I’ve started working my way through The Surprising Power of Liberating Strucutres - a hand book of techniques for collaborative work. So far I’ve tried one technique from the book - one two four all. The idea is super simple and is an alternative to open brain storming or post-it note sessions. Before describing the technique with a few comments, I’ll just point out one of the weaknesses of a group work activity like a group retrospective. ... (more)

This looks like a great way to quickly get an overview of your site architecture, a vital step when thinking about wide spread changes. https://www.ayima.com/blog/how-to-visualize-an-xml-sitemap-using-python.html ... (more)

I've decided to use syntaxhiligher2 to do syntax hi-lighting and a call to Yourequations.com for rendering latex on the blog. Bot Cyborg has a good description of how to get this to work on blogger. The main advantage of this approach is that the pseudo code is written in the blog posts in plain encased in a pre statement, and the equations are also just vanilla latex in a pre statement. ... (more)

Well, today I finally made a switch that I had been thinking about for a long time, I moved the hosting of my personal domain to google app engine with email being managed by google apps for my domain. http://www.mulvany.net is now a google app engine site. At the moment there is not much content there, but the google app engine tool allows me to run a perfect cop of my site off line, and to edit locally and then push live. ... (more)

References - "Python Objects", Fredrik Lundh, http://www.effbot.org/zone/python-objects.htm - "How to think like a Pythonista", Mark Hammond, http://python.net/crew/mwh/hacks/objectthink.html - "Python main() functions", Guido van Rossum, http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=4829 - "Python Idioms and Efficiency", http://jaynes.colorado.edu/PythonIdioms.html - "Python track: python idioms", http://www.cs.caltech.edu/courses/cs11/material/python/misc/python_idioms.html - "Be Pythonic", Shalabh Chaturvedi, http://shalabh.infogami.com/Be_Pythonic2 - "Python Is Not Java", Phillip J. Eby, http://dirtsimple.org/2004/12/python-is-not-java.html - "What is Pythonic?", Martijn Faassen, http://faassen.n--tree.net/blog/view/weblog/2005/08/06/0 - "Sorting Mini-HOWTO", Andrew Dalke, http://wiki.python.org/moin/HowTo/Sorting - "Python Idioms", http://www. ... (more)

A blog post from AcademicProductivity trundled across my reader this morning in which the blogpoints to a paper in which the author claims that academicsare prostitutes because they modify their papers in response to thedemands of reviewers. I got a sense frisson when I read the blog post andsome of the text that is quoted there from the paper, but then I read thecomments to the blog post, and they are very good at, if you like, pointingout that the paper is a bit weak in it's premise. ... (more)

OS CMS systems beat the crap out of the free ones for what you get for your money, including support. If you have a budget then you can get in touch with the authors of the OS systems easily the only thing they sometimes don't win on is polish it is someone's job to look at each piece and make sure that it is slick Drupal is free, It upgrades about twice  a year, one major one minor ... (more)

what's cool about microformats web? is it the stickers?the t-shirtsthe community process urlb.at/2f personal information disastertravel airlines don't talk to railroads microformats say, what problem does it solve? perhaps there is no problem at all what problem does blogging solve?Twitter for christ's sake? no one knows what they do until they are popular e.g. yahoo pipes is not practical yetit is a user experience nightmareand it doesn't have a clear defined purpose ... (more)

A friend of mine set up her own business a few years ago, at the same timeas having a baby. It was really tough for Ais for the first couple of years,but it is looking like things are really working out for her now. She wasrecently featured on TV in Ireland, and she has posted a link to the clipfrom her blog. For a really inspirational view on managing business withchildcare have a loot at the vid: ... (more)

Well, i'm starting out my mob-blogging life waiting in que for a flight to milan, and i discover that my predictive text thinks i'm a clogger! An interesting, if somewhat disturbing begining. Tags: moblog, txt, travel ... (more)

I am at Bar Camp Cambridge, We have had the three word introductions and are just running through themorning talks now. It's pretty cool. The coffee is good, and cookies are great. Let's see how the day goes. ... (more)

Laura JamesAlert Me.Com might get too corporate. trying to do the internet of things, internet access to small devicesthey are implimetning today, and will be shipping later this year.comes from R&D, but working in a shipping they are going to ship a home security system, but they are actuallybuilding a platofrmthat can connect anything that does not require full audio and video using a mesh network that connect to a hub using a 'zigby'output can be things like a lamp that has a color dependant state ... (more)

discussionQ Gridle is raised along with RDFa if you don't like the way that the xslt is workin you can make your own.however most domain exprts can't write xslt if you just let the domain experts create microformats you may leave theontologicaldefinitions to people who are creating the xslt AG says that there may be two different problems, address to addressbookfrom page vs data harvesting ... (more)

Matt talking about semanitic web for science, an introductionXML, URI, namespaces, RDL OWL,standards are often argued about but it;s just XML we are supposed to be able to publish semantis data easily,at the moment it's not just an extension but a whole other world,people won't learn sapqrl Matt believes that we can get the benifits of semantic now, but withoutin any case, it's hard to get funding ... (more)

Arecent blog post on Action Potential pointed me towards the neuroscience peer review consortium. Theyhave a description here about theconsortium and a list ofparticipating journals. I have no doubt that this is the future of peerreview. At the moment the peer review system is horribly inefficient forpapers that get rejected. Rejection from a journal can occur because a paperis crap, but often it happens for many other reasons, because the journalhas already met it's pagequota, the journal is publishing a set of special issues on another topic,the editors of the journal are interested in shifting the focus of thejournal, the topic of the paper is slightly away from the main interests ofthe editorial board, the paper is good, but just gets edged out by a set ofbetter papers that come in. ... (more)

I just posted the below as a comment on a blog, but it was good so I thoughtI'd repost here What is open science and what is the system? Well I am sure that there aremany viewpoints on this, so I am going to just put forward one here. At a fundamental level 'the system' is how we ascribe credit toparticipation in science. The credit is converted to grant money, thedollars keep the food on the plate. ... (more)

Below follows a long comment that I posted to an article on O'Reilly Radar about patents. The original blog post is here There is an interesting compliment to the patent system in the domain of assigning credit to ideas, which is the academic peer-review system. The inventor of the idea in the case of academia is the author. The equivalent to the patent office is the editorial board of the academic journal that the author submits to. ... (more)

Thistech blog article is a charming description of how human behaviour seemsto have spread the name of a particular wireless node across america. Ithink it is a lovely example of the spread of an idea driven by simpleself-interest. ... (more)

Attila Csordas sent along links about these awards, looks nice, http://www.the-scientist.com/lawva/ and a blog link about them: http://pimm.wordpress.com/2007/10/09/the-laboratory-website-and-video-awards-by-the-scientist tags: science ... (more)