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February 18, 2008

Busy, busy, busy.

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.

October 22, 2007

PhD: 3 weeks in

After neglecting the blog for so long, I realised that I’ve currently said nothing about starting my PhD (although there’s probably a lot of stuff about applying, funding and soforth). In the anticipation of encountering numerous challenges — all worthy of screaming at my computer — I’ve set up a category for all the useless posts that will clearly appear over the next 3.5 years.

9:48 am | Posted in Maths, PhD | No Comments »

August 19, 2007

A-Levels: Gah.

A-level results day has come and gone and, as usual, we get the “A-levels suck”, “No they don’t, stop insulting my intelligence” argument. Meanwhile, everybody turns off the telly and moans about the same old crap year after year. I figure that since this isn’t really read by anyone anyway, I can probably get away with a bit of a stab at A-levels.

Here goes: A-levels in Mathematics are getting easier, and if you disagree, you are wrong.

July 15, 2007

W950i Remote for Presentations

As some of you may or may not be aware, part of my fourth year project was to give a presentation of my work over the first two terms. Naturally I’d already written a lot of LaTeX code for the project and produced lots of lovely PostScript figures, so it seemed pretty natural to go ahead and use Beamer, with evince in presentation mode.

However, because I like to look a bit swish, I decided to do something to make my shiny Sony Ericsson W950i switch through the slides for me without having to touch the keyboard. Since nothing was apparent from much Google searching, I sat down and figured it all out. After a long time of sitting on this code I’ve finally found the time to sit down and package it all up in a neat bundle.

So, if you have a decent phone with Bluetooth enabled, visit the project page if you’re interested!

The project report and presentation slides will be going up tomorrow, I just need to get around to writing some CSS.

July 7, 2007

Quiet Times

Well for the first time in a while, things are actually pretty quiet round here. Currently, I’m taking a nice break from doing any work of any kind after the exams finished, and concentrating a bit on web work. Unfortunately there’s a massive to-do list that need to be finished in the next month or so, and my motivation to do anything but watch telly is very low.

On the PhD front, things are progressing. With a bit of luck there’s a course running in September at Keele University that I’ll be going to, and I have a variety of papers and books to read. Right now, I’m only concentrating on learning general fluid mechanics, with the aim of specializing on a particular topic a little later (although this topic is pretty much determined already).

But now I shall try to motivate myself. Or possibly not.

June 28, 2007

Results

Had my results today, and got the first I needed to get onto my PhD scheme, so I’m well chuffed. Even more chuffed by the mark I got this year, so read on if you’re at all interested.

June 9, 2007

Exams: Done!

Well, never thought I’d say this, but all of the exams are now out of the way and completely done! Overall, they’ve gone pretty well although I’m rather hesitant to predict any marks just in case they’re completely wrong and I tempt fate too much.

The rest of the post is pretty much dedicated to my own opinions of them, so I advise not reading unless you’re really interested.

10:19 pm | Posted in Academia, Exams, Maths | No Comments »

June 7, 2007

Promised Images

Well, I haven’t really got around to playing much with the lens but I’ve taken a few test shots: they will be up shortly. But, to give you an idea of the scale of this thing, here’s a picture of it taken next to my old Sigma 70-300mm APO DG - shortly to be for sale if anyone’s interested…

It’s a fabulous bit of kit. The IS is really quite something, and I’m not sure how I’m going to live without it on any future glass I buy. Next on the list is the 24-105mm f/4L - I think I’ve been thoroughly bitten by the L bug. Damnit.

Other than that, I’ve had another exam, Fractal Geometry. It went pretty well: the exam was easier than last year’s paper and I managed to do about 60% of that without too much trouble. I’ll post a full breakdown of the exams after I’ve finished Information Theory on Saturday morning. And then there will be much cheering, for I shall have finally finished my year.

11:11 pm | Posted in Exams, Photography | No Comments »

May 15, 2007

Project Completed!

Well, it’s taken me a while to blog it, but I’ve completed the very last part of my fourth year project, which was a simple 20-25 minute presentation with questions at the end. All in all, it went pretty well. Alan kindly stayed on after he completed his own talk and listened to the ones given in my group. They were quite interesting: the first was on some kind of 2D projection technique to model 3D Navier-Stokes equations, and the other on the spread of disease throughout a tree-like structure.

Most surprising was that I didn’t feel nervous at all; having spent so long typing up the project and fiddling around with code, I knew the algorithms pretty well and I think that I did a good job of summarizing the key aspects. The reaction seemed positive enough, and the questions at the end were reasonably managable.

For anybody who’s going to do this sort of presentation, I’ve collated some handy tips that I found useful.

1:51 pm | Posted in Exams, Maths, Project | No Comments »

May 3, 2007

PhD is Go

If you read this you’ve probably heard already, but for the record I’ve now been offered funding for my PhD at the maths institute next year! (I think this is ultimately ace.)

Now, back to the revision I guess…

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