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 » |

Well, inspired by WB and with little else to do, I decided to look into tags and how best to implement them on my blog. Boy, was that a mistake.

There’s three basic schemas that one can use; non–normalized (the MySQLicious solution) which uses fulltext, the sort–of–normalized and the fully (3NF) normalized. There are problems with each, but in the end I opted for the latter choice. The only major obstacle to overcome was efficiently displaying a list of tags for each entry. Clearly I didn’t want to have to run a query for each individual entry since that would be hidously inefficient.

So after much googling and beating my head against a wall, I came up with an idea. MySQL’s GROUP_CONCAT function is extremely useful, so I used a subquery to get all of the tags for that news entry and GROUP_CONCAT them all together. It’s not pretty, but it works and it seems to be okay–ish. I know subqueries aren’t particularly efficient, but this seems to be the best way that I can think of without doing something completely radical (for instance, dumping the RDBMS system altogether).

Anyway, that’s kept me up until now (3:17am). The rest of the stuff is coming together nicely. Getting load times of between 0.1 and 0.01 seconds on my lowly laptop, so I’m hopeful that this will be a lot more efficient than my last incarnation. Once I’ve got the basic foundations laid, I’ll be setting up the user system and hoping things work nicely. Themes are also getting there, but there’s a lot more to do.

If only I could put this much effort into doing something useful – like revision. Oh well.

3:19 am | Posted in Computing, PHP/MySQL, Warwick Blogs | No 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 »

Well, it’s quite amazing that I’m actually writing two entries in one day, but what the heck – it’s for a good reason.

I decided that instead of trying (and probably failing) to get Xgl working with my i915 driver, I’d give AIGLX a shot instead. There was a nice howto and repository on the Ubuntu forums which I followed, and that got it all set up in a matter of minutes. I’m now quite pleased to say that everything’s up and running and working much better than I ever expected.

cube/rotate work extremely well, and the transparency effect when opening/closing windows is very nice. Minimize also works really effectively, but unfortunately the switcher is broken for the time being (alt–tab works, but I can’t seem to get out of it – maybe I’m just being dumb). miniwin is also broken, but the other plugins work great. wobbly is fun for a while, but not really of much use other than for nice eye–candy.

The only downside is that resizing windows is quite slow at the moment. Hopefully with successive releases this will improve, but for the time being I’m definately keeping this enabled. It’s really great to see something that’s truly revolutionary. I just wish that we’d moved over to xorg a long time ago, instead of keeping the XFree behemoth alive.

2:38 pm | Posted in Linux, Warwick Blogs | No Comments »

Well, first impressions are really very good. Considering that I installed from an alpha version of the LiveCD, installation went very smoothly. Managed to reformat using the inbuilt GParted widget and get to the very end of the installation process before grub didn’t want to install. Luckily I have quite a lot of experience with grub due to Gentoo installs, so that was easily rectified.

Ubuntu has, amazingly enough, managed to auto–detect pretty much everything. Even ACPI sleep works – something I never got working under Gentoo. Need to sort out hibernation but that’s probably not going to get used that much. Right now I’m running a dist–upgrade, and then its time to try out AIGLX and Compiz for some nice prettyness.

Anyway, time to transfer some documents back over and get the laptop set up.

1:05 pm | Posted in Linux, Warwick Blogs | No Comments »

Well, after having wasted about three hours trying to fix an obscure Gentoo–related wireless problem, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s probably time that I tried another distribution for the first time in two years. Gentoo is an amazing distribution, and I really do love working with it. But when you’re trying to get work done, and you can’t because of some silly little problem, it does get quite annoying. Equally annoying is when emerging a package that subsequently breaks everything.

So, I’m going to back up my documents tonight, make a ghost image of my Gentoo partition and install Ubuntu (Flight 6). I’m actually really looking forward to trying out Gnome 2.14 properly, and I might even give Xgl a go if I can get it working nicely with the Intel drivers.

Currently downloading the LiveCD which I intend to try out for a while, and then use the brand–spanking new installer to (hopefully) install without wiping my entire drive.

It’ll be a shame to lose Gentoo after all of these years but it’s getting to the point where I just need something that works out of the box – to a certain degree – without me spending half my time editing configuration files. I shall definately be keeping it on my server boxes, but I think that Ubuntu is definately the way to go on my laptop.

Well, that’s my evening sorted out.

9:02 pm | Posted in Linux, Warwick Blogs | No Comments »

…or not.

I am, of course, talking about that most delightful of subjects, Measure Theory. The examination in question was held this morning, and it is fairly safe to say that, barring moderation, I will be failing that course quite badly.

My major problem with the exam was the style in which it was set. Frankly, it was clear to me that he simply couldn’t be bothered coming up with some decent questions. Pretty much everything on the paper was a 10-mark question, and two questions were split into 5/20 mark parts each.

I did the majority of the first question fairly well, I think. But unfortunately that’s where the limit of my knowledge reached. The second question was basically a lovely “state and prove the Dominated Convergence theorem” – 20 marks. Right, okay. Maybe that’s a reasonable question. But to just say “prove it”, and not break it into any sort of parts or guide you in any way is just lazy and completely unacceptable. Especially when you give the ultimately useless advice of “don’t try to learn large proofs, learn the ideas!!” on your website.

The third question was split into 15/10 mark parts. Yet again – absolutely no guidance at all, so I basically had no clue whatsoever. Question 4 was another lovely 20/5 part. The 20 mark question? “Prove f is in L1(0,1)”. Great. Thanks so much. Not even so much as “using theorem x”, or “Hint: try this…”. Just prove it. Finally, another lovely question on Lp spaces, and another lovely 15/10 mark split. Just amazing.

I don’t usually go off on people and examinations like this, because I do believe that if I do badly in an exam, 99 times out of 100 it’s going to be because I didn’t bother revising something. But giving advice on the website and then setting the exam on stuff that you told us not to revise fully is just a complete waste of my time. I spent a lot of hours sitting and finishing off the assignment questions, and to what end? I could have just sat there twiddling my fingers and I would’ve come out of that exam feeling exactly the same.

I left after about an hour. Quite a few people left after me, and maybe the fact that so many left in an exam that’s supposed to last three hours will give him a gentle hint. Some people came out saying that they didn’t think it was that bad, but to be honest, those guys are going to be very good at every exam they take or just got lucky. If you sit down and take the time to memorize the proof of the Dominated Convergence theorem, then that’s 20 marks, no sweat. If, like me, you didn’t think it was going to come up because everything pointed towards it not coming up then you’re in a lot more trouble.

Sure, I’m not the best student in the world. But I can do some of Measure Theory. The reason that I screwed this up so badly is that unless you knew how to do all of Measure Theory or were lucky enough to know the right bits, then the exam was a disaster.

So, what advice would I give coming out of this exam? (Not that anybody will listen, but hey).

To Dr. Valeriy Slastikov: This exam was unfair, period. I’m not unintelligent, but as a result, the hard work and effort that I put into revision counted towards precisely nothing. That is the most utterly frustrating feeling that one can get out of mathematics. Please take five more minutes to put together questions that aren’t completely impossible for those people who aren’t absolutely brilliant.

To second year students: Don’t take Measure Theory unless the lecture course is altered or the lecturer is changed. Simple as that.

PS: Please don’t bother writing comments if you’re going to say “hah, you deserved it you idiot!!!!oneoneone” because I can’t be bothered dealing with that sort of nonsense. These are my opinions, and if you disagree that’s fine, but please be constructive.

2:14 pm | Posted in Exams, Maths, Warwick Blogs | 3 Comments » | Show comments » | Hide comments » |

Well, had the old double-whammy yesterday and overall it was a bit disappointing.

Started with Introduction to Topology in the morning. As soon as I turned over the paper and read the first question, I knew that something had been drastically changed. I’ve done the past five years’ worth of papers, and, apart from one year which was done with a different lecturer, the format of the paper hasn’t changed at all. Basically the format is topologies, compactness/connectedness, identification maps/quotient spaces, the fundamental group and finally surfaces.

This year, the overall format was the “same”, but the standard of question was much harder. It came as somewhat of a shock to the system, but I don’t think I’ve done that badly. Amazingly, read the proof of Lebesgue’s lemma, and it came up on the exam. Unfortunately I completely forgot the proof and couldn’t answer in there. Oh well. Somewhat annoying was the lack of any “give without proof examples of…” question which would have been extremely useful. Overall though, I’m hopeful of a mark in the 70–80% region.

Combinatorics was, unfortunately, somewhat of a different story. I (barely) answered 4 questions worth of material, and I think that overall I’ll be quite lucky to get around 50% of the marks, tops. Mostly because I made all of it up. Hopefully there’ll be a certain degree of moderation as I think everybody found the exam quite hard. The annoying thing was the presence of probability stuff in not one, but two of the questions which I found extremely annoying – after all, I have pretty much no knowledge of anything to do with statistics at all.

So we’ll see. One last exam on Monday before three more weeks of revision, and then the second lot starts. But before that, the joy of Measure Theory. That could be very interesting.

10:23 pm | Posted in Exams, Maths, Revision, Warwick Blogs | No Comments »

So the first exam, Topics in Mathematical Biology, is all out of the way and done. My impressions were that it was fairly similar to the last two years’ worth of past papers, and having done those and the question sheets, it made it slightly easier. However, I couldn’t help but feel that the questions themselves were quite bulky. I found there was an awful lot to do for each question – especially the first, which took me about 45 minutes!

I attempted questions 1–3 and 5. I only answered question 1 in its entirety due to immense time constraints, but I got the vast majority of the work done. For the most part it seemed fairly correct. Unfortuantely I couldn’t quite remember how the very end of the singular pertubation question was supposed to work, so even though I’d got down to the inner and outer solutions, I couldn’t match them up properly to get the composite which was annoying. However, I gave it a decent shot so we’ll see what happens.

Question 3 was actually quite interesting and I very much enjoyed it. I did manage to complete all of the parts barr the very last bit, for which I basically scrawled something down when we were told to put our pens down. Managed to get the same answers as the question, so that’s got to count for something.

Didn’t attempt question 4 since I know next to nothing about lambda-omega wavetrains, so sat down and did question 5. Didn’t do the initial 3-mark starter question as I meant to come back to it later but again, didn’t get around to it which was a bit annoying. Got through most of it with ease, but unfortunately discovered a mistake in the very last part which means that I’m going to have lost a couple of marks.

However, it’s all over and done with, and I’m fairly pleased with what I’ve written. I can’t account for moderation and stupid errors on my part, but I guess that 70% isn’t an outrageous estimate. I’d be very pleased with that, considering I only actually went to one of the lectures for the entire course.

Next exam is on Friday morning, and it’s Introduction to Topology. I’m actually really looking forward to that since it’s one of my favourite lecture courses of all time. Unfortunately I also have Combinatorics immediately afterwards, so tonight will be spent completing the very last topology paper, and tomorrow I’ll mostly do Combinatorics.

So, we’ll see how the both of those go. Will hopefully update the blog afterwards, but that depends on how much time it’s going to take since the dreaded Measure Theory is on Monday morning. Eek.

8:31 pm | Posted in Exams, Linux, Maths, Warwick Blogs | No Comments »

I’ve recently become somewhat disillusioned with the annoyances of getting Qt and GStreamer to play nicely, so I thought I’d give Gnome a go. So, I spent a couple of hours emerging the source and getting to know it, and I have to say that I was quite impressed. I spent quite a lot of time trying out little bits here and there, and Nautilus is extremely nippy when compared to Konqueror.

However, after having used it for a few days I’m switching back to KDE. Why? There are certain things that I love doing in KDE that I simply can’t do in pretty much every other OS out there. For example, I can open Konqueror, browse the web for a bit and then open a new tab for browsing the local network, or perhaps transfer a couple of files by FTP. KDE seems a lot more tightly-knit, and for some reason I just couldn’t get along with Firefox.

Perhaps I’m just too picky, but I love the KDE interface. I think it’s one of the most elegant out there, and with a decent font (Bitstream Vera or, in my case, Luxi Mono) it just looks great.

So for now, back to KDE. I’ll probably have to give XFCE another go at some point though.

1:40 am | Posted in Computing, Linux, Warwick Blogs | 2 Comments » | Show comments » | Hide comments » |