Archive for the 'PhD' Category

January 14, 2010

Me and blogging: Epic Fail.

Yeah. So I suck at updating this blog.

Why I fail at blogging

Partially: I can get super lazy about these things, as anyone who frequents the Reflection forum will probably know. I really don’t mean to be so slow at responding. For my PhD related stuff I try and be quick at responding.

Sometimes I find it hard to concentrate solely on one thing. By this, I mean that I have a project that needs completion and will work at a frenetic pace until it is 98% done. And then I get up the next day, and the final 2% gets ignored because I’m onto the next thing. So I have bunch of stuff that is almost there – but not quite.

Also partially: this term is turning out to be incredibly busy for me – much busier than I had expected – for the following reasons.

So yeah. Pretty busy all around recently, which has left very little time for blogging, photography, or any of my other hobbies.

Lecturing has been an interesting experience. I actually took MA117 when I was a first year undergraduate many moons ago, and was a TA for the past two years, so I’ve seen it from both sides of the fence. The first lecture, which was today, actually turned out pretty well. But it gets tough real quick, so a better evaluation will be in a couple of weeks.

However I feel like I’m pretty prepared. Lectures and lab session notes are (mostly) prepared all the way through to week 8 of term.

It’s testing my programming out pretty well too. I’m coding Java for MA117 (obviously), C++ for MA903 (duh) and a mixture of C, C++, Fortran and Python for my PhD work. Nice to keep up to date with the languages.

Getting back to it

I feel a great sense of disappointment that I’ve not got much stuff done. On the programming side, there are three things I want to polish up and get published on here.

  • Reflection 1.2. This is under development, but I need a final push of about 2 solid days to get it done.
  • mjwrapper. This is a new project of mine. Unbeknownst to you guys, I have taken up drumming as an additional hobby (yeah, I didn’t have enough, right?) So I constructed an electronic drum kit, which uses something called MegaDrum to convert drum hits into MIDI notes.MegaDrum is awesome. It has a remote control utility called MegaDrum Config Tool which is written in Java, and uses the Java MIDI API, which I have to admit is pretty good. But it doesn’t work on Macs. Why? Apple is stupid and doesn’t supply an implementation. There are a couple commerical ones; mmj is the most popular. But I’m a big fan of open source, so I wrote my own.

    mjwrapper is perilously close to having a 0.1 release. Just need to finish the last 2%.

  • Java to BLAS/LAPACK converter. This is something I knocked together just yesterday for MA4G7. There are a few Java students on the course (no doubt to MA117) and there’s no set method, as far as I can tell, to call BLAS and LAPACK functions through Java. So again, I wrote one.

And then of course, on the photography front, it would be useful if I could get out and actually take photographs. 2009 was a pretty poor year in terms of quantity of photographs taken, but the quality looks better.

Finally the blogs… so much to do on that front, I don’t even want to list it!

Anyway, enough for now. More updates to come. Honest!

3:56 pm | Posted in Academia, Computing, Maths, Personal, PhD, Whining | 4 Comments » | Show comments »

September 7, 2008

Alive

I’m not dead yet.

I’ve been really busy recently preparing for a conference talk in Manchester, so this blog and my photography has had to take a back seat.

For those waiting for Reflection 1.1, I’ll go out on a limb and say that it should be out by the end of the month. That’s not a promise, but it is coming!

5:13 pm | Posted in PhD | No Comments »

February 18, 2008

Busy, busy, busy.

output.pngI 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 »

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.

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Continue reading “PhD: 3 weeks in”…

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