Partially Attended

I’s a beautiful morning in New York, the sun is shining, and the snow blankets central park. Yeserday the rain and mist made it feel like a bit of a shit-house, but today it’s a fantastic day. I brought my climbing boots on this trip just in case I might find a few hours to squeeze in an attempt on the polish traverse on rat rock, and this morning I had my chance to get up and see what state the rock was in. ... (more)

Axel Boldt posted an interesting short paper discussing how to turn the physics ArXiV into an open peer review system. It’s a short read, about three pages, but if you are familiar with the problems around peer review then you can just jump to part three of the paper which is a little under a page. The solution proposed is to create a new role of editor on the ArXiV, and allow anyone to propose their paper for review. ... (more)

CANCELLED Due to flight cancellations out of NY, Chris won’t be making it over to this side of the pond, so sadly we will be calling the event off. London is a great city to live in if you are interested in technology. It has to be one of the best cities in the world for people working on the interface between science, tech and te web. Tonight I’ll be going to the awesome Same As Christmass Quiz, and tomorrow night Chris Wiggins will be passing through from New York, and there will be a chance to meet up with him for a pint and a chat. ... (more)

I’m trying to move away from iPhoto because I have lost too many pictures over the years from having multiple versions of an image lying around, from metadata being plopped all over the place. It is time to move to a more sustainable simple way of naming foldering and tagging my image archive. In the course of looking at this I have been playing around with Lightroom, and I want to ensure that I can add tags at a system level on my mac, and have them show up in Lightroom, and at the same time have Lightroom tags discoverable through spotlight searches. ... (more)

I’m figuring out the best way to shoot video with my Lumix GF1 on a mac using iMovie. The GF1 offers two main options for video capture, HD JPEG, and AVCHD. There is a great post describing the pros and cons of these two formats here [], and based on that I decided to experiment with AVCHD. After playing around a little I found a few oddities. JPEG capture writes the files onto the device as . ... (more)

(I’m posting some of these posts a few days after writing, but you’ll get that, won’t you) It’s five in the morning, and I’m well and truly jet lagged, but after the past week this is not the strangest I’ve been feeling so, it’s not too bad (the immunisation shots for my trip to Mexico left me in an entertainingly woozy state Friday evening). I’m over to cover the digital library federation meeting, and the satellite SITS meeting on thursday. ... (more)

(notes taken yesterday) The keynote is starting, the DLF has grown by 15 new member organisations, and this is one of the best attended events that they have run, the room is packed, i didn’t realise that there were so many people in the hotel, its looking like its going to be an interesting meeting. The original vision for this group is to create a national digital library, they have been talking about this since 1994 (goodness, so much that needs to be cut through to get to where we know we need to get to). ... (more)

(This was from Sunday) In an attempt to get over the jet lag, myself and Dave headed over to San Francisco yesterday, we had a good walk around, got lost twice, and then met pup with the lovely Ariel Waldman. I had to drop off some mendeley schwag for the upcoming San Francisco science hack day that Ariel is organising (we are giving a little sponsorship, yay!). It’s going to take place in two weeks, and it looks lie it’s going to be an awesome event. ... (more)

I’ll just start by explaining that I hate applescript. I wanted to create a script that would take a specific folder withing the script and save each message from that folder to a text file on my machine for post-processing. This is what I came up with. set fileRoot to "Macintosh HD:Users:path:" set messageList to {} tell application "Mail" set messageList to messageList & (messages of mailbox "mailbox name" of account "account" of application "Mail") set counter to 1 repeat with theMessage in messageList set fileNum to counter as string set theFilePath to fileRoot & "mailcontent" & fileNum & ". ... (more)

Martin Fenner asked me to comment on Mendeley’s relationship with the Citation Style Language, so I thought I would pop up my thoughts on the blog too. Martin’s post below is the original message that I sent over to him. Hi Martin, thanks for getting in touch and asking about Mendeley’s relationship with CSL. There are basically three aspects of citation styling that I’d like to discuss, the first is about Mendeley’s involvement, the second is about the use of citation styling in the community, and amongst publishers, and the third is about how we identify things in academia, and how we format those identifiers. ... (more)