Yesterday was the SIG co-ordinators meeting for ISMB. One of the big and
recurrent issues (besides the timing of coffee breaks) was the timing of
ISMB. At 7 days, ISMB is a long, long conference and is a bit of a killer. Of
course, bringing it down to 4 days will mean that more events will run
concurrently. Live with it, I say.
Bio-Ontologies was a success, but I want to think about the future
(Blair-like, perhaps I am thinking of my legacy, as I will not chair it for
that much longer). Perhaps, "Bio-Ontologies: knowledge in biology" would be a
way to go — I want to move the workshop away from a technology and more
toward a function.
Originally published on my old blog site.
Today is the day of the Bio-Ontologies SIG meeting, which I have now
co-organised for 4 years or so. It’s a surprisingly large amount of work to
do, not least this year because we had 36 submissions. The organisation of
this is a large part of the effort, but it has made for a strong programme;
it’s gratifying to see that we have an audience of size to match.
09:10
We had a moment of worry when the first speaker didn’t register, but Mark
Musen is a notable replacement, talking about representing OBO to OWL
mappings.
09:30
Following Mark’s talk about using more rigourous models of OWL, Simon Jupp is
talking about using the more light-weight semantics of SKOS, which turns out
to be well suited for document navigation.
09:50
Lina Yip covers a familar problem &mdash…
My initial impressions that Vienna is not 24hr were confirmed today. Wandering
around the shops at 9:30, I was greeted with looks of amazement that I should
want to buy anything at such an ungodly hour. I found the electrical cord I
needed, and some sun tan cream; the chemist shop was small and prissy, with
signs for "laxa soft" everywhere; mute testimony that Viennese food is
Germanic — everything you can decently do with a sausage.
The city itself is not, to my mind, beautiful everywhere as the taxi driver
suggested, rather it is impressive. The buildings are large blocks, heavily
ornamented and shine in the sun. The streets are wide and gentle, with a
confusing combination of foot, bike, tram and car lanes. The street I am on —
Lassallestraße — is not only…
I’ve just got to Vienna. I got here at some stupid time, but I had time to pop
out and see the Prater. There’s an currently a film festival on, and there
were showing an outdoor film — sadly I’ve missed Dr Strangelove. I recognised
the ferris wheel from another film, Before Sunrise.
So far, seems like a nice city to me, although around here at least it’s
clearly not a 24hr city as everything was switching off.
Anyway, I won’t say more. I got here fine, but my luggage is in Paris as is my
power adaptor. Better hit the electrical store tomorrow.
Originally published on my old blog site.
The Mouth of the Tyne festival was excellent as always. I didn’t get to see as
much of it as I wanted, but I saw some great Blues (Stax Brothers), an
excellent French jazz band who were fabulous, the Blockheads who were
stonking. Finally, I got to see Courtney Pine again — I’ve managed to miss
him for the last 15 years, so it was particularly irritating that the rain
made me miss some of this.
Originally published on my old blog site.
I’ve been attacking email systems this week. I’ve been helping to
transfer email from the Nottingham exchange server upto Newcastle. The
process has not gone easily. I think that the problem is that
university IT departments think mostly about their current users,
rather than users coming or going elsewhere. To me this is a real
problem: for an academic, their correspondence is an essential
ingredient of the historical record, their knowledge of what they have
done.
Spurred on by this, I decided to recover all of my mail from the
archives where I have kept it, and place it into my current email
system. This is made easier for me because I have used Emacs for
pretty much my entire time on a computer; I remember a DOS based
application before that. I’ve moved from RMAIL …
Tried to install Feisty recently. Turned out to work fine (the proxy
business at install now works). But there were still problems. The
mouse configuration (I use a logitech marble mouse) was a
pain. Logitech make nice equipment but their devices never work
properly with anything else and are hell to configure. Combine this
with Xorgs bizarre configuration scripts (while they have sadly not
thrown away since the fork).
I find it incredible that no one has written a nice mouse
configurator, and more incredible that you have to restart X to see
what the effects are. This really needs to be sorted.
Originally published on my old blog site.
Blackfriars is a very posh resturant in Newcastle. I’ve been there a
couple of times, and the food is reasonably good. On monday, I eat
there; the veggie option is small but looked reasonable. I went for
the stuffed aubergine in the end. It came with breadcrumbs and
ratatouille (that is the contents of the aubergine cooked in
tomato), rather than the cous cous that was on the menu; a pity as it
happens, as the whole thing was rather too dry; something that would
probably not have affected the cous cous.
In general, it’s confirmed my opinion. Blackfrairs is okay, but when
you get down to it a polysyllabic menu, and artful arrangement on the
plate does not make up for the unspiried dishes and a lack of flair
for vegetarian food by the chef.
Course, the meat might be great. I c…
An interesting article on the BBC today about digitial
preservation. The issue is a well-known one, that file formats go out
of date very quickly. They have a chap from Microsoft showing that you
using a virtual machine you can still open word 3.0 documents; this
seems to miss the point, to my mind. Great, so I can still read it,
with my eyes, by looking at it. But can I compute over it? If we are
to take this approach, then it might make more sense to just print out
over thing that we want to store and save the paper.
I think that it’s good that we are moving toward open documentation
standards. Microsoft’s standardisation of their file formats is
welcome, if belated. However, it has to be acknowledged that a large,
6000 page specification is going to be a problem in the fu…
Went to see Into Great Silence last night. It’s a film about a bunch
of monks who don’t talk much; so the entire film is meant to engender
a feeling for the contemplative life. The filmmaker has gone to lots
of effort to make it peaceful and relaxing, while not too dull. He
uses lots of wacky angles, film, video, even super 8 by the look of
things. On the whole, it worked well; only a few people left, although
someone just behind snored through half an hour of it. I thought it
was overlong at over 2 hours.
I was rather moved by the serenity of the monks, by their enormous
sense of peace; they were also deeply worrying. There are only a few
pieces of dialogue: one was a reading which was rather rambling
gibberish about the trinity; the other was a interview (although the
film…