After many years of wanting to visit the States, I’ve finally got the chance. Sarah and myself booked a holiday in New York City back in January, and we’re leaving tomorrow! Seriously, I think it’s the first time in about 5 years that my passport’s got a proper workout.

Anyway, we’re going to do the usual tourist crap, but of course I will be taking as many pictures as I’m allowed to by Sarah. Hopefully with a bit of luck I’ll be able to do some diaries or something on here as the hotel has interweb capability.

That’s it for now — back to packing.

11:26 am | Posted in Personal | 1 Comment » | Show comment » | Hide comment » |

Due to popular demand, my photoblog theme — the creatively named Reflection — is now available for download.

I was quite shocked by the amount of people that said they wanted this thing. I thought it was actually okay, but not good enough to publish. However people seem to think otherwise so I decided to put it up.

Design-wise it’s all very simple. There’s a heavy amount of AJAX behind the front page, but it’s handled in a graceful way should JavaScript not be running. Everything on the site uses mootools for any AJAX requests or effects, which is a cracking little library. By far and away the best 3rd party JS library I’ve ever seen.

Anyway. If you want it, go grab it and tell me what you think.

5:33 pm | Posted in Photography, XHTML/CSS | 7 Comments » | Show comments » | Hide comments » |

I know many of you are wondering why I’ve not been blogging. Well, probably not many of you - maybe not even anybody - but I’ll pretend, for the sake of my sanity, that there is somebody out there. Unfortunately, it turns out that doing a PhD encroaches on your personal time rather more drastically than is advertised on the shiny brochures. Who would have thought?

Anyway, my research involves studying pipe flow in long pipes and I regularly run simulations using 64 (or more) processors. If you look at the lovely picture, that’s a figure I recently produced for an abstract - it shows the streamwise vorticity field in a long-ish pipe. And it just takes a lot of time figuring out the rather complicated program that I use (called semtex - great name).

Well, that’s not the only reason for my lack of bloggyness. On Tuesday I got another new toy - a shiny, super-duper 8-core Mac Pro. Hopefully anybody that knows of me understands that I am one of those annoying Apple fanbois. Well, if they don’t, then they will soon because this machine is stupendously fast.

The reason? I need something a bit more beefy. That figure took about a day to come up with because my work computer is pretty slow and my laptop is much faster. Also, 8-cores is not too unreasonable for some shorter pipe length simulations.

Anyhow. The blog has suffered, as has my photoblog and photography in general. The good news however, is that I have a lot more free time now, and with a faster computer Lightroom should run a buttload quicker. So be ready for some updates soon.

9:55 am | Posted in Academia, Maths, PhD | 2 Comments » | Show comments » | Hide comments » |

A couple of months has gone by now since my initial review of CheapVPS, and I think it’s about time to finish it up with a fairly quick follow-up.

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Continue reading “CheapVPS: A Full Review”…

11:23 pm | Posted in Computing, Site Development, Web Development | No Comments »

Like pretty much everybody else out there, I use Google Analytics to help me figure out how much traffic I’m getting and where it’s coming from. And finally, I’m starting to get some more visitors!

Until very recently, it looked like this site was pretty much blacklisted by Google. I’d type in my name - in quotes - and find this site on about the tenth page. And hell, it’s not like my name is even common. But I noticed a week or so ago that I was getting 30-40 visits per day, which is far higher than is usually logged.

Pretty much the most common keyword is linked into my CheapVPS review; in fact, I was pretty surprised to see that it’s actually the fourth result for CheapVPS. I’ll be writing a follow-up to that story soon.

Other than that, better photoblog integration is on the way, just as soon as I can find some time. We’ve got about ten different things going on depending on the day thanks to Christmas, and finding the time to sit down and figure out something to write is pretty slim (hence why I”m writing this at 3am… whoops).

3:22 am | Posted in Personal, Site Development, Web Development | No Comments »

Really just a quick post to say thanks for reading and hope you have a great Christmas this year!

Normal service will be resumed shortly…

PS: Yes, you’re going insane. This wasn’t posted two days after the event. Honest.

4:25 pm | Posted in Randomness | No Comments »

After a week of toiling over JavaScript, Mootools and a heap of other IE rendering bugs, the finished photoblog is finally here! You might also want to check out the cool mosaic feature which shows all the images I’ve posted.

Now unfortunately I ran into a few problems, and so the photoblog is now running on a separate instance of WordPress, but that’s not too bad. In fact, the user tables are shared so that if you do have an account here already, it will automagically work over there as well.

Anyway, go check it out. The plan is now to integrate it a bit more tightly into this blog right this minute, so enjoy.

3:08 pm | Posted in Photography, Site Development | 2 Comments » | Show comments » | Hide comments » |

I’ve not really been too happy recently about how this blog’s set up. Personally it’s a bit confusing to have my personal blog entries on here, but in-between them have a load of photos that serve no real purpose other than to look good.

So things are going to get mixed up a bit. The photos will be in their own separate website (probably under a subdomain), and the posts will be on the main site. But they’ll all be stored centrally under one WordPress installation - the plan is to use the power of WordPress templates to do this.

More news later when I actually finish this off!

2:34 pm | Posted in Site Development | No Comments »

Many of the readers of this blog will know that I am a giant, giant Apple fanboy. In fact, whenever I’m in Birmingham it’s an absolute necessity is to visit the Bullring Apple Store (as Sarah will no doubt painstakingly tell you). Unfortunately for me — or rather, my bank balance — a couple of weeks ago, I got a first-hand chance to play with the new iPod Touch. And, at this point, I think that you may see where this blog entry is going.

Rather surprisingly, however, I didn’t purchase the Touch. Since it’s quite large and my pockets are reasonably small, I decided that I’d wait a week and combine both the lovelyness of the Touch with my phone by getting the amazingly-hyped iPhone.

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Continue reading “New Toy!”…

7:37 pm | Posted in Apple, Computing | No Comments »

The lack of activity from myself has been quite profound lately, but regretfully the thing that’s made me finally get around to writing is the closure of Sayonara’s blog. Unfortunately he feels that he can’t dedicate either time or money to maintaining the site and giving it the attention it needs, hence he’s shut up shop and called it a day.

I believe we’ve both been around for a similar amount of time, and personally I rather enjoyed reading the site so it is a big shame to see it go. So if you want some free hosting, then send me an e-mail me or something.

I can certainly relate to his position. I find that the main problem is finding the motivation to sit down, think about what needs to be said and then actually write the damn entry. The last two paragraphs, for instance, have taken approximately twenty minutes to write because I am only writing in-between simulation runs. Even then I’m not entirely satisfied with what’s been written, and unfortunately most of my posts come out either as rather dull or overly sarcastic - hopefully I am neither in real life!

Another, somewhat different problem is that half the reason for this blog existing is the photography side of things. With all that’s been going on at Warwick over the past few weeks, I just haven’t found enough motivation to get out there and take some shots. However this will change soon, as I have enough money and justification to get myself a shiny new 40D in the next few days!

But fear not - I will soldier on and continue to blog about useless, dull, and mostly meaningless things because I enjoy doing it. Watch this space.

7:07 pm | Posted in Site Development, Web Development | No Comments »