Yes, so now I have finally finished the damn second year, the sheer, unadulterated boredom has set in. Yesterday was fairly dull, but it was pretty cool. Ended up going to the Bull Ring and then going off to visit the Apple Store. I have to say that I find the PowerBook G4’s particularly appealing, and I’m seriously considering buying one. Got a few things, but nothing of great significance.

Today, I spent a long, long time in the Projects section trying to finish the entire site off. Finally, finally, finally it’s finished, but I just need to populate the thing with some decent projects (there’s a fair few). Tomorrow, I’m going to do the People section, and then the registration form. After that, if I’m feeling really lucky, I’ll re-create the photos section in the spirit of the site.

On the maths front, I’ve been reading up on Galois Theory (a module I’m taking next year). It looks to be fairly interesting; basically, covering questions such as for which polynomial does the equation yield a formula for the roots? You can do it for all quadratics, cubics and quartics, but quintics can’t be done. All in the quest to be prepared for next year’s courses.

Anyway, back to the coding. I shall perhaps start the People section now. Hmm…

12:28 am | Posted in Computing, LaTeX, Maths, Site Development | No Comments »

Hurrah!

Anyway, I’m going to go and drink beer now. The exam was okay, but it could’ve gone better. Now there’s just about a week until we find out how we did, so that should be great fun.

Will post something later.

9:23 pm | Posted in Exams | No Comments »

Oh well, I’m probably going to not do so good in this one. Never mind; it’s the last one.

Will update later. For now, bed.

11:57 pm | Posted in Exams, Whining | No Comments »

Sarah got a letter today informing her that she’d have to do Jury service - I found this to be quite a bit random.

Anyway, I’ve been working on the site a bit more, and got the projects page “up”. It’s not finished yet, but it should be good once it is. Adding files and images and all that on Monday, since I’ve got the Introduction to Fluids module going on. Should be great fun.

On other topics, I have to decide what to do with this site. I find some of the older entries to be quite crass, and I’m considering taking them off of the public viewing. Perhaps I’ll add the registration page soonish, so that people can see the old ones if they want to.

In fact, I think I’ll do that now. Will be back in a bit with an update.

11:36 pm | Posted in Exams, Personal, Site Development | 5 Comments » | Show comments » | Hide comments » |

So, I’ve now had another two exams! Woot and all that jazz:

• Vector Analysis:
  This was great fun - or not. The questions weren’t exactly hard, but answering them in the allocated 2 hours was pretty much impossible for me. There were some interesting questions on there, though; for one, we had to work out:

  The answer turns out to be . Just in case you all wondered.

• Metric Spaces:
  This went so much better than I expected that it actually scares me. There was an absolutely wonderful question on closure; basically, if with B closed, then . Then some other random things, and it all turned out good.

So now, I have only one exam left; Introduction to Fluids. This one I’m kindof dreading quite a lot, since I think it could be really nasty. However, I’m just going to play it by ear and see how it goes.

Now I’m off to eat some food. More blogging funness later.

1:16 pm | Posted in Exams, LaTeX, Maths, Revision | No Comments »

…until the Vector Analysis exam. I really hope it’s going to go well, because I think I could use the marks this time around. Will report back in a bit, I suppose.

11:54 am | Posted in Exams, Maths | No Comments »

So, I was looking at the rather nice LaTeX that I’d generated last night, and figured that I’d check how it looked in IE. The answer? Not good. You see, I’d forgotten that I’d set up the LaTeX script to generate PNGs instead of GIFs, which is bad for IE because it’s a big retarded pile of poo and doesn’t handle alpha blending at all.

But there is a fix, thank goodness. So, for any of you web developers out there that haven’t already found this, take a look at the IE PNG fix. It’s basically a neat and easy way of fixing PNGs so that you get proper alpha blending. So now I’m able to properly put a nice little alpha layer on the PNGs in the LaTeX code, and people are still quite able to see them. How nice. It uses the DirectX filtering control which means you won’t mess up your CSS and by using conditional commenting, only IE users will have to go the extra yard to download the JavaScript. Hurrah!
Meanwhile, I’m in a Vector Analysis kind of mood; it’s a pretty cool course, covering both some vector calculus and, also, some complex analysis. I have to say that I find it quite enthralling to work out integrals like using contour integrals; it’s all quite funky.

Anyway, I’m going to fix a few things on the site, and then get back to revision. I shall return later with more things of a posting nature.

1:42 pm | Posted in Computing, Maths, Site Development, Web Development | No Comments »

Hurrah, LaTeX is installed. Now I can write such prettyness as:

It had to be done.

Edit: having just posted that, it looks rather nice, and it seems to fit in quite well as well. Here, have some more:

Cauchy Integral Theorem:

Fourier Transform:

You know you love it really.

2:29 am | Posted in LaTeX, Maths, PHP/MySQL, Site Development | 1 Comment » | Show comment » | Hide comment » |

Got around to putting lists on here now.

• Now I can talk like this
• Over and over
• and over and over…
• And make everyone really annoyed and leave

So yes, that was fun. Also, I got my essay back today with no mark, but a nice comment:

An excellent essay, written well on a challenging topic.

This was nice, because I did actually put a lot of effort into that topic. For those that didn’t know, my essay was entitled “Chaotic Systems and Strange Attractors”. As is usual with me, I decided to LaTeX it all, and I’m contemplating putting it up on the interweb for scrutiny. Without wanting to blow my own trumpet, I do find the essay quite interesting, and that was always my intention. It doesn’t have all that much maths in it, but you’re going to need your head screwed on when you read it. Maybe I’ll post it up later, when I get back.

I’m still in the maths department though, which sucks. Sarah’s at the Arts Centre tonight, and the thing she’s seeing is a play, performed in Russian with surtitles at the top for those who don’t speak the language. It’s 3 hours long (eek) and has an after-show performance. I got a SMS from her, informing me that she’d be finishing around 11:45pm. So, looks like I’m here for another hour then. Maybe I’ll blog some more in a bit.

10:42 pm | Posted in Academia, Maths, Site Development | No Comments »

I realised, in my stupidity, that I forgot to tell everyone about the other exams that have been taken this year:

• Algebra I:
  A big pile of poo. I don’t particularly want to recall this exam - it suffices to say that it was about as enjoyable as sticking my face in a blender.
• PDEs:
  Great, great exam. I think I pretty much aced it.
• Analysis III:
  I wish I’d done more revision, because I could quite easily have done a lot better in this exam if it weren’t for Algebra I revision. Never mind. Probably 50% or so.
• Mathematical Methods II:
  Pretty much a walkover, but that was fairly unexpected. I was happy with it, nevertheless.

Anyway, RSS feed works, so no prodding/beating/breaking/etc. Always a good thing, I feel.

8:24 pm | Posted in Academia, Exams, Maths | No Comments »