About

About Me

I’m a 22-year old mathematics graduate, currently living in Coventry where I study at the University of Warwick. I’ve now finished my 4-year MMath mathematics degree, and have started 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.

Mainly I spend most of my free time on some kind of computing-related project, especially in regards to Linux. I currently run Ubuntu Linux on my laptop machine, although I’ve kept Windows XP on my desktop. I’m also a Mac fanatic but have no money at the moment to splash out on a shiny new Mac Pro.

A year 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!

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). My iTunes playlist is pretty diverse; I’m a big fan of jazz, big band and soundtrack music in general, but classical, rock, metal and other genres feature heavily as well.

Computing Projects

Programming and computing make up a pretty big part of my daily routine these days. My language of choice is C, with PHP coming a very close second. Additionally, I’m reasonably capable with C++, C# and Python. However, when required, I can also bodge up things in TCL, Perl, Java and various other smaller languages. My latest programming language of choice is Python, which I learnt for a high-performance computing course last year. Pretty much all of my computing knowledge is self-taught, mostly through disseminating existing code - thank you GPL!

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

  • vbLatex: a vBulletin plugin for rendering LaTeX strings in threads and posts.
  • Turning my W950i into a remote control for presentations, using blurc and evince.
  • High performance computing applications for running simulated annealing and parallel tempering on a cluster of atoms.
  • 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.

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 2. 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 somebody else has already done it, and twice as better than you could anyway? 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:

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 Firefox 2.0 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.