relative paths

[eluser]tim1965[/eluser]
Apologies for this, i know its relatively easy but i am having a bad day.

I have just moved both my system and application folder out of /var/www/

so dir structure looks like this

/var
/www
/system
/application
/static
/css

I have been using relative paths
with base_url()../system/static/css
base_url = www.something.com/
(index.php removed)

so my question is what should i use now, are they relative to their location or to var/www/

Thanks in advance.

Tim