However, it’s dawned on me that it’s about two years old now, and it is in desperate need of some maintenance and tender love and care. I’m starting to get back in control of my crazy schedule, and now is the time to do some much-needed maintenance.

To help me in that endeavour, I’m hoping you will all go out to the forum and suggest your features for Reflection 2.0! On there already is my own list of features. Some things I’m keeping hidden for the time being; whilst there’s not going to be a massive change of the style, there will be a lot of

So go check it out, and give me your suggestions.

Personally I feel this is the right move for SFN. IPB provides a much nicer development environment at a significant cost saving now that the licensing rules have been changed for vBulletin. Myself and the other moderators at SFN all feel the same way – that Internet Brands are essentially going to treat vB as a nice cash cow, since upgrading from version to version is going to incur a significant cost.

So, since I will no longer have access to the forum software, vbLatex will be retired. I am happy to incorporate any bug fixes, or for another developer to maintain their own website (as long as original credit/copyright is maintained).

Also, you should probably expect an ipbLatex fairly soon…

Why I fail at blogging

Partially: I can get super lazy about these things, as anyone who frequents the Reflection forum will probably know. I really don’t mean to be so slow at responding. For my PhD related stuff I try and be quick at responding.

Sometimes I find it hard to concentrate solely on one thing. By this, I mean that I have a project that needs completion and will work at a frenetic pace until it is 98% done. And then I get up the next day, and the final 2% gets ignored because I’m onto the next thing. So I have bunch of stuff that is almost there – but not quite.

Also partially: this term is turning out to be incredibly busy for me – much busier than I had expected – for the following reasons.

• Over Christmas I was asked to lecture MA117: Programming for Scientists, which is a first year programming course run by the Maths department and introduces students to Java.
• I’m also running MA903: C++ for Financial Mathematics to teach C++ to MSc Financial Mathematics students.
• I’m also a TA for the course MA4G7: Computational Linear Algebra and Optimisation, introducing fourth year mathematics students to BLAS and LAPACK.
• Most importantly for the time being, my supervisor and I have a submission deadline for a paper due next Tuesday.

So yeah. Pretty busy all around recently, which has left very little time for blogging, photography, or any of my other hobbies.

Lecturing has been an interesting experience. I actually took MA117 when I was a first year undergraduate many moons ago, and was a TA for the past two years, so I’ve seen it from both sides of the fence. The first lecture, which was today, actually turned out pretty well. But it gets tough real quick, so a better evaluation will be in a couple of weeks.

However I feel like I’m pretty prepared. Lectures and lab session notes are (mostly) prepared all the way through to week 8 of term.

It’s testing my programming out pretty well too. I’m coding Java for MA117 (obviously), C++ for MA903 (duh) and a mixture of C, C++, Fortran and Python for my PhD work. Nice to keep up to date with the languages.

Getting back to it

I feel a great sense of disappointment that I’ve not got much stuff done. On the programming side, there are three things I want to polish up and get published on here.

• Reflection 1.2. This is under development, but I need a final push of about 2 solid days to get it done.
• mjwrapper. This is a new project of mine. Unbeknownst to you guys, I have taken up drumming as an additional hobby (yeah, I didn’t have enough, right?) So I constructed an electronic drum kit, which uses something called MegaDrum to convert drum hits into MIDI notes.MegaDrum is awesome. It has a remote control utility called MegaDrum Config Tool which is written in Java, and uses the Java MIDI API, which I have to admit is pretty good. But it doesn’t work on Macs. Why? Apple is stupid and doesn’t supply an implementation. There are a couple commerical ones; mmj is the most popular. But I’m a big fan of open source, so I wrote my own.

  mjwrapper is perilously close to having a 0.1 release. Just need to finish the last 2%.

• Java to BLAS/LAPACK converter. This is something I knocked together just yesterday for MA4G7. There are a few Java students on the course (no doubt to MA117) and there’s no set method, as far as I can tell, to call BLAS and LAPACK functions through Java. So again, I wrote one.

And then of course, on the photography front, it would be useful if I could get out and actually take photographs. 2009 was a pretty poor year in terms of quantity of photographs taken, but the quality looks better.

Finally the blogs… so much to do on that front, I don’t even want to list it!

Anyway, enough for now. More updates to come. Honest!

What have I been up to then? Mostly, PhD work. About two weeks ago we submitted a paper to PNAS. My fingers, toes and other extraneous limbs are now crossed for (hopefully) my first publication! It’s gotten through to review which is something, so we’ll see how the peer review process goes. Assuming it gets through that, I will most likely put a preprint up on the site since the license gives me that right.

Apart from that, I’m taking up a new hobby – drumming. I spent quite a lot of money constructing an electronic drum set, which is now drowning my photography right out. Whoops! Hopefully, I will have another post on that shortly detailing some of the stuff it’s made from.

For those of you now using Reflection (almost 10,000 downloads!) the forums are now in a fully operational state, with all spam removed. Time will tell if the spambots return, but this was a pretty common thing in phpBB 3.0.4. Apparently 3.0.5 has an upgraded CAPTCHA system, so we’ll soon see…  Also, another update is on the way soon. This will mostly include some minor bug fixes, but with luck I will have Category support in the archives along with a lot more customisable options.

Right now that I feel like getting a good night’s sleep. So I shall hope to update more in the coming days!

You can find all the latest info on the Reflection page, or just take a look at my photoblog for a quick demo.

However, please note that if you’ve got problems or feature requests, you should check out the new forum I’ve set up. E-mails probably won’t get responded to.

Enjoy!

1. Reflection 1.1 is almost complete. There are some pretty cool features – better archives (in the same Mosaic style but AJAXified), animation bug fixes, and a lot more customisable features through the admin control panel.
2. vbLatex will also be updated very soon to fix some issues with the later versions of vBulletin.
3. I will be posting Iceland pictures shortly.

Talk later!

All of this leads us neatly onto the title of today’s rant. I had enough spare cash last year to afford the Canon 35mm f/1.4L. I got it used for precisely £610 including delivery; however, I distinctly remember checking the various websites and the price being around £850 brand new.

Cut to today’s recession. The same lens, from the same retailer, will set you back an eye-watering £1133.99; or, equivalently, an increase of about 30%. Ouch.

The reason is that Canon, like all of the other big camera manufacturers, is a Japanese company and hence all stock needs to be imported to the UK. With Gordon Brown doing a sterling job of devaluing the pound (see what I did there?) by borrowing at an alarming 40% of our GDP, the yen is the strongest it’s been in a long time. Essentially if they don’t put the prices up, their profit margin will be significantly decreased on UK sales.

So my plan is now scuppered, because it involved selling the 10-22mm which is very dear to my heart, and replacing it with a stunning 16-35mm f/2.8L II. Which I can no longer justify because that same lens has also undergone a 30% price increase.

Damn it.

When I got my first iPhone, I decided the buds simply wouldn’t do and so the search was on for a replacement pair.  They had to have:

• Good sound quality.
• Hands-free capability, preferably like the default Apple buds.
• Noise-isolation.

Up until recently there really wasn’t much choice at all. You essentially got a good pair of headphones and used an adapter for the hands-free, or you don’t bother at all.

There’s a nice product on eBay which was my first replacement pair. They use the same driver unit as the Sennheiser CX300 (which is an awesome bud), but have a clicker unit attached. The cable is really rubbery and crap, but for £25 I think they were a pretty good buy. Unfortunately, they died after about 5 months of reasonably heavy usage because the connector edges are sharp and don’t have rubber grommets to prevent the cable being cut.

Fortunately, you now have a few more choices.

• Ultimate Buds is a whole company set up around splicing existing headphones such as the Etymotic ER6i and a clicker unit. I decided against this as they are solely a US company, and this meant importing to the UK. Price: Three models from $60 to $160. 
• Sennheiser has the MM50 iP which is essentially an official version of the eBay model I described above. Additionally, I find the clicker to be a bit large and it looks like it might get in the way. Price: £60 – a bit much, considering the CX300s can be had for half of that.
• JVC have the HA-KX100, which seems to have received some poor reviews. To me, they didn’t look particularly comfortable. Price: £68.46.
• V-MODA Vibe were some of the first to be released, but are seemingly plagued with quality control issues – apparently, this is somewhat down to breaks in the cable. I tried a pair, and for me there was way too much bass. On the upside, they look awesome. Price: £68.46.
• Apple have just started shipping their new in-ear headphones. They are designed for the second generation iPod touch, but they are nearly backwards compatible with the iPhone – the volume control being the only thing which doesn’t work. Initial reviews are pretty good, but not great. Price: £54.

All of the above have their problems – personally I felt that I really couldn’t live with them. Pretty much the next step us is the Etymotic hf2 so yesterday, I sucked it up and paid the hefty £97.82 price tag. Which is pretty much more than I’ve spent on headphones in my entire life combined.

Let me tell you, they are worth every single penny.

First of all, let me encourage you to not get put off too much by the 3.5 star review level on the Apple Store. I guarantee the sound quality is better than any other in-ear headphone I’ve ever tried. What is crucial is that the headphones are sealed correctly in your ears. To do this, there’s a choice of two flange tips, or a foam tip which moulds to the shape of your ear. For me, the large flange was the way to go.

Once they’re sealed up properly, you know you’re listening to something special. Mids, highs, bass – it’s all rendered in crystal clarity. I listen to a wide variety of music – jazz, classical, soundtracks, rock (heavy, classic, …) – and it all sounds completely different. I put my pair of cheap buds in, afterwards and it sounded like a joke. Honestly, they are that good.

Sound isolation is also crazy insane good. I was sitting in the middle of a massive crowd of people in the Touchwood Centre, and it sounded like they were a few hundred feet away instead of right next to me. I found them a little uncomfortable at first, but after a while, you pretty much get used to the fact that they’re sitting lodged quite a way up in your ears. Call quality on the microphone is as good, if not better, than the microphone on the iPhone itself.

There are, however, niggles. Although the button for the remote works pretty well, it feels a bit cheap. Also the remote itself is a bit big. Possibly I’d like it a little further down the cord as well. I also feel they could probably include another set of filters and another set of earbuds as well for the price.

Seriously, if you’re looking for a really good pair of headphones for your iPhone or iPod, then go no further. These are absolutely excellent – if you’re willing to take the price.