Well after much blood, sweat and tears, I finally finished my project. In total, it was 33 pages long (including references), so not an unsubstantial amount of work! After it’s all gone through the system, been marked and I’ve got my marks back, I plan on posting a copy on here. But I want to ensure it goes without a hitch first.

Anyway, that was finished about 2 weeks ago. I took a week off which was quite nice, in which I’ve bought many things, most of which are yet to be delivered.

They include a 160gb laptop hard-drive (for the bargin price of £75 with free shipping, thanks to eBuyer); 512MB of SODIMM RAM for my laptop; an excellent 2gb SanDisk Extreme III CompactFlash card; the Canon RC-1 Remote (from eBay, only £11); a 10/100 ethernet switch and a CompactFlash reader.

Unfortunately this spending spree was started by me looking at the Canon 100-400mm f/4-5.6L which, at ~£1000 is a little out of my budget at the moment. However, something had to fill the void, so…

Anyway, revision’s started now. First up is Asymptotic Methods, and it’s going reasonably well at the moment. My plan is to start early and finish early, leaving time for TV and other assorted good things.  Hurrah.

7:13 pm | Posted in Academia, Exams, Hardware, Maths, Personal, Photography, Project | No Comments »

This week has been a really good week. I was extremely worried on Saturday that I might not be able to implement the flatPERM method that I needed for my project, but on Sunday something clicked and I managed to fix my code. Ever since then, things have been pretty much slotting into place and I’m getting very consistent results between all four of the methods I’ve implemented.

I’ve been marred somewhat in that computing resources at the CSC have been under quite a lot of use, but just before the holidays this is somewhat understandable. With a bit of luck, I’ll get added to another queue which isn’t quite as busy, enabling me to do some really long runs with large amounts of fun. When it’s completed, I’m certainly going to try to post a copy on here for everyone to see (as some people have asked), but that will have to wait until it’s been marked.

In other far more exciting news, I got a lovely e-mail offering me a PhD position in the maths department. Now, this doesn’t guarantee funding so I’m certainly not counting my chickens yet (in fact, not by a very long way). However, I’m one step closer so all is good.

Finally, I finished my marking today, so I have nothing more to do on that front until possibly October (if I’m back). Also, after having attended and helped out at every single open day since my first year, I finished up yesterday. So that was a bit sad.

Anyway, enough rambling. I’m going to press on whilst my luck is still moderately good! (I’m touching wood constantly these days).

10:31 pm | Posted in Project | No Comments »

My apologies for the lack of either photographs or similar word entries. It’s an exceptionally busy time of year; end of term is creeping up extremely quickly, and there are a number of things to get done before Friday of week 10. So, expect a similarly large lack of time before the next couple of posts.

Mainly my apathy has been because of the immense amount of research that I’m doing for the project, which is turning into quite a large beast very quickly. However, it gives me a good idea of what research might be like at the graduate level, and it’s generally interesting. With a bit of luck, when everything is finished off I will post the project report on the blog and people can tear into my code.

Anyway, hopefully you’ll enjoy the snow photo that just got posted. Hopefully I will be back around here soon, and maybe after my project is finished I’ll even have time to finish the site off!

6:00 pm | Posted in Project, Site Development | No Comments »

It’s been a reasonably productive day; I completed the majority of the things I set out to do and handed in my latest Fourier Analysis assignment. Also managed to complete the Fractal Geometry assignment so I’m happy. Additionally, I got the latest build of emacs working with XFT. Ho ho ho, that’s very sad.

Tomorrow is project day - the day in which I attempt to catch up for a reasonable amount of neglect on my part. Hopefully I’m going to overcome some of the nastier problems found along the way, and start on the writeup.

I just can’t wait.

On the upside, I have a new photo that I’ll be posting tomorrow. Well, I say photo… maybe it’s a bit different than the usual stuff.

12:33 am | Posted in Maths, Project | 1 Comment » | Show comment » | Hide comment » |

I find that increasingly these days I’m using the phrase “I don’t quite have the time at the moment…” For those who think I’m putting it on to get away from talking to them, I assure you it’s quite genuine. Right now, I have rather a large to-do list.

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Continue reading “Time sucks”…

4:32 pm | Posted in Maths, Personal, Project, Whining | No Comments »

I don’t often appeal to the political correctness brigade, but to all of you out there who don’t believe in saying “Merry Christmas”, I hope you had a really nice holiday.

I was extremely happy to receive a lot more than was expected this year, and because so many people have now asked me what I got, inevitably lots and lots gets missed out. So if you’re interested, have a look at my present list!

To be honest, there’s an awful lot to keep me occupied and this just isn’t a good thing. I haven’t really done any work at all, but there is a plan now that some things are out of the way. Whether that plan actually succeeds or not is yet to be discovered, but we shall see!

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Continue reading “Happy Holidays!”…

8:53 pm | Posted in Maths, Personal, Photography | No Comments »

Well, my long absence from here is pretty much down to me having far too much work to do. Unfortunately, having done far too many purely assessed modules this term, it leaves me with very little time to do much else, and my project work seems to slot very nicely into the “spare time” category. Research takes a lot of time, and does indeed suck the big ones.

Apart from this, life is pretty good. I’m developing what some might call a social life (albeit one spent mostly in the maths department) and I have a lot to keep my mind occupied. I’m very much looking forward to the Christmas holidays, although I know that I have to spend at least two weeks of them working on various tasks - of course, including my project.

I am now going to spend the next couple of hours getting this blog sorted. Honest, guvnor.

4:42 pm | Posted in Academia, Maths, Project | No Comments »

Reasonably regular visitors to the site will know that I’m now in my fourth year of a mathematics degree at the University of Warwick. A good sized chunk of this year’s credit is given for a dissertation on a subject of our choosing; we can either choose to write about some kind of mathematics in action (the MIA project) or a research project, which involves finding a supervisor willing to sponsor you on a topic of your choosing.

As I’m hoping to continue further with my education, possibly going onto a PhD, I chose to do a research project. This post is basically an entry describing my particular woes finding an appropriate project, and it’s quite long; unless you’re interested, it’s best not to continue further!

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Continue reading “Is it really this hard to find a dissertation?”…

3:53 pm | Posted in Maths, Project, Whining | No Comments »

Firstly, I’m sorry about the lack of updates. I’ve been really up to my neck in work and preparations for various things and university. I will at least try to post some kind of rubbish at some point.

Anyway. Moved into Claycroft on Sunday, but I’m already starting to regret doing so really. It’s exceptionally quiet - on my corridor of eight, I’ve only met 2 other people so far. It’s somewhat depressing really, as it’s would be quite nice to be able to talk to somebody before going completely insane from lack of contact. I’m going to give it a couple of weeks, but if things continue the way they are, then I might move out. I’m not sure yet. The major plan at the moment is to spend as much time as possible in the maths department so that I can avoid the complete silence of Claycroft.

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Continue reading “Not the best start to term”…

6:11 pm | Posted in Maths, University, Whining | 1 Comment » | Show comment » | Hide comment » |

Well, after a bit of fiddling, the AJAX search is now fully operational. I think it works pretty well - it’s certainly quite transparent and saves a lot of room. It hasn’t been fully tested yet please let me know if you run into bugs.
IE had some… interesting rendering issues that need fixing in relation to opacity. For some reason, if you don’t set a background colour then font rendering goes completely crazy and everything looks awful. The moral of this story: IE6 doesn’t like opacity unless everything has a background.

Other than that it has been a pretty busy day. I’ve been up and down to Coventry. Most of the time the journey is fine, but today the M6 decided that it was going to hate me. It took me two hours to travel about 25 miles - average speed, 12.5mph. Usually I can do it in half an hour.

The trip did serve a purpose, and hopefully in a few days time I should have a clearer direction of where the project I’m working on is going. However, for the time being I will simply leave you with a lovely formula to show off my LaTeX renderer, as I really must be going to bed.

11:20 pm | Posted in Maths, Site Development, Whining, XHTML/CSS | 5 Comments » | Show comments » | Hide comments » |