Well, after an extraordinarily long period of development (over 2 years at least), vbLatex has finally made it to a public release. You can read all about it here.

vbLatex is a relatively simple plugin that uses dvipng and LaTeX to bring pretty math rendering to your vBulletin forums. I’ve gotten a fair number of e-mails about it, as it’s the system that we’re currently using at SFN – go and visit to see it in action.

The concept is Steve Mayer’s latexrender class; I felt I could improve somewhat on the this class but right now there’s no significant improvements, other than the switch from ImageMagick to dvipng.

Right now development is at what I regard as an early beta stage. Basically, I haven’t worked on the script for a good 9 months and I don’t plan to add any significant revisions until at least July due to my preparation for exams and other committments (this blog included).

There is a good chance that this could break vBulletin at some point, and your users simply won’t be able to see any threads. If you can’t figure out what’s wrong, then feel free to e-mail me.

Anyway, enjoy, and hopefully there will be more updates to it reasonably soon!

12:11 am | Posted in Computing, LaTeX, PHP/MySQL, SFN, Web Development | 2 Comments » | Show comments » | Hide comments » |

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 »

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 »

I’m off to bed, but I have the comment system working. So the 1 person that reads this blog can now comment!

Enjoy.

1:40 am | Posted in Computing, LaTeX, Site Development | 10 Comments » | Show comments » | Hide 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 » |

So, I went and stayed away for quite a while, didn’t I? Oh well. It doesn’t matter all that much I suppose. It’s not like anyone actually sits down and reads these posts.

Yes, indeed. I’ve been updating this site in secret!!!! (shock horror etc). Now that the site is hosted somewhere apart from my box at home, I like to develop the site in stages and then upload once I get to a point of significant progress. As far as I can see, things are coming along nicely:

• Added some rudimentry bbcode-like stuff
• Fixed some annoying bugs
• Replaced the links/stats sections so that they actually work.
• Minor tweaks to the database.

Next on my list, in order of priority:

• Finish the registration form
• Re-write the blocks code because it’s ugly
• Finish the projects page
• Populate the admin CP (which you can’t see) with some options.

I’m thinking that I might actually release this at some point, just for the sheer hell of it. Although that’s maybe a bit of a crazy idea because compared to WordPress et al, it stinks quite badly. I’m just hoping the RSS feed will work now, because if it doesn’t I may actually have to beat and simultaneously poke the server.

So, what’s new? Not a lot. I’ve started my exams – here’s the results so far:

• Algebra II:
  Went well, but not as well as I had hoped. Still, I’m not going to complain; I reckon I got something like 60%.
• Variational Principles:
  This was the best exam ever; questions that I could answer, and they still made you think a bit. Somewhat akin to the Differential Equations B exam I had last year, methinks.
• Number Theory:
  I had originally thought that after my rather dismal 50% on the in-class tests, this would be a crap of an exam. However, it turned out to be pretty good in the end. The questions weren’t all that hard, but they were still quite challenging.
• Differentiation:
  This was today’s examination. Unfortunately, it didn’t go brilliantly but I was fairly happy with the last two questions, and two of the other ones I staggered through somewhat. It was to be expected, though; I hadn’t really had the time to do all that much revision of the course due to Number Theory yesterday. Never mind.

I’ve still got 3 left, but in all honesty it’s getting to the point where I don’t actually care all that much. Metric Spaces ensues to be a horrible exam, but I’m quite looking forward to the Vector Analysis paper (it’s quite a fun topic, and has a gentle introduction to complex analysis). Then there’s Introduction to Fluids on Monday. I get the feeling that I may actually fail this one.

Apart from exams, there’s not been a lot going on. I’m sitting in one of the IT workrooms at the moment, and quite shockingly it’s a Linux-based system (more precisely, Mandrake). I’m not a huge fan of the distro, but it suffices quite nicely (and more importantly has X-Chat installed). Doesn’t have Firefox, and the latest version of Mozilla is 1.4 – ouch. So, I downloaded and installed Firefox onto my USB flash pen, and now I’m chugging along quite nicely. The only downside is that I have to have that with me when I’m around here, but since it’s attached to my car keys, I can’t see that being too much of a hassle.

Anyway, I’m going to go off and maybe do a little more revision now. Alternatively, I could mess around with some LaTeX and see whether it’s worth my while installing my mod on this blog. Hmm.

I think the latter idea sounds better.

8:04 pm | Posted in Academia, Exams, LaTeX, Linux, Maths, Site Development, Web Development | No Comments »