Increasingly in the course of my academic work, I come to appreciate the fact that thought leads many people, independently, down the same path.

I have some qualms, which have been growing recently, about the vast number of meta- posts that have accumulated on the use of social media in academia. I need to state this is not a critique of any one of those individual pieces, or the people who made them. I agree with their content. Indeed, in the last week or so there have been several excellent articles published by colleagues for whom I have a great deal of respect.

The quest to build a system that allows publishing in PDF and XHTML from a single XML galley within OJS continues and I've made quite substantial progress. As before, the code for this article is available on my GitHub. Instead of working from the very basic stub, I instead used the existing xmlGalley template, reading and tracing through the code to work out what it does.

I've just been playing around with my webcam, which I haven't hooked up in ages, and was unable to get it working under my 64bit Fedora installation. Having done a bit of reading, and having found that some applications can use the camera, I worked out the solution.

It is with a heavy and despairing heart that I write this post. It is not particularly well-structured owing to the emotive nature of the content. The state of Georgia have now executed Troy Davis, a black man whose life didn't turn out the way America promised. In 1991, Davis was convicted of murder and sentenced him to death on the testimony of nine eyewitnesses.

As promised when I described the problem I was having with the xmlGalley plugin in OJS, I'm going to begin describing the path I am taking to fixing this, and hope that the knowledge will provide some shortcuts for others wishing to develop plugins, amid the sparse documentation on this aspect. As OJS is the leading system for Open Access publishing, it is important that technical resources are available for others to build upon this platform.

This is a post detailing my experiments with Open Journal Systems 2.3.6 and the current state of producing galleys for an article from a single XML file. As shall be seen in the conclusion, no currently functional plugin allows this feature. This will, therefore, be the first of several posts that will cover not only writing an OJS plugin from scratch, but also aim to fill this gap.

The Troy Davis case, perhaps the most controversial of all death penalty impositions in the United States, is growing perilously close to a climax resulting in the death of a man who, even if not innocent, has been subject to a deeply flawed legal process. An execution date has been set for the 21st of September.

I've just been asked on Twitter as to whether it's worth presenting at postgraduate conferences and thought I'd share my thoughts in a short post. Answer: it depends what you want to get from a conference. If you are looking to meet intellectually stimulating people, get experience presenting and genuine feedback on your work, then a postgraduate conference is great.

Reading Negative Dialectics , I was unable to track down a succinct, suitable definition of the terms "intentio recta" and "intentio obliqua", first appearing on page 69 of the Ashton translation.

Following on from my previous guide to using Zotero in Ubuntu Natty, I am pleased to present, here, the guide for Ubuntu 11.10: The Oneiric Ocelot. The most crucial new addition is that, at the time of writing (September 2011), Zotero was unable to load in Firefox 7.0 beta. Update: As of 9th of September, this is fixed.