An Exercise in Irrelevance

This year, our clusters are going to be moved over to Vista, so I’ve decided to downgrade my windows box from XP to vista. It’s been an inevitable fun-filled afternoon as a result.

Tried a remote installation to save the effort of finding disks. Unfortunately, we tried an installation which booted into Windows 7, and then allowed you to install vista from there; this results in a mysterious 100M partition for use with bitlocker; vista doesn’t know about this, so mounted it as D drive and, as it’s marked as a system partition, you can’t change this. Three installations later, it was gone, and Vista is installed.

Next up, install synergy. Turns out that this is hosed because of UAC — the Vista access control. How to Geek was very helpful, although their technique doesn’t completely work. I have some ideas, but basically, had to turn off all UAC elevation dialogs (as synergy doesn’t work then, which rather defeats the point), and I have to start it by hand every login. At this juncture, a hardware KVM seems an option, but it’s clunky in comparison to synergy.

Cygwin installation has been okay, except for some mysterious “Program Compatibility” dialog which tells me that I have done things wrong and offers to make my life better. Next up is the problem of getting security permissions on my files on D, which think that they are owned by another user (from my old OS). Normal Windows problem I can’t get the permissions set up, or percolating downward whatever I do.

(At this point, a friend popped in and said, “Why don’t you install Windows 7 instead”. Not the first to ask).

Think I now have the security permissions set, although it’s going to take about 2 hours to find out for sure, as it traverses my file system. Cygwin appears to have another strange problem where a bash window doesn’t respond to a click—if you want to move it from the front, you have to use the taskbar.

Emacs, skype, miktex all seem to have installed okay; neither webcam nor sound drivers worked in the default installation, but vista did manage to find them, so no complaints there really. I’ve also found one major advantage; when you switch the irritating desktop sounds off, windows no longer asks you whether you want to save the old scheme (yes, being the default); well worth the billions of dollars spent on vista. The machine balked after all these installs, with explorer up to 100% CPU. Restart has solved.

Installing cygwin sshd was a bit hard; the trick is to run ssh-host-config in a cygwin.bat run as administrator. It all works fine then, except for the bit where you try to ssh in to the machine. Then you always get Connection Closed. Giving up for now.

How would I have got this far out with the wonderous Gerry Tomlinson to help me out? No idea.

On the flip side, thought, I was interested to see one of my own great ideas, first expounded in my work on Generating Sewage Systems has been taken up the Institute of Mechanical Engineering, in a report which has even got as far as the BBC. Yep, algae reactors down the side of buildings. It’s the way forward.

Came down to London last night; forgotten quite how much I dislike this place. Within 10 minutes, I found myself turning into a miserable enemy-of-humanity, having experienced the isolation and rudeness characteristic of the place. Of course, it has to be admitted that the first (re)experience of London involves travelling in the tube, at 5.30, with luggage. Truly, London at its worse. Still, spent the evening, outside the pub, with Aengus Stewart from CRUK; highly entertaining discussion, which is, I guess, London at it’s best.

(Slight pause here…Duncan Hull keeps leaning over my shoulder commenting on this post as I write it…this is not how it supposed to happen, we’re supposed to use the internet!).

The conference is at the Royal Institution — yes, finally in the lecture theatre that I have seen on the TV, having been inexplicably ignored for the last ten years by the Christmas Lecture committee. Like all these hallowed places, it’s old, the seats are not big enough to cope with the increased bum size of the modern generation, and it’s hot. Still, it kind of nice to have been here.

…several days pause…

Well, that’s it over. Was a great conference. There was lots of interesting dicussion about many different topics. The digitial identifiers session was interesting. I’ve blogged about this before, but mostly about stuff that I thought up on while cycling. The overview from Geoffrey Bilder of CrossRef was interesting. What is a scientific paper was the most interesting, while metrics was most depressing (if useful). Come to think of it, the legal and ethical issues session was also depressing; perhaps, less useful because the answer always comes down to “it depends” and “pay a lawyer lots”. Google Wave was interesting, just because it was a big media spam thing, but I’d never got around to bother looking, so this saved me half-an-hour. The science far-future session was more heat than light, but still a relaxed way to wind down.

It will be interesting to see whether this conference goes; last year it was scientific blogging. Those at last year tell me there was more companies, and particular the publishers there this year. There was some tension here, which I suspect that they will feel over time. In the future, will the conference be an experiences meeting, where people who are using online technology talk about how the technology has impacted them and their science; will it be a place for discussion of science applied to the technology itself, with lots of evidenced statements about impact; or, will it become a trade fair for those who are developing, selling and, inevitably, seeking to control the digitial manifiestation of the outcome of science.

Going to try posting this from the train on the way home. Science Online, Science Onrails.

PS Found this excellent picture of myself looking pensive.

Image copyright by Joe Dunckley, released under Creative Commons, Attribution, Share-Alike, Non Commercial.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/steinsky/3848431053/

I’ve generally been reasonably impressed with wordpress since I moved to it from my old, emacs-driven system. It seems to work mostly and it’s reasonably easy to manage.

One problem has been the regularity of the updates; worse, they all tend to be security updates (2.8.4 was to correct a problem where a crafted URI allowed overwrite of the admin password). So, you have to update. Often.

Fortunately, wordpress provides an automatic mechnism for achieving this. Less fortunately, it doesn’t work for me. We’ve finally pinned down why, which is too tedious to explain, but I don’t like the mechanism anyway, as I have to give wordpress my username/password (for the command line, not for wordpress).

So, I’m trying another solution. Check the whole thing out of SVN. I’ve just moved over to this mechanism for the 2.8.4 upgrade and it seems to work. This is actually the same amount of effort as a regular manual upgrade; you just svn co rather than wget/unzip. In future, it should me much easier, though. Just a simple svn switch. No fiddling with moving wp-config across, and wp-content should be unaffected. Even better the one hack that I have had to apply to formatting.php every time should be automatically merged in, or will conflict — in which case, it will good to be warned.

I’ll post again in a few updates time if it all works; if this blog suddenly goes offline, well, probably this wasn’t such a good idea after all.

I’ve been meaning to go and see one of the outdoor performances in Jesmond Dene for a while. Last week, I finally got to one — Emma, by Jane Austen, on a lovely, bright friday evening.

The story itself isn’t really up to much. Almost all of the main characters are unlikeable and unengaging; Emma, herself, is an interfering, arrogant and affected snob, with no redeeming characteristics; she barely stands out against the characters who are meant to be unpleasant. Very little happens that is of particular interest; I can’t find it in my heart to be excited about a ball or a picnic. There wasn’t even the consolation of a few tragic deaths; the one funeral is a minor character, and you can’t take pleasure in that. During the big finale it all ends well for Emma who gets hitched; but, I felt sorry for her other half, and what was being inflicted on him.

Despite this, the adaptation and performance by Heartbreak Productions, was excellent. The actors shifted between multiple characters with ease, and then made full use of cheap theatrical tricks to make up for the simple set and small cast. The audience participation was funny without being irritating, and the dropped out-of-character to provide narration and expand on plot lines. They added to this with reflections on the story (“it’s all about women sitting on chairs, arguing about which chair they are going to sit on next”), as well as the occasional, gentle knob gag to keep the blokes happy.

At the end of it, I was insect-infested with a sore neck and backside from sitting on the grass, but had had a thoroughly enjoyable evening. Well worth seeing.