Hard to believe that my 4 years of student life at the University of Dundee are coming to an end today. In some respects this has been an uphill struggle, in others it has been a wonderful, enjoyable and rewarding experience. I have made mistakes a long the way, I have learned important lessons and I have worked hard to better myself not only as a software engineer, but as a person throughout this experience.

I was planning on collating a number of resources and tit-bits of information and then posting them to the internal mailing list at university, however I changed my mind and decided to write this post making what I have to say open to all. I hope it is of use to someone as the advice I provide here comes from real, solid, “Been there, done that, got the t-shirt” experience.

Not all of it may be relevant to you but it has helped me. Use the links below to view each page (I apologise as it is rather long).

Courtasy of a couple of power cuts earlier in the week which affected most of the City Centre and as far out as the University Campus I had to replace my trustworthy Netgear DG834G router. At first it only appeared to be the power adapter which had gone however yesterday the modem inside of the router failed and forced me to replace it.

Now networking products are a point of contention for me, there are certain brands I just refuse to buy on principle, the worst being Linksys. Despite being owned by Cisco Systems, I just keep reading about how bad their equipment is and so despite being cheaper, I still avoid them. Belkin and D-Link are supposedly allright but  when it comes to routers and networking I work on the same principle I do with hard drives; If a brand hasn’t failed on it’s own within it’s reasonable lifespan then why change?

So sticking with the devil I know I bought another Netgear and effectively the same one, the DG834GT which has 108mb wireless instead of 54mb and came with a USB wireless dongle, that was the only difference. Thanks to the handy configuration backup and restore facility on both routers I could copy the settings across instantly so no need to re-write 30 or so port forwarding rules.

Everything is back online and working quite happily again.

Over 2 years ago I purchased a 12 month contract with O2 which contained an o2 XDA Mini S (Also known as the HTC Wizard), details can be found at XDA Developers Wiki. Now this has been a great little phone (ok, it looks like a brick but I don’t hold that against it), quad band, GPRS, Windows Mobile 5 (and currently 6) not to mention a QWERTY keyboard which is one of the features that drew me to it in the first place.

It has been very durable and survived many accidental drops on to hard surfaces, flash ROM upgrades and other such wear and tear and yet it still keeps on ticking. This is what I like in a phone, in fact this is what I like in electronics, something that can survive without fail and in this day and age such things are becoming fewer in number. Products just to not seem to be made to last any more, we have become a very “disposable” society.

Anyway, I spotted on El Reg today that o2 has announced the newest addition to the XDA family, the O2 XDA Atmos (HTC S730) and so I started thinking about my loyal little Mini S. I compared the spec’s of the Atmos to the 2nd most recent XDA, the XDA Stellar (HTC Tytn II). They both sport the Qualcomm MSM7200 400MHz processor however the Stellar has the better memory (256mb ROM and 128mb SDRAM compared to 256mb ROM and 64mb SDRAM), The camera on the Atmos is only 2 megapixels compared to 3 megapixels on the Stellar. The list goes on, the Stellar is almost better than the Atmos is every way, about the only real upside for me that I could see what the fact it has a numeric pad on it with a slide out QWERTY keyboard.

So, comparison aside I have bought my new phone for the next 18 months, the XDA Stellar won out and will arrive some time this week. I got a good deal on the contract as well making the phone free for only £10 extra a month and double the minutes I currently recieve plus free unlimited landline calls thrown in. I feel quite proud of my purchase.

As for my wee Mini S here, well I know one of my ex co-workers had his eye on it, if he doesn’t want it then I guess I have a spare PDA to play with.

While cleaning up my flat a little I came across a small A5 sheet of paper that belonged to my father. Before he died he worked for Rank Xerox and was a team leader, the following passage was something he found and printed out to hand to the various teams he worked with.

If you think you are beaten, you are,
If you think that you dare not, you don’t,
If you’d like to win, but think you can’t,
It’s almost certain you wont.

If you think you’ll lose, you’ve lost,
For out in the world you’ll find,
Success begins with a fellow’s will,
It’s all in the state of mind.

If you think you are outclassed, you are,
You’ve got to think high to rise,
You’ve got to be sure of yourself before
You can ever win a prize.

Life’s battles don’t always go
To the stronger or faster man,
But soon or late the man who wins
Is the man who thinks he can.

It has sentimental value but I felt it was a nice thing to have posted on my blog as well.