One of the long running debates regarding the British Library reading rooms has resurfaced this week. Upon entering the library this morning I was handed a letter of invitation to the Reader's Committee (or similarly titled initiative); it's self-purported goal, to discuss requirements of readers at the BL that have gone unheeded by management. Several of these items are, indeed, worthy of discussion.

The abstracts for International Pynchon Week 2010 are now online! Of course, I would thoroughly recommend my own paper, which will focus on terrorism and the Cold War in Pynchon's Against the Day and Don DeLillo's Underworld . In the interests of blatant self-promotion, I cite the abstract here: However, I would be doing a disservice if I didn't recommend my illustrious peers who will also be at the event.

I've just, a few days belatedly, checked out the Howling Fantods website and caught up with the news regarding the Harry Ransom Center aquiring the DFW archives. I thought it would be apt to post a link to the fantastic scribd scans of some of this material. I particularly like the editors suggestions for Infinite Jest. Looks like the "make it shorter" suggestion wasn't exactly taken to heart - thankfully!

The London Review of Books has just published a blog post entitled Wallace v. the Terrible Master. You can read the full article here: http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2010/03/16/alex-abramovich/wallace-v-the-terrible-master/ My concern is that, in every recent web publication on the author, the only aspect of his life in which people are interested, is his death.

It's only really during the mass exodus of a fire alarm that the sheer scale of operations daily at the British Library become clear. Here's a picture I snapped of the readers flocking back into the building. Lucky this didn't happen yesterday during the Digital Researcher conference! It was also notable that, on re-admittance, there were no security checks.

The result of a humanities discipline map for Digital Researcher 2010 at the British Library! Humanities Map was originally published by Martin Paul Eve at Martin Paul Eve on March 15, 2010.

Tomorrow I plan to attend the Digital Researcher seminar day at the British Library. It promises to be an excellent day providing insights on how researchers can best employ microblogging, social networking, social bookmarking/citations and many of the other nifty collaborative elements of the web that simply weren't there in the '90s.

In the spirit of social networking/research interaction, I have established a Zotero group for researchers working in my field; the novels of Thomas Pynchon. The site is here: http://www.zotero.org/groups/thomas_pynchon If you haven't used Zotero before, it's the ultimate open-source, freely available citation tool. It will do all the hard work of formatting your citations and even share them across multiple computers.

My first attempt at Python got a slot on the Ubuntu opportunistic developer slot. Check it out here: http://www.jonobacon.org/2010/03/06/the-grand-app-writing-challenge-submissions/ Also, note, first post to posterous. sshsplit featured was originally published by Martin Paul Eve at Martin Paul Eve on March 11, 2010.

Introducing sshsplit sshsplit is a GPL-3 licensed application that multiplexes ssh dynamic tunnels. For example, you might normally run: to get a tunnel on 127.0.0.1:54321 that goes through remote-host. However, if you are using a network-resource-intensive application (torrent clients for example), this single tunnel will not suffice for, say, 1000 concurrent connections.

Currently, owing to a bug, scp in Kubuntu and Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) does not allow you to autocomplete remote directories (when you have a passwordless ssh setup, obviously). While I have submitted a patch for review, this will not be backported into 9.10 and so, those who wish to have this functionality, should follow these steps: Visit this bug to read about the problem.