After many, many days of painful procrastination, I’ve eventually got around to implementing some of the changes to the layout and improvements to the JavaScript running the site. Photos in the Photoblog (and indeed on the index page) are displayed much differently now, as a smaller thumbnail; partially it looks better, but mostly it improves the page load-times.

Other than this, I finally fixed some very nasty IE6 rendering bugs on the sidebar. As you can see, the advert has changed shape; this was the main cause of most of my woes. Eventually the sidebar could expand, but this requires me re-editing images that I don’t have access to at the moment. And the JavaScript tabby slidey thing now works on IE6.

Hurrah! Now back to checking my e-mail with the frequency of an OCD sufferer.

8:50 pm | Posted in Site Development, Web Development, XHTML/CSS | No Comments »

As some of you may or may not be aware, part of my fourth year project was to give a presentation of my work over the first two terms. Naturally I’d already written a lot of LaTeX code for the project and produced lots of lovely PostScript figures, so it seemed pretty natural to go ahead and use Beamer, with evince in presentation mode.

However, because I like to look a bit swish, I decided to do something to make my shiny Sony Ericsson W950i switch through the slides for me without having to touch the keyboard. Since nothing was apparent from much Google searching, I sat down and figured it all out. After a long time of sitting on this code I’ve finally found the time to sit down and package it all up in a neat bundle.

So, if you have a decent phone with Bluetooth enabled, visit the project page if you’re interested!

The project report and presentation slides will be going up tomorrow, I just need to get around to writing some CSS.

12:28 am | Posted in Computing, Hardware, Project | 2 Comments » | Show comments » | Hide comments » |

It’s taken pretty much all day, but finally the new layout is ready. It’s been changed a lot since the last time, since I wasn’t very happy with how it turned out. Let me know what you think!

Apart from layout changes, there’s a shiny new toolbar using mootools 1.1. Also, the AJAX search now actually works - shock horror. I’m planning some more exciting stuff tomorrow, as well as reverting to my old lightbox layout with the reflections.

Currently, IE6 support is crapped up, but I really can’t be bothered going through the CSS tonight trying to find the odd pixel jumps here and there which messes everything. I hate IE.

11:54 pm | Posted in Site Development, Web Development, XHTML/CSS | No Comments »

Given the recent hype about WWDC and the supposed Top Secret features of the upcoming Leopard release of OS X, I was quite looking forward to the keynote speech today. Unfortunately, it was rather dull and overall, pretty much disappointing.

Whilst the Finder has been given a well-needed overhaul and the Dock has been prettified, personally I just don’t see the huge changes that had been promised. The problem is not so much that Leopard isn’t an improvement over Tiger, it’s that the hype built up expectations to a ridiculous degree.

But even so, as far as keynotes go and given Jobs’ amazing keynote in January introducing the iPhone at Macworld, this was quite a letdown. I was personally hoping for an update to the Mac Pro, and really wanted a killer feature for Leopard that didn’t really materialize.

One highlight at the end: Safari for Windows! I’m posting this from it now, and it really is quite nippy. I might even try it for a couple of days over Firefox. Either way, it’s going to make web developers’ lives a lot easier if they don’t own a Mac. 

12:39 am | Posted in Apple | No Comments »

Back in the days of old, crap computers, I used to play Starcraft on my ace Performa 5300 (with uberfast 14.4k inbuilt modem) and loved it. Well, that was almost ten years ago now - apparently I’m getting old - and finally, Blizzard decided they were going to do something other than bloody World of Warcraft and get around to making Starcraft 2.

As Blizzard put on their website: Hell, it’s about time. Quite right.

I will be buying it on the release date. I adored Starcraft; it was the best RTS I ever played, far better than Command and Conquer even in its heyday. Can’t wait until the release, so hurry up and finish it Blizzard - especially since it looks completely great.

As an added bonus for me to buy a Mac, they’re also making an OS X native version. I get the feeling I’m going to be spending a lot of money in the next 6 months.

11:35 pm | Posted in Computing | 1 Comment » | Show comment » | Hide comment » |

I did the upgrade to WordPress 2.2 on Thursday night and I have to say it was a little disappointing. I was expecting the latest tagging features to be implemented, but it looks like they got stripped out at the last minute for 2.3. In any case, I’m now running the 2.3-svn version, so I now have the functionality.

New theme is coming soon if I can convince myself that I’m happy with the mockup… and then I have to tag about a bajillion entries. Win.

6:46 pm | Posted in Site Development | 4 Comments » | Show comments » | Hide comments » |

After a really good day in terms of web development work (not so much in terms of revision though), I’ve spent a bit of time tidying up the JavaScript and WordPress plugins to make them a little better in terms of bandwidth and usability.

I decided that I didn’t want the hassle of fiddling with moo.fx every 20 seconds, so I’ve upgraded everything to use mootools; basically the same thing, but more modular and generally quicker to load and render. Unfortunately this meant that the script I use to display my photos, Litebox, wasn’t going to work any longer as it depended upon prototype.lite.

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Continue reading “Shininess Increased”…

7:24 pm | Posted in Computing, Site Development, Web Development, XHTML/CSS | 2 Comments » | Show comments » | Hide comments » |

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 » |

After having my shiny new hard-drive hooked up today, I decided that I’d go crazy and try out Windows Vista, what with all the hype. I know this is somewhat hypocritical of me, after writing on Sayonara’s blog that I would never do such a thing, but I wanted to know what performance would be like under my one-year-old laptop.

Boy, was I in for a shock.

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Continue reading “Windows Vista and the Intel i915GM”…

1:16 pm | Posted in Hardware, Ranting | 5 Comments » | Show comments » | Hide comments » |

Well after much blood, sweat and tears, I finally finished my project. In total, it was 33 pages long (including references), so not an unsubstantial amount of work! After it’s all gone through the system, been marked and I’ve got my marks back, I plan on posting a copy on here. But I want to ensure it goes without a hitch first.

Anyway, that was finished about 2 weeks ago. I took a week off which was quite nice, in which I’ve bought many things, most of which are yet to be delivered.

They include a 160gb laptop hard-drive (for the bargin price of £75 with free shipping, thanks to eBuyer); 512MB of SODIMM RAM for my laptop; an excellent 2gb SanDisk Extreme III CompactFlash card; the Canon RC-1 Remote (from eBay, only £11); a 10/100 ethernet switch and a CompactFlash reader.

Unfortunately this spending spree was started by me looking at the Canon 100-400mm f/4-5.6L which, at ~£1000 is a little out of my budget at the moment. However, something had to fill the void, so…

Anyway, revision’s started now. First up is Asymptotic Methods, and it’s going reasonably well at the moment. My plan is to start early and finish early, leaving time for TV and other assorted good things.  Hurrah.

7:13 pm | Posted in Academia, Exams, Hardware, Maths, Personal, Photography, Project | No Comments »