About Me

I’m a 25-year old mathematics graduate, currently living in Coventry where I study at the University of Warwick. I’ve long finished my 4-year MMath mathematics degree, and am about to start the final year of a PhD at the Warwick Mathematics Institute. My work there is varied, involving both teaching and research; however, the current focus is the modeling of fluid in a long pipe at transitional Reynolds numbers.

For those that are interested in a more detailed history, a copy of my CV is available on request.

Interests and Hobbies

Mainly I spend most of my free time on some kind of computing-related project. I am an avid Mac fanboi, and currently own a Mac Pro, Aluminium Macbook and an iPhone 4, as well as some other Linux based machines. My main computer-related projects at the moment are Reflection, a WordPress theme; mjwrapper, a CoreMIDI wrapper for Java; and my home entertainment system.

Asides from this, I am interested in more creative things; in particular, photography and music.

Computing Projects

Programming and computing make up a pretty big part of my daily routine these days. My language of choice is C, with Python coming a very close second. Additionally, I’m pretty good with C++, Objective-C, C#, PHP and a whole host of other stuff. However, when required, I can also bodge up things in TCL, Perl, Java and various other niche languages.

Nearly all of my computing knowledge is self-taught, mostly through disseminating existing code released under the GPL. Wherever I can, I publish my own code through the GPL to try and give something back the community.

Another purpose for this site is to keep track of some of my many assorted projects:

• Reflection: by far my most popular project, a WordPress theme using YAPB.
• mjwrapper: a bridge between CoreMIDI and Java [Project page coming soon].
• vbLatex: a vBulletin plugin for rendering LaTeX strings in threads and posts [no longer active].
• An experimental C application combining GTK+, the Gstreamer media library and OpenGL which maps video from any Gstreamer source onto a rotating cube. [Project page coming soon].
• A C application for creating close-up images of the Mandelbrot set. [Project page coming soon].
• Various TCL scripts for eggdrop IRC bots.
• An online tape library management website
• A C++ class for implementing a pseudo-spectral method for numerical solution of PDEs.

On the interwebs, I am an administrator at SFN, a busy science forum. I also try to maintain this blog from time to time and, more often than not, fail miserably.

Photography

Many moons ago ago, I got a Canon 350D digital SLR for my birthday, and have been hooked on photography ever since. Soon afterwards, I set up my photoblog, which I consider to be a selection of my best photos. Please feel free to comment on them – I’m always looking for ways to improve!

Music

My other non-computing interests are musical; I play trombone at a reasonable level, and can at least bash the piano around a bit (although I’m not particularly accomplished). One of my most recent projects has been to construct my own electronic drum kit through the use of a MegaDrum module.

In terms of what I listen to, my iTunes playlist is pretty diverse, with genres ranging from metal to jazz and classical music. My favourite music at the moment is Dream Theater, an epic progressive metal band. Their music, along with Mike Portnoy, the band’s drummer, is my main inspiration for wanting to learn to play drums.

About the Site

My blog has been around for quite a few years now. Originally I started posting the occasional post in 2002 when the site was just a collection of static HTML files. For the most part, they were badly written and sucked a lot. As I learnt PHP, the HTML was slowly ported over to dynamic scripts – again, quite badly. However, in early 2004 I had to develop a solid collection of back-end scripts for another project, and the website moved with it. After many years of trying to teach myself about web standards, I also created a new layout which was fully XHTML 1.0 Strict compliant – no tables!

This is the latest incarnation of my website, which runs on WordPress 3. I’ve ditched my own code for the sake of making my life easier – after all, why bother to re-invent the wheel a hundred times over when many other people have contributed to creating something which is twice as good? It also means that I can work on cool plugins which do the things I want them to, instead of boring routines to manipulate session data.

A big step for the site was moving away from my home box onto shared hosting. I now run everything under the xyloid.org domain. I also host a variety of other small sites.

As you can see, I’m completely anal about proper use of CSS and XHTML on all of today’s modern websites. So naturally, I only use Safari and Firefox for my browsing although this site should render properly in Internet Explorer 5.5 and above. But please, using IE5.5 to browse this will actually make all web developers, everywhere, cry.

Please enjoy the site, and leave me some comments or send me an e-mail!

About the Domain

Sometimes people often wonder exactly why I picked the word xyloid for my domain name. Well, as much as I would like to admit that I am insanely good at memorizing dictionaries, it’s a word that I simply stumbled across one day on a website and I thought it sounded quite good. As an additional bonus, the website wasn’t registered either. The definition is, from dictionary.com:

xy·loid (zī‘loid’)
adj.
Of or similar to wood.

So there you have it. I am officially similar to a plank of wood.