brighton, the city containing my university; there are a large number of lettings agencies with an extensive list of houses for rent by students or the general public. One of these agencies was the go-between between us and our landlord.

According to Rip-Off Britain’s page on naming and shaming ‘Businesses don’t like bad publicity. Customer retention is vital to a company of any size…’ I thought it would be a good idea to let other students know of my experiences and let them decide for themselves. The lettings agency in question is Kendrick Property Services. They provided us with a 5 bedroom house in a sought after location near the center of the city.

We had all sorts of problems with them from the get-go, contacting the landlord through them seemed to be near impossible the majority of the time. Issues we faced were, for example: damp in one of the lower bedrooms to a mattress that felt more like a medieval torture device than something you sleep on.

Now it’s probably worth mentioning that you are probably going to get some sort of issue with any sort of rented accommodation you take on with a tenancy agreement. After a few months of constant phone calls and arrangements we had fixed or found compromises for the issues at hand.

When you go into a rented property for the first time it may not occur to you the things that are absolutely necessary to avoid falling into traps when it comes for you to leave the place. A few things to be wary of at the beginning include:

• Take photos of everything, right down to the smallest detail – you can’t overlook how important this is
• Keep a record of every piece of communication with the letting agent / landlord
• Keep any records of financial commitments and bills at hand
• Try if you can, to get the contact information for the landlord him/herself if the agent isn’t contactable
• Have at least one of you present when official visits are being made, also when the inventory is being taken
• Take note of dates, keep a record of them and challenge them if they are changed for no reason

There may be other things I have failed to include in the list above, but from my experience these are the most important. In nearly all tenancy agreements you will find a clause stating that it’s expected of you to return the house in the same condition that you found it when the end of the tenancy comes around. Don’t overlook this, as the bullet point above about taking photos is essential in making sure that the agency can’t sting money out of you for problems you didn’t cause.

We ran into problems around about three weeks ago from the posting of this blog. We were owed around £2k overall by the agency for our security deposit put down at the beginning and naturally, I had been warned by others that they may and try to sting money out of you either way just to make a profit. I passed this off as a myth at first; how wrong I was.

In a nutshell, the agency didn’t notify us about the correct method in getting the deposit back through the Deposit Protection Scheme, they listed a large number of charges for things which were either un-necessary, nothing to do with us or for problems that had already been rectified us prior to vacating the property.

One of my friends, a fellow tenant even agreed to fix one of the issues after we had left, going as far as getting to the house with a drill in hand to discover that the problem had already been fixed by the landlord without notifying us or the agency.

A good thing to do if you end up in a situation like I did is to get all the parents involved. Assuming there are five of you like there were with us, that’s five sets of parents you have on your back to fight your case for you.

You’ll find that with the careful wording and by recording all communication you have with them, they will be soon to back down if the allegations are false. Companies like these don’t want to go through legal action in case of their public image being tarnished. From our point of view, the fight is over; the deposit has been returned and the legal process supervised by DPS has been completed. Any request for payment from here on is unfound and without reason.

When going through these sorts of situations it’s a good idea to get your Student Union involved, they will have a huge interest!

After seeing the response from them a massive weight upon my shoulders felt lifted, I no longer felt like I hadn’t a clue as to where I was going or what I was going to do. Regarding the course I am about to start there, I am jumping straight into the second year, skipping the courses that I would normally take as a first year (programming, introductory courses, etc). This gives me the ability to continue from the point I’m currently at.

So yeah, I’m moving from Sussex University to Brighton University and I’m going to get to do web media development which is something I’m really excited about. Funnily enough this leads on from the current paid work I’m doing at Sussex’s library. Their website is still under the old design templates which are looking extremely dated. My job with them is to migrate all of the necessary content over to the new system with the new funky design; I tell you, parts of it have not been an easy task. Over all though, excellent experience!

Oh and I have added a troll face somewhere at one point, just for shits ‘n’ giggles of course. ;)

Influences may be a good thing, but they can get a bit much in the end often resulting in people following a distinct path that may not reflect their interests as a person. In my case I find it difficult at times to focus on where I’m going and what I really want to do deep down.

Since the beginning of this huge education timeline I have always been focused on my love for computers, this endless stream of passion has taken me to the point that I’m doing a bachelor’s degree in it. With the utmost massive amount of stress it is also causing me to think about what I can really achieve and what it is deep down I should be looking for a career in.

I’ve come to realise that the IT industry (to be more precise the gaming industry) may not be the ideal place for me to express my skills, don’t get me wrong – I love gaming, it’s probably the number one thing in my life right now; one thing is for certain however, I love building computers, it’s a huge passion of mine and I would continue doing it every day if it wasn’t for the financial constraints; and hey, want a custom computer but don’t want the fuss? Let me build it!

Either way, things right now for me are progressing a little different to how I would’ve thought a couple of years ago. In the next few months I will be deferring my university studies at the end of this academic year and moving the credits I have into a qualification from the Open University. I have also had the motivation to do something different – this involves researching about joining my local Police force.

A couple of short articles for this month, things have been a little slow due to me having other priorities right now and I’d rather not post something on here without having put a lot of thought into it first! Lastly in regards to the site, I have removed the share buttons, I’ve discovered they’re more of a pain than anything and people are more than capable of sharing a URL with someone if they like it.

I’ve recently been so stuck into the game I’ve started to get bored of the single player portion of it (crazy.. really, considering there is so much to do); however I’m venturing slowly into the multiplayer portion. I found this absolutely fantastic map on the Minecraft forums that I have since heavily modified and used to construct a sort of “Citadel” for my personal server.

The server itself currently consists of the bukkit mod with worldedit and istick plugins installed. There are currently no limits on what players can do which is why I haven’t yet opened it up to the public *waves to griefers*. So far only a small amount of my friends and my brother have been online helping me construct things from farms, mine shafts, houses, bridges and a replica of the London Underground (pictured below).

   

Since the beginnings of this server a lot has been worked on. I have had friends join to assist in construction from all over the place, these sorts of things include removing entire islands to increase the size of the sea surrounding the central structure “The Citadel”; other structures include a lighthouse, medieval warship, tree house and James Bond like structure for which I forget the name!

My friends and I are planning on making the server public, once we’ve had our fair share of fun creating the huge structures and projects. For now though, we’re getting to grips with the plugin interface of bukkit and looking into getting a server wide tube system working, focussing on making it a mirror image of London’s Underground.

Oh well, I think it’s about time for an update – I’ve been aiming to get two articles out every month although it’s difficult considering all the other commitments I have. For the people whom enjoy reading the things I write, it would mean the world to me if you could spare five minutes or so sending me in a comment on what you think, things you’d prefer to see me write about and any suggestions / criticisms you may have. I can be contacted via Twitter at @S3verance, email at jj@johnnet.eu or via my skype ID jjbarlow.

In other news, I’m currently testing the closed-BETA release of Age of Empires Online being developed by Microsoft Game Studios and Robot Entertainment. So far it’s been a blast, I can’t give any specific details relating to the workings of the game but I can say it’s pretty much like playing AoE II again with elements of AoE III included. The graphics are cartoony, similar to the ones used in TF2 however with that a given they are still nicely polished and give the gameplay a smooth touch.

If you’re interested in signing up for the closed BETA you can do so at www.ageofempiresonline.com, they send out invites every couple of months I believe so just keep an eye on your email. Unfortunately for Mac users it’s only available on Windoze; simply because it’s being released through Games for Windows Live which utilises the Xbox Live gamertag system.

Anywho, short update for now. My next one will focus on the Minecraft Server implementation and a personal project I’m hoping to undertake.

Recently I encountered a new experience in education, one that I have heard of other people experiencing yet have only just done so myself. What I’m talking about here is collusion, similar to plagiarism (of which I am entirely against) however involves bouncing ideas and theories off other people rather than simply copying work. We were told about collusion from day one after starting university; “don’t do it!” they say, time and time again. Yet behind the examiner’s/assessor’s backs it is done every single day, with lecturers turning a blind eye to a large proportion of it.

This creates a problem, students don’t understand when it is okay to work with one another and when it is not, we live forever in this fear that should we get help from a friend or god forbid their fingers touch our keyboards, then this enormous stamp comes flying down imprinting “collusion” on our heads.

Unfortunately for me this happened not too long before Christmas 2010. I do a variety of courses at university, which all equate to credits that add up to my full degree. One of these courses being “Compilers and Computer Architecture”, great I thought, what a fantastic opportunity to learn about how a compiler finally works; I use them on a frequent basis writing code so it seems suitable enough to learn how they function. The only problem here was that the coursework, which funnily enough was to write one of these compilers involved a bit of code used from the internet, modified slightly and then injected into my assignment.

Now generally, alarm bells will go off shouting that I had plagiarised the code from the Internet; well not exactly, the underlying theory of how the code worked was taken from the internet, with a few snippets here and there and the source being fully referenced in the code’s comment section. The problem in the end was that my friend who I had been bouncing ideas back and forth with had written parts of the modified code before hand and passed it onto me.

The files which were passed onto me were used in my first version of the assignment and the professors being the rather intelligent lot they are, have devised algorithms that determine whether or not code has been colluded upon (looking for similarities and such). Well to cut a long story short, mine and my friends popped up as ‘candidates’ in the batch and were taken to one side with our marks for the assignment withheld.

All that was before Christmas, I only discovered that it had been taken aside after going to my academic advisor myself in order to find out why I hadn’t been given the marks. I pushed it out of my mind during Christmas and the weeks that followed. The bombshell hit last week, the mark for the assignment had mysteriously appeared on my student progress page online so naturally I thought perhaps they had “got a grip” and decided to drop the case after the extensive amount of stress it put on me. Unfortunately though, it hadn’t been dropped and since then I have received a rather patronising email stating that my “hearing” for the case is this Friday.

I can tell you I’m not too fond of the way my university handles these sorts of things; the entire process is rather insulting and throughout my entire academic experience, failure seems to be the one and only thing that is always hampered on about. We are constantly warned about what will happen to us should we fail, given all sorts of guidance on how not to fail and the punishments that occur for those who happen to slip up accidentally.

One thing I can commend my university on is the relaxation of the process when it comes to plagiarism – implementing a self checking system which allows students to submit work such as essays or other written documents (not software code though!). It would be nice if they relaxed their draconian stance on the “problem” that is collusion.

At this moment in time I’m focussing on what the positive things are here at uni. The main one of these being my position as a volunteer engineer at my student union. I’ve met some absolutely amazing people during my first two weeks in the position, friendships of which I expect will last a very long time. In regards to this collusion process, it’s not bothering me as much as it did before; it’s another chapter of my life which will soon close awaiting for others to open.

Lastly, the people who have been helping me through this the most are my parents; even to the point of my Dad driving an hour and a half down from Reading in order to have a meeting with myself and my academic advisor. I can’t thank them enough and the title of this article comes from a quote I found out through my Dad: “Nil carborundum illegitamae” meaning “Don’t let the bastards grind you down”; with the proper Latin grammar being “Noli nothis permittere te terere”.

In light of all things though, being practical helps and going off and doing something different at a minutes notice is probably not the best idea; it may be for some people but probably not in my case of being halfway into my second year at Uni. Funny how this post is another one about education, hah. It’s strange though, these are the sorts of issues that are spinning around my head constantly, whether there is another method of going about things; a way of doing it and adoring it at the same time.

Whilst thinking about what I said above however I’ve decided to do something different, something that goes alongside my degree classification and can benefit me in more ways than one. I had an interview today at my Student Union for an engineer position in their computer support workshop. I couldn’t have asked for a more exciting and interesting time; right off the bat I was amazed at the welcoming nature of the people who work in the building and once I got stuck into the interview process, it was definitely nothing like any other interview I’ve had before.

The interview began with me meeting up with the IT & Web manager who oversees the infrastructure in the entire building and also supervises the union computers project as a whole.

Him and I took up one of the empty offices lingering about and pretty much talked for over an hour about all the things we found interesting, what his plan was with this project is and how I can provide the skills outlined in my CV; we also laughed about how loud the drama students were practicing their lines outside of the room.

We went on to talk about things such as my work experience in 2005 at the publisher MacMillan and how I assisted there in getting a release candidate version of Windows Vista deployed on one of their servers. I had the chance to mention how I personally ran around 20 to 30 metres of Cat6 Ethernet cable around our student house in order for us to have LAN games without trailing wires everywhere and also a medium for sending files. Lastly I got to mention the modification and enthusiasm I have with the Commodore Amiga computer system from the 90s and how now even though I still own the original piece of hardware, I have an emulator running on my MacBook Pro which almost renders it obsolete, hah. Take a view at the images below if you’re curious. (still one of my favourite games after all these years)

The second part of the interview involved me being given an actual student’s laptop that had been submitted to the shop and required repair. The first laptop given to us couldn’t boot properly and the only way we managed to get it running was using safe mode, there was also a problem in that we weren’t able to get administrative access on it due to not having the password. After updating the support ticket in relation to this laptop the idea of me fixing this one was abandoned as I didn’t have the necessary kit at my disposal and not enough time.

The laptop I actually ended up working on was also a student owned one but only had the problem that the OS was buggered. The data on the hard-drive had been backed up so I had to make the best of my skills to fix it; I had been provided with a bunch of OEM OS installation discs in order to do this and also access to a machine on the net, this was vital in downloading the necessary drivers. It was rather simple and I had done the process many times before helping out members of my family with their tech issues; it involved wiping the HDD clean, configuring the BIOS, re-installing Windows XP and then re-installing all the necessary drivers. I succeeded in getting the laptop back to ~90% working order with only the sound not functioning correctly, this was a minor issue however and easily fixable by one of the other members of the team.

So yeah! After that big adventure today I have sent off my availability timetable wise to the guy who runs it and he’s getting my union ID setup and created, which is bloody fantastic! :) I’m really excited about where this can go from here and where it can tie in with my degree work especially. If any University of Sussex students happen to read my blog then feel free to send me an email if you require any personal IT assistance and I will be happy to help.

Wow, I missed Christmas day and New Years on here hah, oops! Well, for the people who do come here relatively frequently I apologise for my rather long absence lately. The run up to Christmas was most lovely, I found myself thinking that it has lost a bit of the “spark” that it used to have when I was a child but it was still nice to have those days without any worries. I spent an obscene amount of money on gifts for people this year, absolutely crazy – I hope everyone enjoyed them! Wrapping the presents was most comical, I spent hours trying to perfect this japanese technique I found on Google Video and my god it took me forever to get it right.

I got to see my granddad and gran which was lovely, hadn’t seen them for over two years and he had recently had a stroke too so still needs constant care. Spending time with family was a lot of fun, it was nice being back at home with all the amenities I don’t have in Brighton like a damn dishwasher; I tell you, I am so getting one of those in my next property – sheesh.

In terms of New Year, I must say, oh my gawd, what an amazing fireworks display there was in London this year – I thought it was absolutely fantastic. If you didn’t get the chance to see it then you can follow [this] YouTube link and watch it for yourself. All in all I hope everyone had a wonderful celebration, I certainly did!

I’m toying around with what to do in terms of frequent blog posts on here, I enjoy doing the product reviews of things I own and I have many more things I can write articles on; it mainly just depends on how much time I have what with the new university term starting again in 7 days and how enthusiastic I am to write things. ;)

Either way, I’ll definitely be updating this more frequently and I’ll bounce things over to and from my twitter (@S3verance) as well.