In recent days, given the furore over Amazon's decision to no longer host Wikileaks, it has become common parlance to declare that the web is now subjected to the pressures that government can bring to bear on corporate entities (web hosting). See posts by both Richard Hall and John Naughton.

This is a quick, personal post to express my disgust at the government's recent proposals to "reform" the Disabled Living Allowance and scrap the Independent Living Fund. While I have been extremely unhappy about the cuts, particularly to higher education, this latest batch hits a group of people who really need this support. And what does it save? The ILF costs a relatively small £359m.

This is a quick post to announce the first code drop of a project I worked on yesterday. It's called Djiscography and it generates nicely formatted javascript hide/show style discography information. It supports track listing, samples, multiple artists, releases and editions. A live version of the project can be found at: http://discography.2bitpie.net.

One of the best things about Mendeley is that, the second you mention their name on Twitter, a horde of helpful and informative community liaison team members descend upon you. This means that, if you have a query, you can be sure that someone knowledgeable is never far away. That said, it seems that my current issue -- being able to convert either an OpenOffice or Word Zotero document to Mendeley -- is not possible.

Julian Assange has just conducted a brief Q&A on the Guardian website and he gave one statement that clearly indicates his fierce intelligence and comprehension of the stakes involved in transparency of government. I felt it worthy enough to merit a post and expository paragraph or two of its own. The quotation reads: There are two points here. Firstly, Assange correctly highlights that it is easy for speech to be free when it has no power.

I've used the snow so far this morning to start some pythonic refactoring of Rockaby. As I mentioned in my project announcement, Rockaby started life several years ago and it was a quick morning's worth of hacking about in .NET to build something that I thought nobody would ever see. As such, the code was hideous and messy. For the first code-drop, I simply transliterated the .NET code into Python/Django.

Yesterday, I attended an event facilitated by the Research Information Network and hosted by Sage Publishing as a roundtable discussion of the complex issues involved in the communication channels, fears and issues surrounding academic publishers, libraries and researchers. I attended this event in the capacity of a researcher who also has experience of publishing under an Open Access model and also as someone with a keen interest in the latter.

This post is probably only good and original in the sense (allegedly) framed by Samuel Johnson. Nevertheless, it came out of a discussion I had the other night and I found it interesting.

There is an annoying bug on Toshiba Satellite Machines running Ubuntu Linux (seems variants up to Maverick) which means that plugging in to the headphone jack does not work and, also, that speakers continue to play sound. The solution, after much digging, is to add: options snd-hda-intel model=ideapad to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf I've put in a bug report, so hopefully this can get a fix in Natty.

Just a quick post to point out that, aligning with my teaching last week, Cable's recent announcement that the Lib Dems have not broken any promises on university tuition fees has multiple resonances with George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Firstly, it is an erasure of history. The Lib Dems explicitly pledged to voters that they would oppose the rise of tuition fees. They are now claiming that this never happened. That was not a promise.

Recent discussion on the lkm has lead to Linus giving the go-ahead to a large kernel patch that massively increases responsiveness when multi-tasking on Linux desktop. A slashdot article today also points out that the same result can be achieved by modifications userspace and that this is, indeed, how the patch was tested. The original instructions can be found at webupd8, but, for Ubuntu systems, they are incomplete.