So, it’s referendum time at the Student’s Union. I severely dislike our Students’ Union (mainly because of their obscene drinks prices and general “let’s have an AGM about what type of teabags we should all use” attitude), but this year, an interesting motion has come up:

Lack of Confidence in the Students’ Union
The Students’ Union does not have the confidence of its members, and should regain their confidence.

I happily voted for this motion. Take that.

Back to programming then. Sigh.

7:28 pm | Posted in Politics, University, Whining | 2 Comments » | Show comments » | Hide comments » |

Reasonably regular visitors to the site will know that I’m now in my fourth year of a mathematics degree at the University of Warwick. A good sized chunk of this year’s credit is given for a dissertation on a subject of our choosing; we can either choose to write about some kind of mathematics in action (the MIA project) or a research project, which involves finding a supervisor willing to sponsor you on a topic of your choosing.

As I’m hoping to continue further with my education, possibly going onto a PhD, I chose to do a research project. This post is basically an entry describing my particular woes finding an appropriate project, and it’s quite long; unless you’re interested, it’s best not to continue further!

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Continue reading “Is it really this hard to find a dissertation?”…

3:53 pm | Posted in Maths, Project, Whining | No Comments »

Firstly, I’m sorry about the lack of updates. I’ve been really up to my neck in work and preparations for various things and university. I will at least try to post some kind of rubbish at some point.

Anyway. Moved into Claycroft on Sunday, but I’m already starting to regret doing so really. It’s exceptionally quiet - on my corridor of eight, I’ve only met 2 other people so far. It’s somewhat depressing really, as it’s would be quite nice to be able to talk to somebody before going completely insane from lack of contact. I’m going to give it a couple of weeks, but if things continue the way they are, then I might move out. I’m not sure yet. The major plan at the moment is to spend as much time as possible in the maths department so that I can avoid the complete silence of Claycroft.

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Continue reading “Not the best start to term”…

6:11 pm | Posted in Maths, University, Whining | 1 Comment » | Show comment » | Hide comment » |

I’m sorry for not updating the blog over the past few days, but it’s been rather a busy week so far. I’ve been working on Monday and Tuesday; yesterday was spent meeting some people in the Maths department and finalizing details for some work there. However, today, I’ve found some time as I finished work early (was back at 2:30pm). The downside is, I’m completely knackered since I was up at 6am. Anyway, I plan on doing some updates today with my recently acquired time, so check back later for more.

The trials and tribulations continue with the car insurance. People that know me may know that I’m selling the car, as I’m moving back into campus accommodation and it will therefore be unnecessary. As far as I can see, I’m pretty much locked into paying for the full term, or gritting my teeth and coughing up the extortionate amount of money they want. However, this month is all paid up for, so I’m going to take a few days to sit back and consider things before I move any further. Certain other things have happened which may mean that I have access to a car anyway, so the insurance may not go to waste if I decide to keep it - really, it all depends on the price.

Anyway, enough ranting for now. My updates later will hopefully consist of setting up the gallery software for WordPress and fixing some minor CSS issues. By that point in time I may well be clinically dead from sleep deprivation, so I think I’ll probably end up leaving it at that for the time being.

In other news, being a big fan of Top Gear I was extremely saddened to hear about Richard Hammond’s accident. I really can’t imagine embedding a car into the ground at 250+mph, and frankly, I’m absolutely amazed he survived. Hopefully he’ll be back in time for the next series.

4:34 pm | Posted in Randomness, Ranting, Site Development | 1 Comment » | Show comment » | Hide comment » |

Just so you all know, never ever use Budget Car Insurance. I pay by monthly installments, and as I’m selling my car, I no longer need the policy. So, upon enquiring about cancelling said policy, I was told that I not only had to pay a cancellation charge, but they would require a back-payment on the amount I already paid as I am in ‘breach of contract’. The cancellation charge, therefore, was in the region of £145.

So, I’m not left with many options now. I either pay the fee, or I’m considering buying a small runabout and changing the insurance over to that car (which I believe I can do without a penalty).

I will update more on this later, but for now, I’m a little tired so I’ll go.

9:48 pm | Posted in Whining | 1 Comment » | Show comment » | Hide comment » |

Well, after a bit of fiddling, the AJAX search is now fully operational. I think it works pretty well - it’s certainly quite transparent and saves a lot of room. It hasn’t been fully tested yet please let me know if you run into bugs.
IE had some… interesting rendering issues that need fixing in relation to opacity. For some reason, if you don’t set a background colour then font rendering goes completely crazy and everything looks awful. The moral of this story: IE6 doesn’t like opacity unless everything has a background.

Other than that it has been a pretty busy day. I’ve been up and down to Coventry. Most of the time the journey is fine, but today the M6 decided that it was going to hate me. It took me two hours to travel about 25 miles - average speed, 12.5mph. Usually I can do it in half an hour.

The trip did serve a purpose, and hopefully in a few days time I should have a clearer direction of where the project I’m working on is going. However, for the time being I will simply leave you with a lovely formula to show off my LaTeX renderer, as I really must be going to bed.

11:20 pm | Posted in Maths, Site Development, Whining, XHTML/CSS | 5 Comments » | Show comments » | Hide comments » |

As some of you may be aware, I spend quite a lot of time over at SFN, mostly doing administrative work these days. We have a custom-coded LaTeX plugin which I haven’t bothered releasing yet because there doesn’t seem to be much enthusiasm for it, and also because I don’t really consider it to be production-stable.

Well, about a year ago, some guys over at the Math Help Forum absolutely begged me to help them set up LaTeX, and caved in and gave them the code. Since then, I’ve redesigned the mod, making it into a proper vBulletin plugin and utilizing dvipng instead of running through dvips and convert.

Yesterday, I received another e-mail from the Math Help Forum asking me whether I could help them set the plugin up after they upgraded to vBulletin 3.6. I responded, and, being the nice guy that I am, said I could. However, after sending the message, I decided to have a look on their site and see if anything had changed since the last time I visited.

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Continue reading “Well, this is a first…”…

1:20 pm | Posted in SFN, Whining | 2 Comments » | Show comments » | Hide comments » |

Well, after a long and arduous battle with exams, I’ve finally finished my third year. I don’t really want to comment on the exams – not that they went particularly badly, it’s just I’d rather wait until I get the results. So, instead, I will comment on the various things that I’ve been doing inbetween.

The first, and by far most exciting was my 21st birthday. This has been quite amazing, and my utter thanks to everyone that got me gifts or just said happy birthday – it’s something I’ll remember for quite some time. My main present was the brilliant Canon Digital Rebel XT, otherwise known as the EOS 350D.

Some explanation may be required. My dad in his early years was a professional photographer for Land Rover. He moved onto do video work, and similarly I share his passion for video and photography in general. I bought myself a happy–snapper Sony camera at the beginning of the first year, but up until this point was somewhat underwhelmed, since I wanted more control with how exactly I wanted the image to be taken.

So, I now have a Digital SLR camera, which is quite frankly an amazing piece of technology. For those that are interested in getting a DSLR camera, I really have to suggest the 350D. I found it a breeze to get into, and it’s extremely easy to use and get to grips with. The build, whilst a little plastic for my liking, is very solid. I highly suggest you get the lens kit – you get a 18–55mm EF–S lens which provides pretty good quality despite the plastic exterior. It’s not brilliant, but for a budding amateur like myself, it’s a good start.

Unfortunately the 18–55mm really doesn’t have enough reach for my liking. I went out earlier in the week with Mark to take some snaps of the nature reserve on campus, and while we were there I spotted a number of shots that really needed a telephoto lens. This is where things start to get tricky, because when you’re on a limited budget like me, lenses aren’t generally an option.

However, I decided it was worth investing in. I spent the majority of the day researching various lenses, reading the EOS FAQ (which is an excellent introductory FAQ for beginners) and eventually came to the conclusion that Canon didn’t make any decent enough lenses for the prices they offered. I really, really wanted the 75–300mm USM IS lens, but at £360 it was just far too much to pay. In the end, I decided to get the Sigma 70–300mm APO Macro DG. According to all of the reviews I’ve read, it’s a decent lens for a bargain price (£165) so eventually I decided to take the plunge. That should turn up on Tuesday.

So, for the time being, I won’t be buying anything else for the camera. I should have everything I need for the time being, although I would absolutely love a Canon L–series lens. However, that’s way off in the future as far as I’m concerned. Anyway, with all of this photography lark, I’d really like to get the website up and running so that I can host my images nicely. So there’s that to work on tomorrow, and then we’ll see what happens.

That’s far too much for tonight, I feel, so I’ll sign off for now. Toodle pip.

10:15 pm | Posted in Maths, Photography, Randomness, Warwick Blogs | 3 Comments » | Show comments » | Hide comments » |

Over the past few days I’ve been trying to procrastinate as much as is humanly possible – for example, playing GTA: San Andreas for very large periods of time. However, last night I turned my attention to the website backend that I’ve been developing, and so far the results have been promising.

Basically, the entire concept revolves around a single “site” object, which is set up by a global include script. The constructor sets up the smarty templating, a PDO object and starts PHP sessions. It also checks for login requests and the like. Then, when the page is loaded it simply registers itself with the site object (so it can do some pretty GUI things and also track the user through the pages) and then gets on with the business of doing useful things.

Since PHP5 (finally) supports destructors, it then grabs the page content from the output buffer, slaps it all into a smarty template automagically and then outputs without the script page ever having to do a single thing. Also, error handling can be done really easily – an exception handler catches any PDO errors and, if the site–>error() function is called, it sets an error flag and exits. On exit, the destructor is called and it can do the appropriate stuff.

One final thing I want to do is create a PDO proxy object which will catch and log the queries sent to the database for statistics information. The pseudo–function __call is very useful in this respect.

On the Ubuntu side of things, I’ve finally got it all set up the way I want it. Took me ages to sort out the supposedly simple keyboard layout problem, but in the end I just edited the xorg.conf file manually instead of messing around. And, to be honest, I’m very pleased with the outcome. I don’t have to bother messing around with lots of stuff, and now I even have mplayerplugin working correctly. Amazing. Still have to sort out hibernation, but I think that’s a problem with my grub.conf and 915resolution.

I’m also taking the liberty of upgrading software on my server, and getting it all working properly. It’s currently on the 2.6.12 kernel and has an uptime of 158 days (which I’m very proud of), but I’m afraid that it really needs an update. God only knows how many security holes have been found now, so I’ll probably update that tonight and reboot it when I get home. Also decided that enough is enough, and completely removed X support – it’s really not needed at all on a server.

Looking to the future, I’m planning on replacing the role of my home server by my current desktop machine. Ideally I want my home server to be a small box which only deals with router requests and has no other processes running, purely for security reasons. I’m planning on replacing my desktop at the end of next year, although depending on my financial situation, I may decide to replace it in October.

On the hardware front I’ll definately be going for some kind of dual–core Athlon, but I’m not sure which yet. To be honest, I would absolutely love a dual 7800GTX SLi machine – just for kicks – but that might be a little pricey. It’s basically going to come down to what I can afford. Hopefully the price of hard–drives will have come down dramatically, and I’d like to re–use the drives in my current machine for the new one and have some kind of home–network hard–drive option on the server. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens, I suppose.

2:41 pm | Posted in Hardware, Linux, Randomness, Warwick Blogs | No Comments »

It came to my attention that this blog makes me look awfully dull. Well, there’s a certain amount of truth to that (in fact, it’s pretty much 100% true) but I’m not that boring. Honest.

1:18 am | Posted in Randomness | No Comments »