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.

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Continue reading “Moving away from DreamHost”…

3:41 am | Posted in Hardware, Site Development, Web Development | 2 Comments » | Show comments » | Hide comments » |

I’ve been working on the AJAX for comments here - try it out by clicking on the Show Comments links on the posts with comments. It uses moo(.pack).fx, moo.ajax and prototype.lite - all stunningly good bits of JavaScript, and extremely small to boot.

One of the issues that I have with AJAX is that a lot of websites out there don’t offer any kind of indication as to whether your query is being processed. Usually this is done with the aid of a nice twirly image. If, like me, you suck at graphics design, then you really want to be checking this great website out. It allows you to automagically generate several different styles of progress indicators for your site without having to break out a GIF animator.

Archives are currently broken as I’m working on a better live-archive script. I found that by using three plugins, things were getting cluttered and, in some cases, over 100kb was being used per page. This was far too much, so I’ve decided to simply code my own stuff and cut down on page load-times.

Onwards and upwards, as they say.

4:45 pm | Posted in Computing, Web Development | 2 Comments » | Show comments » | Hide comments » |

Hello again! If you’re visiting this page, then you may be wondering “what the hell happened to this place?”

I was sitting down, working on the website code when all of a sudden, I realised that I really, really didn’t want to be doing this any more. “What,” I wonderered to myself, “is the point of having a blog if nothing gets done but fiddling with the code for hours upon end?” So I set out looking for well-established blogging packages that would allow for the maximum amount of customization, as well as being relatively easy to set up and use on a daily basis. Eventually, I settled upon WordPress.

As an initial package, WordPress isn’t mind-blowingly amazing. It’s very slick, but the feature set isn’t particularly wonderful. Then I looked at the WordPress Codex, and immediately found a plethora of different plugins, extensions and all sorts of other lovelyness. I even coded a couple of little extensions myself for the fun of it, as I wasn’t entirely satisfied with LatexRender for my mathematics posts. I’m also using the Super Archives plugin for the live archives (they still need quite a bit of work). The amount of customization one can achieve is really quite staggering.

Importing the posts was actually relatively trivial. Of course, I have (or rather had) two separate sources for my blog posts; Warwick Blogs and my own backend. Warwick Blogs allows export via Movable Type. I did run into a problem with some stray tabs messing around the import engine, but after that all was good. I knocked up an exporter for my news entries and after an hour of fiddling the content was in place.

The theme I’m using has obviously been re-styled. I’m still not totally happy with it, but for the time being I simply can’t be bothered messing around with it any more. It’s based off of the original Kubric theme which comes with WordPress 2. It took a little while to get used to because of the different files used for the theme, but I think that it’s turned out okay.

There’s still a lot of work to do. As you can see, the majority of my posts are still un-tagged. So there’s the matter of leafing through all of those - something I’m not particularly looking forward to. Besides this, I also want to get working on some kind of photographic blogging thing (no, I’m not sure what that means either) and that means I have the joy of organising my photos!

7:19 pm | Posted in Computing, Photography, Web Development | 1 Comment » | Show comment » | Hide comment » |

I’ve not been on here for a while again, mainly due to maths and far too little time, but I thought I’d give a quick update to let you all know how I’m getting on.

Firstly, the maths. Measure Theory has been a pig this week (those who are doing the course will love and cherish question 7 on this week’s assignment). I only know a handful of people who have completely finished it, and I’m certainly not one of them. I’ve managed to complete 2/3 of it, so maybe I’ll get lucky and they won’t mark the stupidly hard question.

Combinatorics has been going well. Got the third assignment in a whole 3 days earlier than it was actually due in, and with an (almost) complete set of answers. The lecture notes are excellent, which is always good, and I think the course is one of the most organised I’ve seen so far. Then again, Daan Krammer has always produced brilliantly organised notes and – touch wood – reasonable exams, so my hopes are high.

I’ve decided not to bother going to any more Rings and Modules lectures. Frankly, I still don’t even get what a module is, let alone tensor products, finite dimensional algebras, faithful semi-modules and the rest. It’s like a complete contrast of Combinatorics; appauling lecturing style and lecture notes (sorry), not enough examples that actually make sense and a complete disregard for any sort of coherence. I was actually hoping that somebody would take note of what was said on the SSLC forms for Algebra II, but alas, Dr. Moody doesn’t seem to have caught onto the problems. I’m hoping that with a good book and some time over Christmas, I can teach myself the remainder of the course. However, this just doesn’t look likely anymore.

Since I’ve now effectively dropped both this and Dynamical Systems, I’ve had to take up Topics in Mathematical Biology just to make up my CATS (without those two I would be doing 42 this term). The dynamics of systems has always intruiged me, and I wrote my second year essay on the topic. I’ve managed to wade my way through and copy up about 20 pages of notes in the past week, so I only have a little bit to go. In fact, I should be doing this as we speak.

Besides all the maths, I’ve not been up to a whole lot. One thing to definately note is my 2nd year of dating my girlfriend (Sarah). I cannot believe it’s been 2 years already – hardly seems like I was in Cryfield getting hideously drunk – but it was a nice day. We went to see Serenity at Star City, which is by far the best film I’ve seen in a long time. After that, Pizza Hut was consumed (it’s a tradition) and then just general lazyness watching TV for the rest of the day.

Also been checking Warwick Accommodation, and apparently forms come out on Friday for final year undergraduates applying for on-campus accommodation. I’ve been looking forward to going back on campus for a while now, but the first vestiges of doubt started crawling back into my mind. Perhaps a little more thought is required on the subject, but I’ll apply anyway and deal with it later.

Other than all of this I’ve immersed myself in implementing some rudimentary AJAX for a project. It’s all to do with tape librarys, but it’s extremely boring so I won’t mention it here. Re-considering my decision to have my blog on here – I do miss my old website, and am seriously considering moving back there. I even completely re-did the CSS to enable me to implement styles a lot easier (so I can have both the original and new styling on here). However, I’m still waiting on my host to update to PHP5 (I know, it’s not completely production stable yet) so I’ll have to put it off for a little longer yet.

What little time I have left out of all that has been spent playing Black & White 2. I especially enjoy throwing rocks at random buildings and blowing up people with giant volcanos of immense and utter doom. In my case it does still suffer from the boredom factor of the original; it’s cool for a time, but after a few days the monotony starts to set in (constantly re-building towns, blowing people up, hurling rocks at giant axe-wielding monkeys, etc etc). Oh well, I do have the shortest attention span ever, after all.

And now I’ve realised that this really is rather a long list and I should probably get back to copying up the remaining 13.5 sides of notes still remaining. Yay?!

9:21 pm | Posted in Maths, Warwick Blogs, Web Development, Whining, XHTML/CSS | 3 Comments » | Show comments » | Hide comments » |

Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve been on here. Nevertheless, I’m going to type up some of what I’ve been doing and stuff, since otherwise this entire thing is a complete waste of time. So there.

It’s been an interesting couple of weeks. Spent last week down in Plymouth with Sarah generally having a good time and chilling out a bit after the exams. Went to see some ships in harbour (they’re big) and went to see a load of other neat, but inevitably pointless and extremely touristy things. So yes, I left on Sunday - which wasn’t fun - but the journey was okay so I guess that’s one small mercy.

The rest of this week has been spent, for the most part, sitting in this chair coding like a proper coder monkey. I’m pretty much finished with my current project, which must be finished by the end of next week really. It also means that I’ll be having some money come in fairly soon, which is never a bad thing. It’s given my new backend a very good testing, and I have to say that it’s come up trumps - well worth all of the effort I put into it in the first place.

Other than all of that? Well, eating and sleeping have been pretty high on the list of things to kill time. I have to say that I must have been coding for between 8 and 10 hours every day this week, so there’s not been a lot of time for anything else - this blog included. However, I did have a bit of a chance to read Harry Potter, which I was fairly disappointed with. Perhaps it’s just me, but the entire thing was just one massive anti-climax.

Hopefully, with this big project out of the way in a few days, I should be able to return to regular updates on here. There’s certainly a number of things I want to fix on here, and also implement some new features if I can be bothered. A couple of improvements on the layout front wouldn’t go amiss, and perhaps a new style if I’m feeling really ambitious. To be honest, I’m just looking forward to my hosts installing PHP 5 on here - at the moment, it’s only available as a CGI option which I’m not liking too much.

This also reminds me; I have to add a feature for auto-acronyms. Bugger.

Anyway, since it is now ridiculous o’clock and I have to get up in the morning, I shall stop here. Another update tomorrow, perhaps. Or perhaps not.

PS: I’m off to Ireland (maybe) on the 12th. Any offers of drinking would be appreciated muchly. Ta.

4:03 am | Posted in Personal, Web Development | No Comments »

So, I was looking at the rather nice LaTeX that I’d generated last night, and figured that I’d check how it looked in IE. The answer? Not good. You see, I’d forgotten that I’d set up the LaTeX script to generate PNGs instead of GIFs, which is bad for IE because it’s a big retarded pile of poo and doesn’t handle alpha blending at all.

But there is a fix, thank goodness. So, for any of you web developers out there that haven’t already found this, take a look at the IE PNG fix. It’s basically a neat and easy way of fixing PNGs so that you get proper alpha blending. So now I’m able to properly put a nice little alpha layer on the PNGs in the LaTeX code, and people are still quite able to see them. How nice. It uses the DirectX filtering control which means you won’t mess up your CSS and by using conditional commenting, only IE users will have to go the extra yard to download the JavaScript. Hurrah!
Meanwhile, I’m in a Vector Analysis kind of mood; it’s a pretty cool course, covering both some vector calculus and, also, some complex analysis. I have to say that I find it quite enthralling to work out integrals like using contour integrals; it’s all quite funky.

Anyway, I’m going to fix a few things on the site, and then get back to revision. I shall return later with more things of a posting nature.

1:42 pm | Posted in Computing, Maths, Site Development, Web Development | 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 »

Woohoo, RSS feed seems to work. For those that care (and/or know what it is). Make sure you have an RSS-enabled browser (i.e. Firefox) and you’ll be able to keep track of all the headlines from here. Will probably improve this a little but it’s quite easy to maintain and implement.

(RSS - Really Simple Syndication - is an easy way to announce things like news articles, blog entries and the like.)
Anyway, I will be updating the site with some various bits and bobs at some point today/tomorrow/whenever I have free time because I’m quite bored.

Other than that, Sarah’s come over to stay for a few days (which is great) but I’m really, really knackered so haven’t shown it very much. I’ve worked my arse off for the past 2 days on coding bits and pieces and editing a piece together today. In total, I got maybe 5-6 hours sleep over the past 72 hours so I’m really not feeling terribly well. Also, having been up since 7:30am this morning, it’s getting rather late and I’m feeling rather tired - I really don’t know why I’m writing this now, for instance.

Anyhoo, as far as the updates are concerned, I’m going to completely overhaul the backend and make it a lot more nicerer (yes, I know, it’s not a word, although it should be) to work with when I’m implementing new features. The new backend will be something rather cool from a programming point of view - for those that are interested, my backend is quite modular in nature, using a lot of OOP in the new PHP 5.
It won’t look particularly different to you guys (yet) but as I continue to upgrade the code (which I mainly do, just so you know, to try and keep my skills ticking over) with some new stuff, I’m going to try and add user comments and maybe a way for all the QM people to keep in contact. Who knows, I might even scrounge enough money to make the photos get back online.

Anyway, I’ve said enough for tonight. It’s now 2am, I’m tired and I ache like shite. But I’m going to sleep now and make it all better. w00t.

Catch you all later.

1:59 am | Posted in PHP/MySQL, Personal, Site Development, Web Development | 1 Comment » | Show comment » | Hide comment » |

Well kids, I’m back again after a short (2 month) break from updating the blog.

Some of you may wonder what the post below this one was all about. Basically, someone noticed that I’d done two stupid things which I should really not have done:

1. I left the root of my webserver directory (xyloid.org) without an index file, causing a filelist to be displayed instead of nothing.
2. I left the MySQL administration software (which gives me web access to the database) unprotected - so anyone could’ve gotten to it.

I’m not usually so lax with security, but there you go. I fixed all that and also created a few .htaccess files to fix some other folder permissions. I also went through all my scripts and fixed some outstanding security holes (as small as they might be).

Rather than a public posting, it would have been far more convenient for the person that discovered the flaw to e-mail me. But there we go.

Onto other things. I’ve just finished uni for the term (finished on the 3rd or thereabouts) and am pretty knackered out. This probably isn’t helped by the fact that I’ve not gone to bed before 4am for the past 5 nights in a row, which hurts. What have I been up to since I got back? Absolutely nothing. I don’t think I’ve ever been so bored. Nobody’s back from uni and Sarah’s in Barbados (like I keep saying - it’s alright for some) and the people I know from QM are still in term so aren’t doing anything much.

All around, it’s a bit of a bummer.

The lack of amusing things to do has also led to some vast improvements in the site. If you look at the Archives section, you’ll find it’s all nicely organised by year and month (just in case you all actually care about any posts I’ve made in the past. I’ve also taken down the link to the Stats section (since I can’t be arsed doing that) and the People section (because it’s broken and it needs beating a bit). I’m going to expand into some newer and more interesting areas very soon I think - although I don’t quite know what those might be.

Anyhoo, I’m a bit bored now, so I’m going to listen to some music and work a bit more on the site. Maybe I’ll find a few more background images. Will probably post later (at about 2am :\)

12:21 am | Posted in Personal, Web Development | No Comments »

According to my watch, it’s now 2:56am. I feel like shit and I’m very, very tired, but I’ve got the majority of the stuff done. There’s no photos (for reasons mentioned previously), and I couldn’t be arsed fucking around with the stats page. Also, the images are pretty much fucked up on the people page, but apart from that it’s all working.

I’m going to work on doing some more background images now because it’s slightly more mundane and hence I’ll probably be able to understand what I’m doing. (As you may have noticed, there’s only 1 background image as opposed to the 97,000 I had before. Okay, I lied then, it was 14). Anyhoo, catch you all in a bit.

2:58 am | Posted in Site Development, Web Development | No Comments »