Another busy couple of weeks have passed and I’m sitting here again trying to explain why I have not updated my journal and provide a short summary of all the things I have done recently. I usually plan to post a number of articles to cover all the different topics however I really do not have the time at the moment so a couple will have to do. I have been doing a lot of development work recently in web-based languages finishing off small applications and continuing on some larger-scale projects such as my System Wars Solar Empire distribution. This entry contains my thoughts on smaller updates that have taken place.
One major document I have created is the account of my December interview with Corpus Christi College at the University of Cambridge. It contains a journal of the two days however the majority is dedicated to detailed questions and solutions sourced from my interviews; the professors provided some great questions which I didn’t want to lose so I wrote them up in LaTeX to keep. Also I managed to remember the source of the reading material that we used to prepare for the exam: it is an interesting read and will give a valuable insight into the level of understanding an interview at the University of Cambridge requires. My application was unsuccessful as I completely failed the first interview (obvious if you read the document); I hope my writing can help other growing mathematicians to achieve their goals.
Regarding the recent spate of guestbook spam I have decided to add some more measures to prevent bots destroying my guestbook. Sometimes when a spam-bot posts a new entry it contains a character or sequence which produces a parse error when the entries are next scanned; I have just implemented a system that parses the new XML before it overwrites the current entries thereby preventing dangerous entries being saved. This will at least solve my guestbook the problem of having to restore my guestbook often although the actual issue of spam is yet unresolved.
Lastly I have written a short article about using integer representations of matrices to store information, especially binary/boolean values, in a database.
Comments