A necessary post about the fantastic game from Valve, Portal. To start off on a bad note, it’s disappointingly short, and pretty easy. The game and the advanced levels were completed a matter of hours after I received the Orange box through the post last week.

Now for the good; the different, interesting but yet simple, game style make the game so incredibly playable.

It’s fun and rewarding to spend a few minutes using the portal gun to try to jump over something and then realising a way of using momentum more effectively and flying to the goal. Momentum being conserved through portals, making them a fantastic ways to propel yourself. I wont say the game is physically realistic, I mean, there is a ‘portal gun’ voiding any realism on first glance, however, there is some loyalty to physics in motion and aspects of weight in the physics engine. Combining this with the abstract Portal device makes a wonderful mix that is very fun to play, making you think differently about the possibilities of moving yourself around and achieving the solution.

The puzzle elements never got to the point of frustration either, and the touches of humour lighten the mood and blanket the fact that there are you are almost alone in the ‘Apature Science’ laboratory.

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Sod tiny urls. Who needs them, when you’ve got a huge one. Bigger is better.

Full view for our hugeurl. (more…)

As you can see, I’m updating again, as I’ve promised myself to regularly post in the future. If anyone is interested in our summer Northern Europe trip, it was fantastic, and I’m currently well into writing up and compiling images of what we got up to on the journey.

The Physics department at my University uses an secure shell server for tasks, including compiling and running Fortran programs. Although it’s easy to access from any of the Physics computing labs, if you fancy a spot of last minute programming (fun) on your assignment at home it can be a bit of a bother. This post will show you how to connect to SSH servers and transfer files using some free Windows applications.

Firstly, a quick look at the other options. Connecting through Linux is simple:

ssh user@server.domain.ac.uk

Or optionally, with X window system forwarding:

ssh user@server.domain.ac.uk -X

With this you can run programs on the server and tunnel X to your own computer. After connecting you will be asked to validate credentials. If you want to access your files, just add the remote SSH server as a remote connection. It’s as simple as that.

Windows, however is going to require some 3rd-party programs to properly use SSH. First, grab the free putty application, run the downloaded .exe and set up the session page with server details. For example, for the Surrey Pierre server:

Then, click open. Type your login details when prompted, and your ready for some 3am Fortran compiling.

Okay, so you’ve got terminal access, but you want to get to your files through MS Windows? The most reliable, cheapest and simplest way I have found to do this is to use the free application WinSCP, an open-source secure file transfer client for windows.
After installing and running the application, you will be asked which kind of interface you would like to use. It doesn’t really matter which one you choose. If you want the program to look like a Windows folder, choose explorer like. The other option makes the program look similar to an FTP client, and can be easier if your moving a lot of files around, but for the sake of simplicity we will use ‘explorer like’.
Fill in the server, and your details on the session page, and click save. Now, under Stored sessions you should have something that looks like this:

Click connect, and after a brief amount of communication between your computer and the server, you’ll see your home directory in an Windows explorer-like window. Now you can copy files to and from your network drive and your windows machine.

So, you can now access the terminal, and transfer files to the remote machine. Now all you need is a text editor for writing your Fortran programs! I’ll leave this for you to explore, as there are rather a few options.

Furthermore, in the preferences for WinSCP you can supply the location of putty, and let both applications work together! All that is left now is ‘mounting’ your network drive (i.e. so it appears in My Computer as a drive) and tunnelling X in Windows. I’ll leave these for another time. I have had a try at tunnelling X over windows, but with no success as yet. If anyone has managed to do so, i’d love to hear how you did it. Feel free to leave a comment.