Well, after the complete downer at the end of term, things are looking up. I’m spending a week down in Plymouth with Sarah, and it’s been nice and relaxing so far. I’ve spent quite a few hours coding on the website tonight, trying to get things done by the end of the week. When I get back on Saturday, I’m going to have an awful lot of revision to do and not a whole load of time, so for the main part I will probably not be blogging or doing much else than revision.

My first four exams are at the beginning of April, and I’m not looking forward to them that much.

• Topics in Mathematical Biology
  The course itself doesn’t seem to be too hard. Sure, there’s non-linear PDEs and all that jazz, but we don’t seem to actually do an awful lot with it. The problem with this exam is definately going to be the sheer amount of things that we have to know. And, unfortunately, there’s just no way around that apart from extensive revision.
• Introduction to Topology
  I’d like to think that at this point in time, I understand topology fairly well. Again, there’s a fair amount to revise for but this is something that I can tackle, and it certainly isn’t insurmountable in terms of understanding. Which is always good. I just hope we don’t get a nasty exam.
• Measure Theory
  This one has me a little worried. The problem is that there’s a lot to revise for and it’s also quite challenging from the standpoint of knowledge. We didn’t have the best lecturer, so that doesn’t really help matters. Really need to get going on some past exam sheets and do some questions.
• Combinatorics
  I understand and enjoy this course. My only worry is that the lecturer, Daan Krammer, sets a nice(ish) exam. Last year’s was pretty nasty, and although it’s fairly easy to do, it takes a lot of time - not something that you have an awful lot of in the examination rooms.

Anyway, this is all worrying about nothing at the moment. I’ll worry more when I get back to Coventry and get going on the actual revision. For the time being, I’m going to drink some tea and enjoy myself here (as much as I can).

On the website front, I’ve finally got the “proper” CSS coding in place which means user-selectable themes! I know that’s what you’ve all been begging me for in a completely silent fashion. But yes, I have three CSS templates for the new (WB) theme, the default theme and also the old theme which did mainly suck. But there we go. Just need to write the appropriate bits for password changing, selecting themes, profile information perhaps and a couple other things, then I’ll have something that closely resembles a proper website.

I’m also going to make a distinct effort when I get back to catalogue all of my loose pieces of code here and there that do minorly useful things. I really want to put them on the web, since at least some people might e-mail me. I like e-mails, after all.

On top of that, I hope to accomplish the image catalogue as well as putting the photo galleries back online. I’d also quite like to optimize the scripting so that it all runs a lot faster and uses less SQL queries. Also, the CSS could, as always, need some work but I think I’ll leave that for the time being.

I can’t wait to get this thing finished. It’s been a long time coming and, considering the amount of work I’ve put into it, I’ve not had a lot to show for it. Certainly the coding will be most of the work, but I must sit down and actually write some content, otherwise this place will be nothing more than a skeleton. I’m more determined than ever that during this exam period I will blog more than I have done before. I need somewhere that I can vent my frustrations and not bombard my poor Sarah with rambling maths questions.

Anyway, I must stop writing now as it is certainly time for bed. Tomorrow, I think I’ll mainly concentrate on the user control panel and get that out of the way. Once I get that done, I can move on to sort out the other bits and pieces that are more shiny.

1:16 am | Posted in Exams, Maths, Site Development, University, XHTML/CSS | No Comments »

Not been a great day, when all’s said and done. A friend of mine has, frankly, shown his true colours this afternoon and to be honest I’m quite annoyed about it all. I don’t think he reads this blog, but in case you do; I don’t consider you as a friend any longer. Don’t expect anything from me in the future, because you’re not going to get it. Grow up.

Basically that’s spoiled my day up until now. We had Pizza Hut tonight, which was nice, but honestly I’ve never been quite this angry with anyone before and I don’t particularly like it. I just find it hard to believe that anybody could be quite so immature and idiotic, but there we go.

So, I’ve decided to come back to Coventry tonight instead of doing the usual Maths-fest. I have to pick Sarah up later, but I do have two episodes of Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares to catch up on and I would really like to work some more on the website tonight. I’ve patched up most of it to use my new templating system, and it seems to work a treat. I’m still not 100% sure about the performance, but I reckon I can get away with it pretty easily. Perhaps if I do some database work and tidy the OOP code a little, it can be enhanced a bit more.

Still, load times of about ~0.01 seconds per page aren’t too bad. I just want it to be able to process the databases efficiently. I’d better get on with it then, I suppose. Bleh.

8:53 pm | Posted in Personal, Site Development, University | No Comments »

Well, it’s a little later than I wanted to go to bed, but oh well. Got quite a bit of work done on the project tonight; fixed some problems with the code, cleaned it up and general polishing. Also, fixed a couple of design flaws that were just annoying me; can now hook up more than one output module to each PDESolver object, which is nice.

Basically, the PDESolver object is an abstract class which has one virtual function, solve(). This is implemented by subclasses allowing me to very quickly and easily create new methods for PDE solving without going through all of the hassle of starting from scratch. As a part of this, I also created another abstact class, PDEOutput, which is designed to allow sub-classes to implement output methods (such as to files, X11). Up until this point, I could only output to one PDEOutput object at once; now I can do multiple things, which is always good.

I also now have some very funky 3d visualizations of my solutions thanks to OpenDX. It’s really starting to come together; hopefully if I pull my finger out and finish off the write-up tomorrow then I can get it all done and printed out by the weekend. Here’s for hoping, at least. I’m going to try and put the graphs on here for everyone to see because they’re really quite nice. However, I’ve not got them quite to my liking yet and I still feel that they need a bit of tweaking. Hoping to find some way to get some good anti-aliased fonts out of OpenDX.

Aside from this, I watched Robots tonight (which was my Valentine’s present from Sarah). I’ve forgotten how much I loved that film; it was definately a good one from Blue Sky. Can’t wait for Ice Age 2.

Anyway, I’m definately going to bed now. Need some sleep, and I’m doing campus tours tomorrow. Wouldn’t want to give the prospective undergraduates bad ideas about student life, oh no…

2:56 am | Posted in Computing, Maths | No Comments »

I clearly don’t have enough time in the day for everything I want to do. Almost have IMAP set up at home so that I can remote access all of my e-mail from either my desktop or my new laptop without having to transfer it all everywhere. Just got to set up fetchmail and procmail to fetch and move the appropriate messages.

Apart from that I’d like to work on the website but it’s currently far too early in the morning to attempt such a task. Today I copied ~20 sides of notes from various lectures, which brings me (almost) back up to date. The only lectures I have left to copy up are ones that I don’t yet have notes for - definately something to chase up on Monday.

Other than that, went to Skool Dayz for Mark’s birthday party. Apologies to all that were involved - I am hopeless at going out to the Union, and I probably shan’t do it again. The last time I actually visited the place was the Elections Party in my first year.

Computational PDEs has been worked on over the past couple of days. This time I have to create a program to model either the regular KdV equation or the modified KdV equation (there’s not an awful lot of coding difference to either method). I’ve completed the programming itself, but I’ve run into a couple of odd things. Namely, my oscillations start at double the time that they probably should do. Hopefully I’ll talk to the lecturer on Monday about this as I’m a little confused as to what is actually involved.

Anyway, I shall hope to squeeze in a bit of time on the website sometime tomorrow. Have quite a lot of work to do in the meantime, but I’m optimistic that I can get it done now that I’ve pretty much finished the coding for my Computational PDEs module. We shall see, I suppose.

2:26 am | Posted in Computing, Linux, Maths | No Comments »

Well, it’s certainly been quite some time since I last blogged. The reasons are fairly few and far between; mainly it’s because I’ve been extremely busy (read: excruciatingly lazy) and haven’t had a lot of time on my hands to sit down and empty my thoughts out. I had been thinking of moving back to my own personal site, but I really don’t have the motivation to sit down and actually code the rest of the site.

Christmas was good, although a little boring. Spent most of my time on the computer, doing various bits and pieces and a little maths. Didn’t get a whole bunch, but I’m not really altogether bothered – which is a bit odd, but I suppose that’s all part of “growing up” or some rubbishly similar thing.

Can’t believe that we’re already in week 3. I’m taking an insane amount of CATS simply for the reason that I don’t know what to drop, and I’m feeling a little overwhelmed by it all. Seem to have lost any motivation to do work at the moment, and that’s a little disconcerting. Taking Manifolds – which I find, for the most part, gibberish – as a fourth year module, as well as Computational PDEs and Equivariant Bifurcation Theory.

The former is really a rather good course. Basically, it involves the computation of numerical solutions to PDEs – oh, I bet you didn’t see that one coming. Oh no. The latter is also quite good, covering the symmetries of group actions on various sets and differential equations.

But the more I think about it, the less I want to do a PhD/MSc in mathematics alone. Of all the courses over the past three years, I’ve highly enjoyed all of the numerics and programming that’s been thrown at me; indeed that’s where I’ve got some of my best marks. So, at the moment, I’m thinking that I might sit down and contemplate applying for some postgraduate stuff at the CSC.

Anyway, that’s a long way off yet. Let’s see if I can keep this blogging thing up, eh?

9:03 pm | Posted in Computing, Maths, Warwick Blogs | No Comments »

Well, I find myself sitting here in the maths department with very little that I can actually do for the moment; I have to say, this makes rather a large change from the norm, but there we go. I say very little, because theoretically I should either be working on Topology (can’t be bothered) or Combinatorics. However, I’m giving myself a break since I’ve managed to complete all but the last question on the assignment a week and a half before it’s due in. Warwick Accommodation form for next year’s hopeful on-campus place has also been submitted.

Anyway, thought I’d come on here and let you all know that. Not that anyone will be interested in a post that basically has no content and is generally useless to everyone. But never mind, eh?

I think I might go back to the house now.

7:18 pm | Posted in Boredom, Maths, Warwick Blogs | No Comments »

I’ve not been on here for a while again, mainly due to maths and far too little time, but I thought I’d give a quick update to let you all know how I’m getting on.

Firstly, the maths. Measure Theory has been a pig this week (those who are doing the course will love and cherish question 7 on this week’s assignment). I only know a handful of people who have completely finished it, and I’m certainly not one of them. I’ve managed to complete 2/3 of it, so maybe I’ll get lucky and they won’t mark the stupidly hard question.

Combinatorics has been going well. Got the third assignment in a whole 3 days earlier than it was actually due in, and with an (almost) complete set of answers. The lecture notes are excellent, which is always good, and I think the course is one of the most organised I’ve seen so far. Then again, Daan Krammer has always produced brilliantly organised notes and – touch wood – reasonable exams, so my hopes are high.

I’ve decided not to bother going to any more Rings and Modules lectures. Frankly, I still don’t even get what a module is, let alone tensor products, finite dimensional algebras, faithful semi-modules and the rest. It’s like a complete contrast of Combinatorics; appauling lecturing style and lecture notes (sorry), not enough examples that actually make sense and a complete disregard for any sort of coherence. I was actually hoping that somebody would take note of what was said on the SSLC forms for Algebra II, but alas, Dr. Moody doesn’t seem to have caught onto the problems. I’m hoping that with a good book and some time over Christmas, I can teach myself the remainder of the course. However, this just doesn’t look likely anymore.

Since I’ve now effectively dropped both this and Dynamical Systems, I’ve had to take up Topics in Mathematical Biology just to make up my CATS (without those two I would be doing 42 this term). The dynamics of systems has always intruiged me, and I wrote my second year essay on the topic. I’ve managed to wade my way through and copy up about 20 pages of notes in the past week, so I only have a little bit to go. In fact, I should be doing this as we speak.

Besides all the maths, I’ve not been up to a whole lot. One thing to definately note is my 2nd year of dating my girlfriend (Sarah). I cannot believe it’s been 2 years already – hardly seems like I was in Cryfield getting hideously drunk – but it was a nice day. We went to see Serenity at Star City, which is by far the best film I’ve seen in a long time. After that, Pizza Hut was consumed (it’s a tradition) and then just general lazyness watching TV for the rest of the day.

Also been checking Warwick Accommodation, and apparently forms come out on Friday for final year undergraduates applying for on-campus accommodation. I’ve been looking forward to going back on campus for a while now, but the first vestiges of doubt started crawling back into my mind. Perhaps a little more thought is required on the subject, but I’ll apply anyway and deal with it later.

Other than all of this I’ve immersed myself in implementing some rudimentary AJAX for a project. It’s all to do with tape librarys, but it’s extremely boring so I won’t mention it here. Re-considering my decision to have my blog on here – I do miss my old website, and am seriously considering moving back there. I even completely re-did the CSS to enable me to implement styles a lot easier (so I can have both the original and new styling on here). However, I’m still waiting on my host to update to PHP5 (I know, it’s not completely production stable yet) so I’ll have to put it off for a little longer yet.

What little time I have left out of all that has been spent playing Black & White 2. I especially enjoy throwing rocks at random buildings and blowing up people with giant volcanos of immense and utter doom. In my case it does still suffer from the boredom factor of the original; it’s cool for a time, but after a few days the monotony starts to set in (constantly re-building towns, blowing people up, hurling rocks at giant axe-wielding monkeys, etc etc). Oh well, I do have the shortest attention span ever, after all.

And now I’ve realised that this really is rather a long list and I should probably get back to copying up the remaining 13.5 sides of notes still remaining. Yay?!

9:21 pm | Posted in Maths, Warwick Blogs, Web Development, Whining, XHTML/CSS | 3 Comments » | Show comments » | Hide comments » |

I don’t know what it is about Maths, but it has some very good ways of annoying the hell out of me. I now have a number of problems that I can’t figure out how to solve:

• Measure Theory assignment is due in tomorrow but I can’t complete question 8. Measure theory is just one big mess at the moment though; I can understand the concepts perfectly, but when it comes to actually sitting down and proving something I’m just ultimately screwed. I need to (re)learn some set theory.
• Dynamical Systems assignment is completely insane, to the point where I don’t think I’m going to be able to physically pass the exam or even do the damn thing.
• Rings and Modules is another great big mess of uncertainty. The probability is that this module is almost certainly going to be dropped come the end of the term. The lecturing is, quite frankly, terrible and needs to be sorted out.
• But if I drop that and don’t take Dynamical Systems, it will leave me with precisely 3 modules totalling 42 CATS this term – everything I want to take is next term. So I’d have to take ~100 CATS next term in order to get to my 150 total. Whee.
• Why am I still in the Maths Department?
• Why won’t Measure Theory go away and leave me alone?
• Am I ultimately screwed for this year?

I’m extremely frustrated about the Measure Theory, frankly. It just seems that I can’t get my head around the proofs. Every time I think I’m getting somewhere, the entire proof gets bodged and I’m screwed. Either that, or because I don’t know as much as I should, I think its bodged and re-do it 97 times only to have someone tell me it’s actually correct.

Plus I’m still struggling with infimums and suprema 2 years after we were taught them. This really can’t be a good sign.

9:44 pm | Posted in Academia, Maths, Warwick Blogs | 1 Comment » | Show comment » | Hide comment » |

Well, I know I haven’t blogged for a while, so whilst I’m sitting here waiting for some inspiration on the Measure Theory assignment this week I’ll update everyone who is mildly interested (probably zilch) on what’s been going on.

First off, the involuntary “get in” reaction. Last week I applied to become a peer tutor, and being the enormous idiot that I am forgot to fill in a word at the bottom (which I consequently blogged earlier). However, everyone on listy3 got an e-mail today asking whether they wanted to help out, since a ninth class has had to be created to fit everybody in. This time, I got the e-mail after about 20 minutes, and have had a response to say that I have the place. Unfortunately, the class on Monday morning is on the 5th floor Physics seminar room, but I’m not about to complain.

Anyway, apart from that I’ve been busy updating vBulletin to 3.5 over at SFN – my habitual geeky home. For anybody that’s interested in the sciences or anything else besides, come along and post some stuff. It’s good fun and we’re trying to add to the academic base of people that we have there, so I’m going to plug it like a beast.

Naturally, that’s taken up a lot of my time. I’ve re-written a mod I wrote to render LaTeX using a small PHP class. I discovered the utter uniequivocable joys of dvipng, which makes creating PNG’s so much faster it’s just utterly untrue. The class also provides a number of options (one being MathML, if I can get it to work). So that’s good.

Besides that there’s been lectures as per normal. I’m enjoying all of the courses I’m doing so far; the problem is, I don’t know which ones to drop. I’m on something silly at the moment, like 250, but if I only drop 5 modules that gets me back down the scale quite a bit. I think I may put it off until later.

Also, I put some fencing up today. And I’m going home to visit the folks later, so it’s all good. For now though, I think I shall depart to beat Measure Theory with uncountably many sticks, and perhaps an open cover or two.

7:12 pm | Posted in Computing, Maths, SFN, Warwick Blogs | 3 Comments » | Show comments » | Hide comments » |

I’m a bit annoyed at the moment. I filled in the form to become an Analysis peer tutor again this year, and forgot to fill in the bottom of the form saying whether I could attend the meeting today or not – probably because I’m stupid. Got an e-mail yesterday at 2pm asking me whether I could attend, but I didn’t see it until 6pm when I got home – by which time, he wouldn’t get the e-mail until the following morning, making it too late for me to get in.

I got a rather apologetic e-mail saying they’d filled the groups and would e-mail me if someone doesn’t turn up, so I guess I’ll just have to wait and see. I doubt it’ll happen though. Quite annoying, really, since I enjoyed doing it last year and was very much hoping to do it this year. However, it’s out of my hands now and I suppose I’ll wait and see.

On the good side, I dropped Continuum Mechanics, since the lecturer obviously hasn’t learnt anything from Differential Equations in the first year. I’ll just sign up for something else instead – with over 100 CATS left to play with, I’m sure I’ll cope.

12:11 pm | Posted in Maths, University, Warwick Blogs | No Comments »