Well, after the complete downer at the end of term, things are looking up. I’m spending a week down in Plymouth with Sarah, and it’s been nice and relaxing so far. I’ve spent quite a few hours coding on the website tonight, trying to get things done by the end of the week. When I get back on Saturday, I’m going to have an awful lot of revision to do and not a whole load of time, so for the main part I will probably not be blogging or doing much else than revision.

My first four exams are at the beginning of April, and I’m not looking forward to them that much.

• Topics in Mathematical Biology
  The course itself doesn’t seem to be too hard. Sure, there’s non-linear PDEs and all that jazz, but we don’t seem to actually do an awful lot with it. The problem with this exam is definately going to be the sheer amount of things that we have to know. And, unfortunately, there’s just no way around that apart from extensive revision.
• Introduction to Topology
  I’d like to think that at this point in time, I understand topology fairly well. Again, there’s a fair amount to revise for but this is something that I can tackle, and it certainly isn’t insurmountable in terms of understanding. Which is always good. I just hope we don’t get a nasty exam.
• Measure Theory
  This one has me a little worried. The problem is that there’s a lot to revise for and it’s also quite challenging from the standpoint of knowledge. We didn’t have the best lecturer, so that doesn’t really help matters. Really need to get going on some past exam sheets and do some questions.
• Combinatorics
  I understand and enjoy this course. My only worry is that the lecturer, Daan Krammer, sets a nice(ish) exam. Last year’s was pretty nasty, and although it’s fairly easy to do, it takes a lot of time - not something that you have an awful lot of in the examination rooms.

Anyway, this is all worrying about nothing at the moment. I’ll worry more when I get back to Coventry and get going on the actual revision. For the time being, I’m going to drink some tea and enjoy myself here (as much as I can).

On the website front, I’ve finally got the “proper” CSS coding in place which means user-selectable themes! I know that’s what you’ve all been begging me for in a completely silent fashion. But yes, I have three CSS templates for the new (WB) theme, the default theme and also the old theme which did mainly suck. But there we go. Just need to write the appropriate bits for password changing, selecting themes, profile information perhaps and a couple other things, then I’ll have something that closely resembles a proper website.

I’m also going to make a distinct effort when I get back to catalogue all of my loose pieces of code here and there that do minorly useful things. I really want to put them on the web, since at least some people might e-mail me. I like e-mails, after all.

On top of that, I hope to accomplish the image catalogue as well as putting the photo galleries back online. I’d also quite like to optimize the scripting so that it all runs a lot faster and uses less SQL queries. Also, the CSS could, as always, need some work but I think I’ll leave that for the time being.

I can’t wait to get this thing finished. It’s been a long time coming and, considering the amount of work I’ve put into it, I’ve not had a lot to show for it. Certainly the coding will be most of the work, but I must sit down and actually write some content, otherwise this place will be nothing more than a skeleton. I’m more determined than ever that during this exam period I will blog more than I have done before. I need somewhere that I can vent my frustrations and not bombard my poor Sarah with rambling maths questions.

Anyway, I must stop writing now as it is certainly time for bed. Tomorrow, I think I’ll mainly concentrate on the user control panel and get that out of the way. Once I get that done, I can move on to sort out the other bits and pieces that are more shiny.

1:16 am | Posted in Exams, Maths, Site Development, University, XHTML/CSS | No Comments »

Not been a great day, when all’s said and done. A friend of mine has, frankly, shown his true colours this afternoon and to be honest I’m quite annoyed about it all. I don’t think he reads this blog, but in case you do; I don’t consider you as a friend any longer. Don’t expect anything from me in the future, because you’re not going to get it. Grow up.

Basically that’s spoiled my day up until now. We had Pizza Hut tonight, which was nice, but honestly I’ve never been quite this angry with anyone before and I don’t particularly like it. I just find it hard to believe that anybody could be quite so immature and idiotic, but there we go.

So, I’ve decided to come back to Coventry tonight instead of doing the usual Maths-fest. I have to pick Sarah up later, but I do have two episodes of Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares to catch up on and I would really like to work some more on the website tonight. I’ve patched up most of it to use my new templating system, and it seems to work a treat. I’m still not 100% sure about the performance, but I reckon I can get away with it pretty easily. Perhaps if I do some database work and tidy the OOP code a little, it can be enhanced a bit more.

Still, load times of about ~0.01 seconds per page aren’t too bad. I just want it to be able to process the databases efficiently. I’d better get on with it then, I suppose. Bleh.

8:53 pm | Posted in Personal, Site Development, University | No Comments »

I have absolutely no idea what is going on with this code. As far as I can tell, it’s not my doing. Basically tracked the error out to the file output module (as expected). However it seems that because I had two ofstreams on the go, it was causing some kind of data corruption and hence things were breaking all over the place.

No idea what’s caused this; whether this is expected behaviour or not. I’m fairly certain that I’ve at least got the code narrowed down now. There was some very odd memory management going on, but that was definately my doing. That is now sorted. However I woin’t be happy until I’ve determined precisely what is causing this very strange output.

My plan of attack is to try the code out on my desktop PC tomorrow. I’ve got a similar setup there but as far as I know, everything “works”. If I can replicate the strange oddities there then there’s got to be something wrong with my code and I’ll fix it. If not, then I’m stumped.

Either way this is something that I really don’t want to have to deal with right now. This program was supposed to be finished and I’ve even gone ahead and written the damn write-up of the project. To find that something is going critically wrong is quite disheartening, and I can’t even trust my own results anymore.

However I can’t do anything else on it tonight. I’m just too tired to concentrate anymore nad I think that this is just going to introduce more and more stupid errors into the code. Frankly I’m considering reverting to the old codebase and just starting with a fresh sub-class. I know the method works, but I can’t believe I’m having so many problems with these (comparitvely) simple output classes.

Gah. Not a good day.

3:10 am | Posted in Computing, Ranting | No Comments »

Literally 20 seconds after I say that, something else has broken. There is a seriously major bug in this output code somewhere, and I can’t find it. I think I’m going to revert back to a much simpler way of handling the output than this concat() stuff and see if that helps. If not, I’m going to sit down and beat my computer.

2:27 am | Posted in Computing, Linux | No Comments »

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’m now having to recompile VTK. For the third time.

Not a happy bunny.

Also, ATLAS is a big pile of poo. Things aren’t going my way today.

5:08 pm | Posted in Computing, Whining | No Comments »

Well, it’s a little later than I wanted to go to bed, but oh well. Got quite a bit of work done on the project tonight; fixed some problems with the code, cleaned it up and general polishing. Also, fixed a couple of design flaws that were just annoying me; can now hook up more than one output module to each PDESolver object, which is nice.

Basically, the PDESolver object is an abstract class which has one virtual function, solve(). This is implemented by subclasses allowing me to very quickly and easily create new methods for PDE solving without going through all of the hassle of starting from scratch. As a part of this, I also created another abstact class, PDEOutput, which is designed to allow sub-classes to implement output methods (such as to files, X11). Up until this point, I could only output to one PDEOutput object at once; now I can do multiple things, which is always good.

I also now have some very funky 3d visualizations of my solutions thanks to OpenDX. It’s really starting to come together; hopefully if I pull my finger out and finish off the write-up tomorrow then I can get it all done and printed out by the weekend. Here’s for hoping, at least. I’m going to try and put the graphs on here for everyone to see because they’re really quite nice. However, I’ve not got them quite to my liking yet and I still feel that they need a bit of tweaking. Hoping to find some way to get some good anti-aliased fonts out of OpenDX.

Aside from this, I watched Robots tonight (which was my Valentine’s present from Sarah). I’ve forgotten how much I loved that film; it was definately a good one from Blue Sky. Can’t wait for Ice Age 2.

Anyway, I’m definately going to bed now. Need some sleep, and I’m doing campus tours tomorrow. Wouldn’t want to give the prospective undergraduates bad ideas about student life, oh no…

2:56 am | Posted in Computing, Maths | No 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 »

I figured that I may as well give another small update saying what I plan to do with this place - assuming I can find the time and motivation, of course. I won’t bore you with details of what I’ve been doing for a little bit yet.

• Update the code to my latest development version; it’s been ready for ages but my host is only just beginning to implement PHP5 (which it requires).
• Create an importer so that I can grab my entries from WB and put them over here fairly easily.
• Perhaps create a little guide for the BBCode and stuff so that you can all comment easily. Maybe add some more for functionality.
• Create an image store; this way I can easily create galleries and put images into my entries without having to worry about uploading them manually.
• Put all of the photos back up again?
• Create a new style for the place (perhaps based off of my WB style), as well as a style manager.
• Create a user control panel (basic).
• Create the admin control panel (again, basic).
• Perhaps look into actually releasing the source code (if people would actually be interested in this).

Well, I’m going to install apache on my new laptop now and see if I can actually come through with any of this. So I suppose that I will try and update tomorrow or sometime soon. Tomorrow isn’t out of the picture, however, since I have about a gazillion frees.

9:15 pm | Posted in Site Development | 2 Comments » | Show comments » | Hide comments » |