Open Access

I came across an interesting blog article discussing whether academics should strive to publish in open access journals.  I particularly liked this passage:

"However in the information-saturated world you can’t read everything and traditionally journals have been a way of bundling content into packets for particular readers. In the electronic and multidisciplinary world this is no longer necessary (although it’s still common). So journals have become branding labels. They are a simplistic way of saying “this paper is better than that paper”. It’s a bit like Gramophone records used to be. Or book publishers... So we’ve moved to a situations where scientists follow brands rather than make rational decisions. The university system reinforces this... And the publishing houses can make a lot of money out of promoting brands. Bibliometrics shows that one publishing house not far from Kings Cross has done exceptionally in promoting its brand for all sorts of disciplines. Does this mean that their papers are better, or simply that their marketeers are better? Why do people buy one fragrance as opposed to another? Or any other fashion accessory? It’s not the raw value of the item – it’s the perception that has been built up."

Alfie

Peter Hallward wrote in the THE of last week's demos thus:

"The story of one Middlesex undergraduate who used to sit in on my MA classes, Alfie Meadows, is already notorious. He received a full-on blow to the side of his skull. My partner and I found him wandering in Parliament Square a little after 6pm, pale and distraught, looking for a way to go home. He had a large lump on the right side of his head. He said he’d been hit by the police and didn’t feel well. We took one look at him and walked him towards the nearest barricaded exit as quickly as possible. It took a few minutes to reach and then convince the taciturn wall of police blocking Great George Street to let him through their shields, but they refused to let me, my partner or anyone else accompany him in search of medical help. We assumed that he would receive immediate and appropriate treatment on the other side of the police wall as a matter of course, but in fact he was left to wander off on his own, towards Victoria.

As it turns out, Alfie’s subsequent survival depended on three chance events. If his mother (a lecturer at Roehampton, who was also “contained” in Parliament Square) hadn’t received his phone call and caught up with him shortly afterwards, the odds are that he’d have passed out on the street. If they hadn’t then stumbled upon an ambulance waiting nearby, his diagnosis could have been fatally delayed. And if the driver of this ambulance hadn’t overruled an initial refusal of the A&E department of the Chelsea and Westminster hospital to look at Alfie, his transfer to the Charing Cross neurological unit for emergency brain surgery might well have come too late."

Spineless

From a Guardian interview with Tim Farron MP, president of the Lib Dems:

"I am absolutely furious with the vice-chancellors as a cadre and I'll be careful not to call them all spineless – but I will call them all spineless.

"No other public sector body, in this whole shake-up with the cuts, was in a position where they could say: 'Right, we'll accept our cut in the direct support we get from the state as long as we get to charge our clients.' Imagine if we had headteachers or NHS managers saying that – it's absolutely outrageous"

Says it all, really.

New Skills

Liked this quote from an InfoWorld article on the forthcoming BlackBerry PlayBook:

According to RIM's website, Tablet OS developers are currently slated to build apps in HTML5/CSS/JavaScript bundles or in Flash. "Add a new dimension to your BlackBerry development skills and create compelling applications for a new mobile form factor that complements your existing application" appears to be the euphemism that Marketing cooked up for "you're going to have to learn a whole new set of development tools".

Extra security for Google users

It looks like Google are rolling out a beefed-up security model, based around two-factor authentication. This is where a person needs to provide two forms of proof that they own the username with which they are attempting to log in.

In most two-factor schemes, the first proof is a password or PIN and the second is either a physical token of some kind (key or card) or a biometric identifier such as a facial image or fingerprint scan. The idea is that whilst an attacker might well capture your password or PIN somehow, it is going to very difficult for them to also provide physical or biometric proof.

For an organisation that can issue its employees with smart cards, this scheme works very well, but such a move would be completely impractical (and hideously expensive) for Google. Their solution is to use your mobile phone, instead!

It works like this: you log in as normal with a username and password, but then you are taken to a second screen in which you must enter a six-digit verification code. This code is delivered to your phone (which you have previously associated with your Google account).

The system seems to be designed around the assumption that users will have an iPhone, BlackBerry or Android device running the Google Authenticator app. Whilst the verification code can also be sent via SMS, I wonder whether this will be quite as efficient. Fortunately, Google provide the option to authenticate like this once per computer rather one per login, which is easier (albeit at the cost of reduced security).

Security & Social Networks

Talk about security in the context of social networks and many people will think first of privacy - perhaps citing Facebook's convoluted and controversial approach to this important issue as an example. But the risks run deeper than that. Security firm AVG reports that it has identified 11,701 compromised Facebook pages and 7,163 compromised YouTube pages.

AVG note that students between 18 and 25 years old are most at risk of having their Facebook status 'jacked'; this particular age group is the biggest user of Facebook whilst at the same time being significantly less concerned about Internet security and privacy than the average member of the population.

Something to think about the next time you log on?

The Joy of iTunes

I find it curious that a company lauded for its design skills when it comes to hardware can get it so wrong with software. My iPod Classic is an immensely cool and sexy piece of kit - almost lickable (to copy Stephen Fry's memorable description of his iPad) - and yet iTunes feels like the complete opposite: clunky, unintuitive, unreliable and fundamentally untrustworthy.

My negativity stems from the number of serious bugs that have plagued me ever since I started using this benighted piece of software - bugs which Apple seems to have no interest in fixing, preferring instead to add half-arsed new features such as Genius and Ping. Here are a few examples:

• Album artwork that disappears from individual tracks or is reduced to a lower resolution, seemingly at random
• Overwriting of my edits to album information (track titles, genre, etc) - again seemingly at random
• Splitting of a single album into several identically-titled albums by the same artist for no apparent reason

I encountered another instance of the last of these earlier today and managed to fix it by making all the tracks 'part of a compilation' and then clearing this flag from all the tracks. Logical, huh?

This stuff isn't hard to do. I've not encountered any of these problems with the copy of my music library that I access from Linux using Banshee, for example. So how come a big, high-profile hardware/software developer can't get it right?

Train Fail

After  booking a train ticket for the HEA-ICS annual conference in Durham, this is the response I got:

Don't you just love inadequately-tested websites?

Welcome Home

After a week of 40-degree temperatures on Kos, it was good to be greeted by cooler and more comfortable conditions. The two things that lodged in my travel-fatigued brain on arriving at Manchester Airport soon after dawn yesterday morning were me narrowly avoiding treading on the decapitated corpse of a mouse - presumably chewed up by the escalators - and the sight of a lass throwing her guts up just outside the terminal.

Welcome to Britain!

Pomodoro Technique

Image via Wikipedia

I've just started experimenting with Pomodoro Technique, partly in the hope of improving productivity and achieving a more sustainable working pace, partly as a way of rigorously embedding breaks from the keyboard and mouse into my working habits so as to stave off the dreaded RSI. Staffan Nöteberg's book Pomodoro Technique Illustrated is proving to be a useful and entertaining guide.

Teaching preparations

Summer is in full swing now and many of us at work are turning our attention to developing modules ready for teaching in September.

I will once again be teaching introductory programming to our incoming students, using Python (of course :) - although the major change for this year is a move from Python 2.6 to Python 3.1. In addition, I'm involved in three modules on our brand-new IT degree: IT Infrastructure, Web Development and Project Management.

Digital Music Pricing Weirdness

Image via Wikipedia

Can anyone tell me how Amazon can sell Tangerine Dream's Encore live album as an MP3 download for £4.99 yet sell its four individual tracks for £4.49 each?

It Lives!

Shortly (and coincidentally) after the previously mentioned upgrade to Ubuntu Lucid, my PC went into a sulk - shutting down and refusing to boot up again. Pressing the Power On button caused the fans to spin up for about a second before everything went dead.

Poking around the motherboard's power connector with a multimeter confirmed that the problem lay with the PSU. £45 got me a new unit from the local Maplin Electronics - 700W rather than the 580W of the original that came with the PC (best to be on the safe side :) Fitting was straightfoward and everything seems to be working swimmingly once more.

There's a certain satisfaction to be had from fixing something yourself...

Upgrading

I've upgraded my Ubuntu machine at home to Lucid without any major issues.

I like the new look and feel and would probably make the effort to get used to the new window button positioning, were it not for the fact that I have to use Fedora at work (plus Windows occasionally at work and at home).

Gwibber is a promising addition, although it isn't quite as robust as I would like; it took several attempts and a detailed examination of bug reports in Launchpad before I could successful add my Facebook account to it.

I've also discovered that screen lock no longer works properly after having upgraded from the open source fglrx graphics card driver to the proprietary version.

On the plus side, sound works better than it did before; I seem to have much better control over volume than was the case in Karmic.

United For Education

My photos from today's United For Education day of action are now on Flickr, as a set and as a slideshow:

Live train and tube maps

One of the nicest mashups I've seen shows approximately live maps for UK mainline trains and the London Underground.

I was particularly taken by a view of trains to and from Leeds (especially after checking the box to move trains at 10x normal speed).

Django 1.2 E-commerce

Packt Publishing have sent me a copy of Django 1.2 E-commerce to review. Looks interesting. I've got a number of Packt books and some of them (Learning JQuery, for example) have been really good. Hopefully this will be up to the same standard.

Chapter 2 is available as a free download, if you want to check it out for yourselves...

Dear None...

Got this via email after having registered for one of those discount cards.

It is interesting to speculate on the cause. If I had to put money on it, I'd bet that YouGov send these emails via a 'mail merge' application of some kind that merges on a name field in the customer database given to them by Costa. Perhaps this name field is blank in some cases, and the mail merge app fails to check this. (If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say that the 'None' suggests an app written in Python :)

Regardless of the precise reasons for this error, we can say with certainty that it points to inadequate testing of the application. The developers have made assumptions about data completeness/validity that are not justified in reality. Testing with realistic data would have exposed those assumptions, prompting a simple modification to the code that substitutes a suitable default ('Valued Customer', for example) if no name is available.

Pilgrimage

Last week I at long last paid a visit to Bletchley Park, the centre of codebreaking efforts for the British during World War II and the birthplace of modern computing. The picture here shows the reconstructed Colossus Mk II, the world's first semi-programmable digital electronic computer, which helped to crack the Lorentz cipher used by the German High Command.

For a geek like me, standing in front of this as it whirred and clicked was a near-religious experience! The Bletchley Park huts are well worth a visit for anyone interested in cryptography or military history, and the existence of Colossus and The National Museum of Computing on site is the icing on the cake.

My photos of the day are available for viewing as a Flickr set or slideshow.

Leeds UCU Rally

Pictures from last week's Leeds UCU Rally:

Twittering

I've succumbed and created a Twitter account for myself - not really out of a burning desire to start using it, but rather because last week I gave a lecture to my students on how Python could be used for Internet programming at the application level. I already had examples of how to access Flickr and Google services, but Twitter seemed like another good example to use because students are familiar with it as a 'Web 2.0' service and because there is a nice, easy-to-use library available for its API: python-twitter.

I showed the students a simple program to post a status update. I ran it using my newly-created Twitter account (python33r) and then showed them the tweet appearing on my Twitter page.

I didn't think I'd want to continue using the service, but I happened to start following a few people/organisations of interest to me and it has provided a couple of useful notifications already.

Relegation

It seems that the UK risks relegation from the 'Premier League' of scientific nations. Sir Martin Taylor, former vice-president of the Royal Society has said that "we are a bit like Manchester United, but if we are not careful we could end up a bit like Leeds United".

Ouch.

Back Trouble

Today, I was supposed to be supervising a couple of lab classes on object-oriented programming with Python, but instead I find myself lying in bed, blogging (thank <insert deity of choice> for netbooks :)

Yesterday morning, I suffered a prolapsed disc that popped back in but left my back in spasm. Of course, I didn't realise this at the time, and foolishly shuffled into work, thinking that if I could move around (albeit gingerly) I would be OK. I eventually made it in to the office and sat down to deal with emails and other chores. After about 30 minutes, I attempted to get up out of my chair and found that I couldn't straighten up, nor could I walk properly! I rang my wife, who came in to pick me up and take me to the doctor.

My problem was diagnosed more or less instantly, thanks to my "duck's arse walk", as the doc so eloquently put it.  I was prescribed bed rest and a bunch of drugs, and advised to seek physiotherapy once I am a bit more mobile.

So here I am, feeling somewhat relaxed courtesy of Diazepam and Codeine, wondering what to do with myself for the next few days...

Gnuplot in Action

I've used gnuplot for a long, long time without ever truly getting to grips with its intricacies - but I'm rectifying that with the aid of Philipp Janert's Gnuplot in Action. So far, I've learned three interesting and useful new things in the first thirty pages: a good sign!

Uninstall woes

Having bowed to pressure from the family and installed Microsoft Office 2007 on one of the family PCs, I figured that there is no further need for the copy of Microsoft Works that came pre-installed on the machine. But when I tried to remove Works, I was prompted to insert the installation CD!

WTF? Why on earth should this be required? Most malware is easier to get off your system than this piece of crap.

Anyway, I can't comply with the request because the CD was not supplied with the system when we bought it. Grrr...

Flickr fun

I'm a Flickr devotee, and was interested to discover their App Garden - a place where home-grown applications that use the Flickr API can be promoted.

One that particularly caught my eye is Command-Line Flickr - a retro, textual interface that allows you to browse photostreams and even render individual pictures as ASCII art! Strange but rather cool.

Here's the photo from yesterday's post, rendered in ASCII:

Frozen Britain

The BBC website has an interesting NASA satellite image from yesterday, 7 January, showing the extent of the snow cover across the country.

Let It Snow...

We are deeply in the grip of winter at the moment, with plenty of snow on the ground, schools closed, etc. I was at home with the kids today and took my camera outside for the first time in a few weeks, to grab a few shots of interestingly-shaped accumulations of snow. Here, it looks like the nesting box in our back garden has acquired a quiff!

Happy Birthday, Python!

It appears that Python turned twenty a couple of days ago.

I hope that the next twenty years will be as successful as the first twenty...