Dave’s Blog » Computing

Archive for the 'Computing' Category

April 19, 2007

Shininess Increased

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.

April 18, 2007

Announcing vbLatex v0.1

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!

April 16, 2007

Windows Vista and the Intel i915GM

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.

April 13, 2007

Project’s Done!

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 »

February 27, 2007

On apathy

My apologies for the lack of either photographs or similar word entries. It’s an exceptionally busy time of year; end of term is creeping up extremely quickly, and there are a number of things to get done before Friday of week 10. So, expect a similarly large lack of time before the next couple of posts.

Mainly my apathy has been because of the immense amount of research that I’m doing for the project, which is turning into quite a large beast very quickly. However, it gives me a good idea of what research might be like at the graduate level, and it’s generally interesting. With a bit of luck, when everything is finished off I will post the project report on the blog and people can tear into my code.

Anyway, hopefully you’ll enjoy the snow photo that just got posted. Hopefully I will be back around here soon, and maybe after my project is finished I’ll even have time to finish the site off!

6:00 pm | Posted in Project, Site Development | No Comments »

January 26, 2007

WordPress 2.1 Upgrade

After what might be called ‘fun’, I’ve finally finished the upgrade to WordPress 2.1. Unfortunately along the way, I managed to delete the thumbnail cache for my photoblog software, YAPB. I also managed to break the composer; make sure you delete the additional prototype.js file included with YAPB, otherwise you’ll get lots of JavaScript errors.

In other news, I’ve decided that I’m going to buy a Mac Pro. But not until they release Leopard… so it could be a little while.

10:38 pm | Posted in Site Development | No Comments »

January 9, 2007

MacWorld Expo and the iPhone

Well, although there wasn’t a live feed this year, I did watch the live updates from the various sites around the net. Boy, am I pleased when they announced that iPhone.

Yes, it’s stupidly expensive and is locked into a crappy carrier, and no, we won’t see it until the end of the year in the UK. No, there wasn’t any upgraded iPod. Nothing on Leopard, nor on the supposed Mac Pro. But just sit back and think about this for a second - this is just the beginning. Apple clearly has an awful lot of new stuff planned for 2007, and I’m quite a firm believer that, given time, we’re going to see some absolutely killer products.

December 22, 2006

Server Move

Well, if you’re reading this (and I really, really hope you are) then the you’re seeing the page from my new server! I decided to take the plunge and purchase the VPSLink-2 scheme, which gave me a bit more room to play around with. In hindsight, that was a very wise choice as 64MB of RAM just isn’t enough for a LAMP stack (as pointed out by Scott Yang in my recent post).

I’m running various services and things to make life easier. Currently it uses about 54MB of RAM idle, although that shoots up a little when loaded. Overall, I’m pretty happy with everything as it currently stands - the speed of the website is much, much better than it used to be with DreamHost and things are going pretty swimmingly.

December 15, 2006

Moving away from DreamHost

Well, over the last few weeks I’ve come to realise that using DreamHost wasn’t a particularly good plan. If I’m honest with you (which hopefully I am most of the time), the cheap price of their hosting and ridiculous amounts of both bandwidth and disk space were too much in terms of temptation. However, there’s been a lot of quite severe downtime and the majority of my patience has been used up.

The major problem is speed. My server is relatively good - the load averages are only around 2.00 to 2.75 on a good day at peak times. But DreamHost do pack an awful lot of people into their hardware, which makes everything insanely slow. Even simple static content load times are pretty shocking. I also find their control panel software to be quite a bit of a pain at the best of times.

December 10, 2006

Windows Vista

There has been a lot of discussion over at SFN recently about the relative advantages and disadvantages of Windows Vista, and whether we should all upgrade when it’s been released. A lot of the Microsoft fanboys are saying “yeah, this is a truly amazing release!” so I decided to install RC1 the other week to see precisely what all of the hype is about.

Truly, the entire experience annoyed me immensely. Everything, from the complete failure to design an interface as beautiful as OS X, to the annoying popup windows that say “Are you sure you want to move the cursor? You might get RSI!!!” got on my nerves in the most extreme fashion. To be charging am immense $300 for such utter, utter tripe is completely beyond me.

Personally, I’m holding out until the end of the academic year, when I should hopefully be able to afford to finally buy myself a Mac Pro. When I look at the enormous, seamless leap that Apple made 6 years ago from the transition from OS 9 to X, and the complete backwards step that Vista has made from XP, it’s amazing that Microsoft are even able to make any sort of software at all these days.

Anyway, on another note, I prepared some more photos for my photoblog earlier, but unfortunately left them on another machine which I’m not able to access for a few days. So, I intend to postdate them and keep up my one-a-day record!

7:24 pm | Posted in Apple, Ranting | No Comments »

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