Dave’s Blog » Whining

Archive for the 'Whining' Category

July 30, 2007

Slacking off…

As you’ll have noticed, there’s not been many postings recently, neither photo nor text. To be honest, it’s been a bit weird: after having worked hard for 4 years on this degree, it all suddenly stopped and so I’ve been a little down and lacking in energy. Ultimately this has culminated in me becoming a bit run down and catching a cold - usually it picks up from this point onwards.

Felt a bit more with it this evening, so got around to doing some website work that had been pending for some time. Bit late now, so I’m going to bed and will update more tomorrow morning.

June 22, 2007

Jessops are not winners

I’m not about in Coventry at the moment, but I will continue to update the blog. With a bit of luck, some photos should be coming up soon since I have (another) new toy.

As a quick update, my Sigma sold for £110 inc. P&P, so somebody is getting a nice lens for a good price there. I had hoped to get about £130, but there we go - market depreciation does indeed suck the big ones.

12:12 am | Posted in Photography, Whining | No Comments »

January 31, 2007

Time sucks

I find that increasingly these days I’m using the phrase “I don’t quite have the time at the moment…” For those who think I’m putting it on to get away from talking to them, I assure you it’s quite genuine. Right now, I have rather a large to-do list.

4:32 pm | Posted in Maths, Personal, Project, Whining | No Comments »

November 30, 2006

Referenda at the Students’ Union

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.

October 28, 2006

Is it really this hard to find a dissertation?

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!

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

October 3, 2006

Not the best start to term

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.

September 18, 2006

Why driving sucks.

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.

September 14, 2006

AJAX Search is up

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.

September 10, 2006

Well, this is a first…

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.

February 23, 2006

Who would have thought it?

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.

Pages

Photoblog

Monies

Frequently Read

Categories

Meta