Partially Attended

Last night I had a strange anxiety dream. I'm not usually prone to blogging this kind of thing, but it was pretty odd. I dreamt that I had been given command line access to a particle accelerator that was embedded in that antarctic ice sheet. I'd run some kind of a job and forgotten about it. Two weeks later I got a bill for £216, 000. I'm not sure if that was the bill for the data that was generated, or for ... (more)

Gtug blog post On Monday I was at the London Google wave roadshow presented by Lars and Stephanie. The previous Friday I had helped to run a hack day for science applications in wave, so with that experience fresh in my mind I was particularly interested to see what they would say about a few particular topics. We had a few problems in the hack day which could be summarised as follows: ... (more)

I do a bit of code hacking and I often find myself putting objects into pickle files, and reading and writing them in order to fake object persistence. It's easy, but messy and it begins to leave lot's of pickle files sitting around in your path. I've decided to finally make the switch towards using a more grown up persistent object solution. I've decided to try out Django + SQLite. ... (more)

Last week an interesting invitation popped up in my email box, I got a message from Richard Sterling asking if I would be interested in previewing the program that the government are rolling out as part of their open data project. They have set up a google group for developers, and I guess I'm on the waiting list, or something. I'm going to be interested to see what data sources surrounding science, ... (more)

the post seems to be missing :/ ... (more)

Documentation on getting a google wave robot written in python working with the Cron functionality is still a little sparse. Getting a cron job into the capabilities.xml file. Add the following directive to the main function of your python program: myRobot.RegisterCronJob('/path',60) When you look at you capabilities.xml file you should now see a new node in the file: ... (more)

I had a brief discussion with a good friend and colleague this evening about the Drake equation. He has recently come to think that the equation can provide a good handle on understanding how many communicating civilizations exist in the universe, and how that reflects on the fragility of life on earth. A long time ago I had dismissed the Drake equation, feeling that it had very little to tell us about these matters. ... (more)

I'm sitting at home in London with a head cold. For the dew minutes it took me to check my temperature (37 thank you very much) I was wondering whether it might be the old swine flu, but no, just a normal head cold.Made me think, someone should make a t-shirt with a biometric sensor that checks on true wearers' temperature. No fever and it would say "don't worry it's only a cold". ... (more)

The Navier-Stokes equations: \frac{\partial \mathbf{v}}{\partial t} + ( \mathbf{v}\cdot\nabla ) \mathbf{v} = -\nabla p + \nu\Delta \mathbf{v} +\mathbf{f}(\boldsymbol{x},t) \frac{\partial \mathbf{v}}{\partial t} + ( \mathbf{v}\cdot\nabla ) \mathbf{v} = -\nabla p + \nu\Delta \mathbf{v} +\mathbf{f}(\boldsymbol{x},t) Describe the flow of an incompressible fluid. The equations are non-linear and are notoriously difficult to solve. I've always found them to be very beautiful and the fact that Sr George Stokes was an Irishman probably had some effect on my taking to the subject when I was an undergrad. ... (more)

In February 2009 a mac security update broke my perl installation. You can read more about that on this Slashdot article (http://hivelogic.com/articles/view/top-10-programming-fonts) , ulimatly forcing me to reinstall my entire system. One of the main reasons for this is that I had a hevily customized perl setup as part of installing Connotea and I based this on top of the system perl. This was a bad idea, but was the quickest way to get Connotea up and running on my local machine at the time. ... (more)