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.

till in the end the day came in the end came close of a long day when she said to herself whom else time she stopped -- Samuel Beckett, Rockaby Today marks the first release of the source for my book annotation software, Rockaby. At present, the base installation is up and running at http://gr.pynchon.net/ which forms the Online Gravity's Rainbow Reference.

This weekend I was house- (and dog-) sitting for a friend and had been told that I could use the internet while at their place. Sadly, however, the way this was configured was a guest account added my friend's laptop and she had not left the WEP key for their router.

I've been a big fan of cryptic crosswords for several years now. For those who are unaware, these are crosswords in which the clue consists of both a definition (almost always, except in the case of triple definition clues, at the beginning or end) and a subsidiary indicator.

While I do not normally attend rallies, demonstrations and the such like, I am making an exception tomorrow for the NUS' demonstration against the implementation of huge cuts to HE and moving the burden onto the student.

There has been a trend, in recent days, of moving towards providing tweets under various licenses; most prominently, Creative Commons Non-commercial Sharealike. While I thoroughly approve of strong copylefting, there were some issues that struck me as incredibly problematic with this stance and I would like, in this post, to briefly explore a few of these areas.