Been having some wierd bugs turn up recently in my code. Stuff like simpling defining an integer array completely messes up an unrelated routine and causes my methods to diverge off to infinity. Very odd stuff indeed.

Switched the compiler back to 3.3, and am having absolutely no problems at all. Lucky that, because up until this afternoon I was seriously considering getting rid of the 3.3 branch. Very glad I didn’t now.

I suppose it could be my code that’s buggy, but considering it works with 3.3 flawlessly I’m wondering whether I’ve managed to somehow break my toolchain. I’ll just have to find another copy of 3.4 on another box and see if I run into the same problems.

All in all, a very odd day.

2:22 am | Posted in Computing, Linux | No Comments »

Seriously. This is getting a little silly now. All I want is a (reasonably) simple program which allows me to plot a great big 3D data set, export it as a good quality PS file and allow me to import it into my project.

But ooooh no. That would be waaay too much to ask. I’ve tried pretty much every program out there, from OpenDX to freaking gnuplot, and nothing is working. Absolutely nothing. It hasn’t helped that I’ve had to recompile vtk a number of times now, and on top of that I’ve been sat around for the past god knows how many hours waiting for numerous other packages to compile.

Now, I know I shouldn’t complain about Gentoo, because it’s not its fault. I just wish that things didn’t contain a gizillion lines of source code so that they’d install sometime this bloody year.

On the upside, vtk just finished compiling for the third time, so lets see if it works now, eh?

PS: It didn’t work. I now have to wait another 40 minutes for it to compile again. I hate my life.

5:51 pm | Posted in Computing, Linux, Whining | 2 Comments » | Show comments » | Hide 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 »

With nothing to do I find myself spending yet more money on the so called “interweb”. Oh well, never mind - it’s quite good to be able to keep in touch, even when I’m 300 miles from home.

Not up to much today, as you can tell by the title. After the internet cafe trip, found the rest of the folks and came back to the hotel - just finished dinner, as a matter of fact. With the rest of the guys engrossed in Big Brother, I’m finding myself very bored indeed.

Not content with upgrading my aunt’s computer to the latest version of OS X, I’ve decided that it would be a good idea to try and get the classic PHP/MySQL setup working on there (since Apache is shipped with the thing anyway). As a matter of fact, it’s been a complete synch getting the stuff set up and nicely done.

The biggest problem that I’ve had so far is getting Smarty set up without beating it to death with a spoon. It doesn’t seem to like Darwin too much, but I’ve sure got a lot of time to sort it out and get the thing debugged. I realise now (which is rather too late) that I should have put the source code for this site, and worked on this for a bit. Oh well - benefit of hindsight, and all that. Perhaps if I get a chance, I’ll take my memory stick to the internet cafe down in Youghal.

My plans for this week are pretty minimal. Try and stay occupied as much as possible as to make time fly. It’s been pretty dismal down here so far, and I can’t see it getting all to much better. There’s nothing for me really to do, even with the plethora of equipment and other things that we’ve brought along for the trip. I think that more than anything (apart from Sarah, of course I’m missing not having the instant communication that I’m so used to with the Internet. Hard to think that we’d find ourselves so reliant on such trivialities, but there we go.

Anyway, I think that’s enough blogging for the time being at least. I’m going to go and get back to beating Smarty with a giant stick.

Hopefully get on here tomorrow. If not, then certainly Monday.

8:06 pm | Posted in Apple, Linux, Personal | No Comments »

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 »