AST year (or at the end of 2010 to be more accurate) I started posting a lot more often about my work in this blog. I resumed what I had done years beforehand, even if that meant a loss of focus for this personal blog. But then again, this blog hardly ever had any single point of focus, so after the upcoming release of one gigantic PDF I will resume posting updates about my research on a more regular basis. This ought to achieve a more transparent communication of ideas. It is also a departure from the disappointing pace of blogging (about a post per week as of late).

^AT_EX helps render for a variety of output types including posters and Web pages, not just A4 sheets. As a typesetting language it is very powerful, but for advanced functionality it requires additional packages, included in the preamble. It appears as though GIF animations are not supported in L^AT_EX despite the fact that, if exported as Web pages for instance, the notion of animation makes sense. This is a shame really and if someone knows of a workaround, please leave a comment. I am currently writing a 400-page report which is a comprehensive summary of what I am doing and without animations it might be hard to express what is going on. For example compare the following triplet of static and dynamic (which HTML is happy with):

VER THE past 2 months I have practised very hard to improve the strength of my upper back in preparation for the competition which I have just won (and received the award for today). I was attempting to break the British record, but I did not succeed. I was two tenths of a second behind it. Nonetheless, my time was good enough to win the contest, which I added to the sports page.

My mother and I this month

n December 17^th I will turn 30 and I recently went through some old photo albums trying to gather some memories from favoured times in the past — times when life when generally quite easy and fun. This made possible and easy to assemble the following collage which spans mostly a year or more after birth, 15 years after that, and another ~15 years later, at age 29 and 11 months.

1983

1983

1983

1983 (with my dad)

1983 or 1984

1991

1998 (age 16)

1998

1998

1999

2011 (days ago)

2011

2011

ccasionally, in numerical programming, one may wish to plot or instantiate a grid of a circular (or spiral) nature. Here are some code samples for those trying to achieve it. The following sets some values of interest:

lines=10
degrees=180

Now, let us generate some linear, equally-spaced points:

t_map = linspace(0,lines*pi*2,lines*degrees*2);

What we have here is the 2 for 360 degrees, which may depend on what one tries to achieve. For the more complex case shown later, this will be essential. Now, let’s do the sine/cosine magic:

x_map = t_map.*cos(t_map);
y_map = t_map.*sin(t_map);

This can be plotted with plot(x_map, y_map), but let’s do something more interesting by assigning colour to the sample points and then plotting them as dense dots. The following would work:

flat=zeros(1000,1000);
  for ll=(size(x_map,2)/2):-1:1
    flat(floor(x_map(ll*2))'+500,floor(y_map(ll*2))'+500)=1
  end
imshow(flat)

The values here are rather arbitrary and can be used for demonstrative purposes. The problem itself seems to be commonly recurring, thus the need for a blog post. Different colours can be assigned to sample points, which achieves something like the following:

ODAY I began preparing for a rowing competition like those which I have not paricupated in for years. This one will be a sprint equivalent which relies on sheer strength and proper technique (the latter requires more practice) and I believe that with enough preparation I can beat the British record. My diet and my exercise (not to mention sleep patterns) will be changed accordingly in the coming month and I look forward to bringing another trophy home before I turn 30.