In the next few days, I shall be moving the site over to the new backend system. As well as this, I shall almost certainly be moving from “realm.xyloid.org” to “xyloid.org”, since there is precisely zero reason for me to not use my top level domain and display it as a big, blank page.

I shall be leaving redirects in place for those of you who insist on beating me to death with giant chihuahuas. Not that there’ll be much of that, mind.

I’m also contemplating a new name for the site and some other assorted goodness.

PS: Sleep deprivaton has start to set in and this post may be construed as “ever so slightly mental”. At least I didn’t do the “OMG TEH ROXOXXXXXXXXXXXOXOXOR!!!!!!!!!!!1111123123″ stuff. So there.

12:34 am | Posted in Personal, Site Development | 2 Comments » | Show comments » | Hide comments » |

This might not be complete, but I’ll post some semblance of what I’ve been doing for the past week or so, and fill in the details tomorrow.

The website is coming along by leaps and bounds. I’m really pleased with how it’s turned out so far, and it’s starting to get there. Sunday was a nightmare - basically wrote the template parsing routine, and it took absolutely bloody ages. The reason? Well, I use a templating system similar to the one found in vBulletin or Smarty. Namely, it has conditions in it in a similar style to PHP - I’ll post more about that soon.

However, that’s now complete and I’m very happy with the results. The templating is working perfectly, and because of that I’m going to be able to have a fully styleable website for very little extra work. It does mean that I now have to go through and completely change bits of the code, though. Whilst most of it can simply be changed or adapted, other bits need overhauling. I’ve completed 5 out of 8 sections, but I still have Statistics (template nightmare) and Projects (nightmare generally) to finish. After that, of course, I actually have to start doing things like the User CP (so people can change their passwords and stuff). But, the good news is that very little HTML has made it through to the backend - inevitably, there will be small pockets, but most of it has been totally eradicated.

On top of the website work, I’ve been travelling down to Oxford a few days a week with my dad. For those of you that don’t know, I help out/maintain the tape library there, and part of that was creating a better system than the one they had currently installed. That’s pretty much complete now, but I still have a few tweaks. However, most of my work is going to be pure tape logging, and whilst the pay is good it’s still mind-numbingly boring. Today was a slight respite from it, since I spent the entire of the day sorting out tapes that had been left around, looking at the contents of the CDs and playing with the shiny new Adrenaline to sort out a load of files on there. However, tomorrow will be 100% logging - great.

As far as everything else goes, I’m seeing Sarah on Saturday which I’m looking forward to. My car needs to be MOT’d, and I need to renew the insurance. I have to re-program another website for dad, as well as create a design and structure for my aunt. On top of all of this, I have administrative duties at SFN, and to top it all off I want to concentrate on revising some of the maths topics that I’m not so hot on.

So, all in all, it could be rather a busy week.

However, I’m not going to complain. I’d rather be busy than bored, and at least I’m getting to see people and do things, and have some sort of income over the summer.

Anyway, I shall report back tomorrow at some point. I’ve promised myself that I want to get this website done tomorrow at the latest so that I have time to fit in everything else. However, I suppose we’ll have to see.

And one final thing: I won’t be allowing non-users to comment on my blog from when I put the new back-end up. It’s not that I can’t do it, but I prefer not to with the new spam-fest of commenting bots everywhere. I haven’t had an attack yet, but I’d prefer not too.

I must go now, before the computer sucks me back in again - night all.

12:58 am | Posted in Personal, Site Development | 1 Comment » | Show comment » | Hide comment » |

I’ve not done very much today. Mainly it’s been playing about with the library system amongst a variety of other (identically boring) things. I cannot quite describe how terribly dull logging tapes and programming this damn library system actually is. Down in Oxford again tomorrow, in which time I aim to log a number of tapes. On Friday, I will finish this stupid software once and for all - it’s just annoying me now, and I want to get it out of the way.

Right now I’m missing Sarah a fair bit, but there’s only a week or so until I get to see her again, so I’m not too bad at the moment. To be quite honest, I just wish I was back at uni starting the third year already.

I will work on the website a bit later next week. For now, I’m really, really sick of programming so I’m not going to.

Bah.

10:01 pm | Posted in Computing, Personal | No Comments »

Well, that’s another year over. Sarah left yesterday which sucked as usual, but she’s coming back up a week on Saturday. Hence that isn’t too bad, but I still miss her.

Missed Alex’s barbeque today due to silly work-related badness, so I must apologise for that.

I shall be all over the country in the next few days, so don’t expect too many updates. I’m back home atm though if anyone wants to go out for a drink or something. Just give me a call or send an e-mail - I’d love to hear from anyone.

Until then…

8:21 pm | Posted in Personal, University | No Comments »

I could’ve sworn that I’d blogged yesterday. Oh well.

In site-related news, I’ve begun doing the changes I stated in my previous post. However, for the time being, they’re on hiatus - I’m not planning on doing any major projects any time in the next six months or so, hence I just got the feeling: “I can do this, but not just yet.” Too much going on at the moment for me to concentrate, really, and I don’t want programming to take up my entire life.

It’s results day tomorrow; I’m both dreading it and looking forward to it. At least I’ll know where I stand tomorrow, and that can only be a good thing. Checked my pigeon hole today, and got the new booklet entitled “Are you ready for Term 1?” Basically, it’s a list of introductory questions for a variety of courses taken in Term 1. Measure Theory has the delightfully named section “High-School Horrors”, doing integrals like:

I find it all rather intriguing really, since I’ve been wondering about these integrals ever since lower sixth form. But yes, I’m quite looking forward to the third year. I feel that I’m really going to get my teeth stuck into some interesting maths.

Interestingly, there’s a great big open outdoor Gala concert right outside maths which I’m planning on going and watching in a few minutes from the comfort of maths (there’s no chairs outside). Should be good fun, and there must be a thousand people all crammed onto the maths lawn. Brass Band, Wind Orchestra and the Symphony Orchestra are all playing - I feel that I should really re-join the Wind Orchestra since it was quite good fun. But we shall see how much time I have next year.

Anyway, time to go and beat some servers. I shall be back later.

9:24 pm | Posted in Exams, Maths, Personal, University | No Comments »

I’ve not added anything new today (yet). There’s an annoying bug I have to fix with the logout function, but that should hopefully be a reasonably simple fix. In other news, I’ve coded a small bit of JavaScript that I think is quite funky. Whilst I usually loathe JavaScript to the extreme, I’m coming to see that small bits are quite useful when used properly. The problem is, loads of kids abuse it and have multiple flying things everywhere whilst saying “omg look aet teh c00lness!!!!112″ Basically, this bit of code fades out the sidebar and extends the content to the full width of the box. Yes, it’s a bit useless but it looks cool and allows for easier viewing. I might add it tonight if I can be arsed, and I can find a place to put the checkbox.

In other news, the Wing Wa meal was completed successfully today, with multiple fun and food had by all. It’s actually very reasonably priced; £5.80 for lunch, all you can eat and there’s absolutely loads of food to choose from. List of people: myself and Sarah, Alan, Emma, Alex and Katie, Helen and Dan, Lewis and finally Mark. Mo couldn’t make it, but that’s okay since he’s going to come around tomorrow to collect his present.

Anyway, I’m going to go off and post some stuff on SFN. Have fun.

5:17 pm | Posted in Personal, Site Development, University, XHTML/CSS | No Comments »

So, I was just sitting here in the maths department, minding my own business, when all of a sudden a little thought pops into my head. “What exactly are you doing?” it said. Well, after I gave it a little thought, here is a nice itemized list of my life, and how exceeding dull it is.

• Get up.
• Mess around on the computer until my brain hurts, or do maths.
• Drop Sarah into work/wherever she wants to go.
• Go to the maths department and work, or mess around on the computers.
• Pick Sarah up, go back home, mess around on the computer.
• Sleep.

And there we have it - my life in 6 nice little points.

Now, personally I found this quite depressing, hence the iPod comes out and Linkin Park is turned on up to quite a loud volume in order to block out any remnents of thoughts - good, bad or otherwise. Unfortunately, this time it didn’t really do the trick and now I’m really quite down - hence the blogging.

I mean, Sarah has her singing, or goes out to work and has quite a nice little social life. In fact, everyone I know has some kind of social clique. Last year was great fun, and I used to go out quite a lot - now I’ve turned into some fucking maths-performing hermit. I want to get involved in something, but for some reason every time I go near the Union I just want to burn the place down. The sheer tedium of the politics and red tape there just makes me want to scream and beat people with overly large sticks.

I don’t know. Maybe I’ll give WTV another go, but again the red tape annoys me. I’d quite like to make a professional quality video there, but I just can’t seem to find the effort.

It just gets on my nerves that everyone else seems to be having such good times, whereas yours truly feels like a big pile of poo 90% of the time. Maybe it’ll be different if I get back on campus for my final year. Bah, humbug.

Mental note: must stop feeling sorry for myself.

7:42 pm | Posted in Personal, Whining | No Comments »

Forgot to post for the past couple of days. However, I do have rather a good reason for it. In fact, I have a very good reason for it: namely GTA: San Andreas which has just been released for PC. It’s rather a good game, and has taken up pretty much two entire days of my existance to get somewhere near completion. The map is so incredibly large, and there are so many things to do that I think I may have to spend at least the next week or two trying to get to the coveted 100% mark. Oh, what a hardship.

In other news, I get my exam results on Friday which I’m currently not looking forward to. So, in order to keep my mind off it I’m going to work on the site a bit (as well as playing GTA). I haven’t got around to doing anything yet, but I’m going to try and get the Mandelbrot set generator up and running in the Projects section today. It’s a pretty cool program, but I need to optimize it and generally get it to work better. I do have a minor problem in that I forgot to set the precision of cout and cin; by default, it only reads in numbers up to about 7 decimal places, so you can’t get most of the interesting shots.

I’m also not sure as to whether I should get the Photos section back up or not. There are a lot of photos - last count, over 500 - and although I have more than sufficient bandwidth for now, I can’t help but wonder what will happen if the site takes off a bit. I’m also considering putting some kind of Google AdWords on here, but at the moment the pendulum swings towards “no”. For starters, not enough people visit the site to make it worthwile, and I’m not sure that I could get them to blend in properly. I will only put them on if it doesn’t compromise the layout of the site.

The world of maths is looking quite diverse for next year. I’m considering what modules to do for next year, and this is quite a hefty challenge - the sheer number of courses on offer makes it quite hard to make my mind up. Like most other universities, we’re allowed to choose a variety of modules in the third year, totalling 120 CATS (module points) or more if we desire. Most of the third year modules are worth 15 CATS each, and the fourth year modules 18 CATS. Now, assuming that I actually get on the MMath course - which I really hope I do - I have to take two courses from the fourth year modules. At the moment, this is looking like it’s going to be Manifolds, since it’s needed for so many other 4th year modules and a choice of either Lie Groups (taught my my tutor) or Mathematical Recipies, which is more of an applied module.

My worry at the moment is that I’m not sure which “route” I should be taking. This year, I pretty much took a 50/50 pure/applied route. However, I’m finding myself inextricably drawn towards courses that concentrate mainly on the pure. I find that they’re extremely interesting and, for the most part, make me work harder on them. Metric Spaces went really well for me - it was a really nice exam, and although it didn’t have the same insane marking that it usually does for definitions, it had interesting questions that made you think, but were still managable. I have to also admit that the applied courses are also interesting, but my concern is that I’m going to screw them up, and I don’t quite have the same understanding that I do for the pure.

Of course, the other issue here is my postgraduate opportunities. Again, assuming I get onto the MMath and I’m finding the 4th year work enjoyable and I can cope with it, then I’d quite like to do a PhD. Even if I didn’t actually go on to do research and other insane mathematics then it would greatly increase my job opportunities. However, that’s a good two years away yet; not to mention that if I don’t get on the MMath, all of this talk is a complete waste of time.

Anyway, I think that’s enough for now. I’m going to concentrate on SFN now, and try and catch up on the backlog of posts that I have to moderate. Woo. See you all later.

3:13 pm | Posted in Computing, Maths, Personal, SFN, Site Development, University | No Comments »

Sarah got a letter today informing her that she’d have to do Jury service - I found this to be quite a bit random.

Anyway, I’ve been working on the site a bit more, and got the projects page “up”. It’s not finished yet, but it should be good once it is. Adding files and images and all that on Monday, since I’ve got the Introduction to Fluids module going on. Should be great fun.

On other topics, I have to decide what to do with this site. I find some of the older entries to be quite crass, and I’m considering taking them off of the public viewing. Perhaps I’ll add the registration page soonish, so that people can see the old ones if they want to.

In fact, I think I’ll do that now. Will be back in a bit with an update.

11:36 pm | Posted in Exams, Personal, Site Development | 5 Comments » | Show comments » | Hide comments » |

Not impressed – no export function!

Anyway, I didn’t blog yesterday which is a bad idea; I tend to ignore it for a day and then a day turns into a week, which turns into a year, etc etc.

It does, however, mean that I am left in rather a precarious situation – to blog here, or to blog elsewhere? Right now, it’s looking to be the latter of the two options. However, I think it’s worth sticking it out here for a bit.

Yesterday was boring. So I won’t really bother posting all that much about it. Went to see Jack Dee at the Arts Centre, so that’s always good. He was quite excellent, especially with the jokes at the end. Although he was a bit slow to get started, admittedly.

Anyway, off to look at some more code. I have LaTeX to play with, and not in a kinky fashion.

6:11 pm | Posted in Computing, Personal, Warwick Blogs | 3 Comments » | Show comments » | Hide comments » |