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.
- Over Christmas I was asked to lecture MA117: Programming for Scientists, which is a first year programming course run by the Maths department and introduces students to Java.
- I’m also running MA903: C++ for Financial Mathematics to teach C++ to MSc Financial Mathematics students.
- I’m also a TA for the course MA4G7: Computational Linear Algebra and Optimisation, introducing fourth year mathematics students to BLAS and LAPACK.
- Most importantly for the time being, my supervisor and I have a submission deadline for a paper due next Tuesday.
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!
