My two spheres of interest -- difficult works of English literature and computer programming (OK, scholarly communications and publishing, also. OK, there are lots more spheres of interest) -- only intersect occasionally. However, in recent days I have been toying with the idea of using git to version control my writing.

Last week saw the descent of some sixty Pynchon scholars upon the small northern city of Durham in the UK. The occasion was the International Pynchon Week conference, this year a co-sponsored event between the University of Durham and the University of Lincoln. The event was organised primarily by Samuel Thomas, of Durham, while I had assisted with various aspects of promotion, web design and suchlike.

While I agree with much of what they say, in a post on the LSE Impact Blog, Meera Sabaratnam and Paul Kirby write, of the latest round of HEFCE consultations on OA for a post-2014 REF: This isn't how I read the proposed document at all.

Another brief post on fop. I wanted to render some MathML markup inside an XSL:FO document to be converted to PDF using fop. The way to do this is to use JEuclid. However, the JEuclid page claims to only work on fop versions 0.95beta and 0.95. Turns out this is untrue.

I've just spent the past hour grappling with getting FOP to render the Unicode glyph for a checkmark (U+2713) in PDF output from XSL:FO. I thought I'd share a few things I learnt along the way (that make me feel a bit silly for not knowing them already). The type of errors I was getting were: {% highlight bash %} Glyph "✓" (0x2713, checkmark) not available in font "Times-Roman". {% endhighlight %} Some observations after messing around for far

Having returned from a glorious week away in Crotia and Bosnia (for Pynchon fans: it was "very nice, very nice, very nice indeed"), I have returned to an inbox that features the current state of play with HEFCE's thinking on open access mandates for a post-2014 REF. In order to ensure that I've got it straight in my own head, I thought I'd write a summary post for quick reference. I'm using the PDF version as my reference.

I'm very pleased to announce that I am joining Jisc's National Monographs Strategy Expert Advisory Panel.

Last night I went to see Punchdrunk's performance of The Drowned Man, the latest in their series of promenade theatre pieces. Housed in an enormous building next to Paddington station in the middle of London, the piece was a strange mixture of ambient environmental exploration and two loose narratives of betrayal and murder, expressed through dance and physical theatre.

I'm extremely pleased to announce that I will be speaking at the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition on "The Front Line of OA in Humanities and Social Sciences" on the 23rd August, 2013 at the Tokyo National Institute of Informatics. I'll post more about the remit of the talk when I can, but the seminar schedule is now online. The talk will be translated, so all are welcome.

OK, this is probably one of the most specific posts I've ever written, but... I wrote a bash script to automatically fetch and parse the currently used data on the 4G EE mobile network in the UK that can then be used with Conky.

I received an interesting email this week from Nate Wright, who posed the following questions: I asked Nate if he'd mind if I replied publicly to this in a blog post because, quite frankly, this issue is important: Although we always go by the aphorism that the social problems are the ones that need fixing, we cannot neglect the technological If we do not build and maintain an open toolset, we cannot rely on the arguments derived from the free