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We apologise for the inconvenience

2010-02-05T19:48:00.002-08:00

Due to the upcoming FTPocalypse, there may be some disruption to the regularly unscheduled site. I'm not working particularly hard to fix this, but rest assured there is a non-zero amount of perturbation going on.

2010

2010-02-01T10:09:00.005-08:00

When he tired of official reports and memoranda and minutes, he would plug his US letter-sized iPad into the ship's information circuit and scan the latest reports from Earth. One by one he would conjure up the world's major electronic papers; he knew the URLs of the more important ones by heart, and had no need to consult the list on the back of his pad. Switching to the unit's headline aggregator, he would hold the front page while he quickly scrolled the headlines and noted the items that interested him.

Each had its own two-digit reference; when he punched that, the page thumbnail would expand until it neatly filled the screen and he could read it with comfort. When he had finished, he would pinch zoom back to the complete page and select a new subject for detailed examination.

Floyd sometimes wondered if the iPad, and the fantastic technology behind it, was the last word in man's quest for perfect communications. Here he was, far out in space, speeding away from Earth at thousands of miles an hour, yet in a few milliseconds he could see the headlines of any newspaper he pleased. (That very word "newspaper," of course, was an anachronistic hangover into the age of electronics.) The text was updated automatically on every hour; even if one read only the English versions, one could spend an entire lifetime doing nothing but absorbing the ever-changing flow of information from the Internet.

It was hard to imagine how the system could be improved or made more convenient. But sooner or later, Floyd guessed, it would pass away, to be replaced by something as unimaginable as the iPad itself would have been to Caxton or Gutenberg.

Edited from "2001: A Space Odyssey" by Arthur C Clarke, original excerpt

On Computing

2010-01-29T23:01:00.003-08:00

This is an iPad post. Tune out if you're sick of this stuff.

I've been watching with some degree of bemusement the reaction of people to the iPad and the very strictly limited feature set. I've debated the value of this product with people ad nauseam, and I've read a number of opinion pieces on the device. Most of all though, I am excited over the potential for this product to allow me to do my job a lot better.

For a very long time – longer than I care to admit – I've been a technologist for the sake of technology. Whenever the latest and greatest bit of technology came out, I'd immerse myself in it wholly, simply because it was new and shiny. My love affair with technology can be traced back to my Father, who repaired consumer electronics all the way back in the 80s. He'd come home with new TVs and VCRs and we'd sit and watch in awe as he fixed these arcane devices, and then act as QA while we not only took advantage of these increasingly sophisticated devices, but reported bugs in the systems themselves.

Once computers came out and we eventually got a hold of one of these newfangled devices, both me and my older brother took to the machines. We learnt about the devices from the inside out, and we became the masters of their dominion. My father, once the expert on electronics, now had to take a back seat to a pair of punk early tweens. He had the purchasing power, but we held all the keys to the workings of these arcane systems (literally since our first PC had a keyboard lock).

Fast forward a few years and we're still masters of this technology. We upgrade our machines by hand, we're manually assigning interrupts to peripheral devices, wrangling the most out of extended memory, and logging on to primitive bulletin board systems via this revolutionary modem device. Yet some things remained the same. We were still the resident experts. We owned the future.

Eventually, we grew up (ha!). We dutifully shuffled off to university to gain our "education". This is, as the custard maker said to the non-Newtonian liquid, where the plot thickens. Both my brother and I are studying computer engineering. However, instead of vanilla computer engineering, we're studying a double degree with biomedical engineering. It's no longer pure computing we're looking at, but this bizarre field of applied computing. It's here we learn about the wonders of the rest of the world. Anatomy, Physiology, Physics. You don't know wonder till you've opened up the chest of a toad, seen its lungs pop out, and looked at the blood coursing through the capillaries in the lung. It's enough to make you believe in God. Yet, at the same time, we're learning about the dark magiks of computing, algorithm development and CPU design. It's involved stuff, and to even know how a single sub-field works would require a lifetime. The computing, for a while becomes my focus. Yet, in the back of my head, there's a slight tingling, an inkling that maybe working on the biomedical stuff is kind of important.

My brother and I split paths after university. He began his PhD in the field of surgical simulation (or close enough), and I started moving closer and closer to molecular biology. University had taught me that computing skills were a commodity. There would always be someone else that had the skills to replace me. Yet, in molecular biology, I was again the guru. I performed magic with computers. And it was good.

Betraying my past – as every year passed, I became less and less interested in the computing. I used Linux on the desktop for many years. I stopped using it after I realised that it was actually stopping me from doing what I was most interested in doing. Solving problems. I became engrossed in problems of mass spectrometry, of proteomics, of glycomics. I compared these to the problems I solved when I was involved only in computing, and realised that I was simply playing on computers when I first embarked on this so-called career so many years ago.

This, I believe is the natural progression of any geek from a proto-geek to a whitebeard. The proto-geek is only interested in the technology. The whitebeard has seen so many technologies come and go, that the whitebeard only cares about the problems. The whitebeards look beyond spec sheets, and see the utility of the whole. They understand their place within a larger system that involves a large number of meatspace (human) components. I once had an argument in a bar, where two proto-geeks were comparing which operating system they used. As a user of Mac OS X, I was the subject of ridicule. I wasn't hard enough for them. They had been using Ubuntu for the past year, and it was more real computing than a Mac could ever be. The utility of the tools were never brought up, but instead the deviation from 80 columns and 20 rows of characters was the metric of "coolness". I guess, at some point of time, I was that person too.

As a geek, what we do has been steadily shifting away from gatekeeper of technology to custodian. Our value no longer comes from being the family member who "does computers" and knows how to burn a DVD. The role of geek is to become invisible. To tame and protect technology, and present it to the rest of the world while they do their jobs. This century, we're facing a whole bunch of problems, and we're going to need everyone's help to get through it. The last thing we need is technology getting in the way of the problem solving. Before I digress, the protection of technology is an important point. We're the only people that can stand up to attacks on freedom like the great firewall of Australia and net (non-)neutrality.

Apple positions itself at the intersection of the Liberal Arts and Technology. It's where I've been for at least the last 10 years, and it's the most effective place to be in computing. I've had a long journey through technology to get where I am. I'm not the only person here. Almost everyone in Social Networking belongs in this space too (to various degrees of effectiveness). Everyone in bioinformatics belongs here too (to various degrees of effectiveness). You can pick any field of endeavour, and see the effect of computing on it (to various degrees of effectiveness). Computing is pervasive, and integrated across all of society.

The iPad is the first public and loud death knell for computing as we know it. The first sign of the death of the late Twentieth century nerd. It's going to take a number of years before the revolution is realised, but it's been happening for a number of years, and it's not going to stop now. What you're hearing now, is the sound of inevitability. So, my advice to the people who still cling to their roles as gatekeepers of technology is this: If you want to have a job in the next decade, ask yourself what you're doing to help. If you can't answer how you're directly solving real, human problems, then you're going to find yourself out of place. If only that were true for the financial services sector too. *sigh*

In the future, if you want to know how successful any bit of technology is, don't look at the implementation. Look only at how well it solves a problem, how invisible the tech is (i.e. how easy it is to use) and how accessible it is (which includes price).

New Years Revolutions

2009-12-19T01:05:00.003-08:00

Somewhat oddly, I haven't posted anything up here for exactly a year. I personally blame the other micro-blogging sites out there (tumblr, twitter, facebook) for satiating my need for writing voluminous texts and treatises. Why labour over a long form piece, when your thoughts can be published live, in a stream of consciousness to the internet?

Today, I make amends. I've been driven to write this because, fundamentally I feel like I'm witnessing what can only be described as the apocalypse. Or, more accurately, the latest apocalypse to come knocking on our doorstep. As a society, we've had quite an interesting decade, in that we've faced a number of apocalypses, and we've managed to muddle through each of them quite well. At the beginning of this century, we were all scrupulously avoiding getting into lifts at the start of the year to avoid that dreaded Y2K bug. IT folks had actually managed to get together to fix that before any huge damage was caused, and the actual changeover passed with nary an incident. As my first apocalypse, I was somewhat disappointed in it.

Barely two years had passed before the next apocalypse arrived, in the form of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. I was pretty sure at the time that the world was going to war, and that "the world had changed". Again, once the shock had worn off, I ended up being disappointed by that apocalypse. The world had changed, for sure, but not in any of the ways that I had predicted. Political forces seemed to be working hard to stabilise the situation behind the scenes. If anything, I was picking up quite the reputation as the unreliable Nostradamus (Yes, I realise the irony).

Beyond the odd computer virus set to destroy the internet, the world was relatively calm for the next few years, until we first started hearing about this dreaded super-bug – the avian flu (ca. 2006). Again, I was sure this was a sign of the coming apocalypse. Having some knowledge of the method of action of this nasty bugger, I was even more sure that we were all doomed. Yet, the people at the CDC put some plans into place to handle the outbreak of this avian flu. I remember a lot of chickens were killed. I never received word on the plight of rubber chickens in China.

And so we lived with an outbreak of avian flu every year. It loomed over us, a malevolent presence, only recognisable through the hideous face-mask deformations it caused in its victims. On every report of a new virus sub-type, I stopped, and thought that maybe this would be the one that would become a pandemic. I acclimatised to this situation, safe in the knowledge that I could just buy drugs off those smart cookies at the CDC. Or that was the plan until the global financial apocalypse hit – seriously threatening my ability to buy antiviral agents.

As far as apocalypses go, the GFC was pretty convincing. It had all the hallmarks of an apocalypse: sudden onset, dire consequences, impotent rage, and a rain of bankers from the sky. This time, I was pretty sure the world was about to turn to shit. So, I took precautions with my wealth, became more cautious, and generally tried to protect myself from the fallout of the eventual collapse of the financial system. It was obvious the whole system was a house of cards, based upon something so ephemeral as confidence in the system and the belief that insane financial risks are worth taking. Again, against all odds, the situation was stabilised. I still don't know what was done, or whether anything was really fixed, but somehow our economy hasn't been sent back to the stone age.

2009 brought another outbreak of flu – this time from our porcine friends. I was worried about it again this time, but I wasn't panicked. I knew what the precautions to take were, and that in good time, the vaccines will be released to stem the spread of the flu. The plans worked as expected, and maybe we were lucky, but we didn't suffer through a deadly pandemic. Crisis averted.

Which brings us to today. Today, I sat in dismay as I saw the Copenhagen climate discussions collapse. For all the apocalypses that I've showed undue panic over, climate change is one apocalypse that until now, I haven't been able to get worked up over. The idea seemed too abstract, the consequences too far away. Yet, over time, I've been reading more and more. I get the problems now. I see what's coming down the track, and submerged island states are the least of our worries. It's pretty grim, and it's not the world that I want to live in.

Fundamental to my worries are that we're going to live in a less opulent society. This may sound very self-serving at first blush. That I'm a limousine liberal, a caviar-swilling socialist. However, I look at this capitalist freedom as a buffer-zone, that allows people to actually voluntarily be good people. I worry that if you push people into a corner, if they become desperate, or angry enough, they'll do terrible things. I had this realisation when I went to visit Dachau. That, whilst walking amongst the apparatus of a horrendous social machine, all of this was created by people who weren't madly evil, but by people who, in the most banal of ways, became these monsters (see Zimbardo's Stanford Prison experiment). That the capacity is there in everyone worries me, and I worry what's going to happen in Africa when already desperate people become even more stressed by their surroundings.

I'm willing to accept that perhaps the climate models are wrong. God knows I've modelled enough stuff to find out my predictions are totally off base. I'm going to err on the side of science though, and go with the models until there's compelling evidence otherwise. However, there's a whole bunch of great reasons to cut down on usage of fossil fuels. If you liked the War in Iraq, you're going to love renewable energy, as it frees up the US for more imperialistic action to exert political (or otherwise just for you hawks!) pressure upon some pretty terrible regimes. Are you worried about the fact that the economies of the west seem to be based upon financial services, and the sale of fart apps on the Iphone? Have no fear! You can build entire new industries upon the development of green technologies. There's so much money to be made it's nuts! Are you an investment banker, and you're worried that all this pesky regulation is going to come in, and ruin your coke-filled lunchtime meetings? With the introduction of carbon-offset trading, you've got a great chance to destroy yet another economy! This time, you're not even playing with the lives of people – you can play with this inconsequential thing called the environment!

Given all these great reasons to do something, why am I fundamentally disappointed? It's because, at a time when we really needed clear action, we were hit with the reality of our society. I don't doubt the motivations of the negotiators at Copenhagen. I don't think they didn't try hard enough. I just don't think we're going to get a political solution to this problem. Which leaves us in a remarkable position. In 1869, about 182 km from the city that my family is from in India, a bloke was born. He had an interesting life. Unlike Obama, he didn't win a Nobel prize. He did talk a lot though. One of the things he said was "You must be the change you wish to see in the world". It's stuck with me. It's the kind of thing I think should stick with you too.

With the failure of diplomacy, and the reluctance of society to change its ways, we need a back-up plan to get out of this situation. So here's what I say: Be that change. Wake up every day, and ask yourself what you're doing to DIRECTLY help the situation, and if you're not helping, find a way to help. Everyone can get involved. What's the goal? To develop technologies that will either a) obviate the need for fossil fuels, b) mitigate the damage done by climate change, or c) directly protect those at greatest risk. If you have skills that could be useful to the development of technologies, get your arse on over and start working on it. If you're tangentially related, you can help too. For example, graphic designers aren't just useful for making snazzy t-shirts. Scientists need all the help they can to make diagrams. Help them make clear easy to understand diagrams. Another science example – IT people can give some time to some labs, making sure their data is well organised, archived and published to avoid any East Anglia climate research shenanigans. I don't know why Google doesn't come in and just devote a whole block of its staff to running the IT infrastructure for places like the EBI. They're the best in the world at this, and if climate change is as important a problem as we all think it is, I think we should have the best and brightest working on it. If you don't think you can do anything – you're wrong. Bake a cake for people you know working on this problem. Have a word with them, and let them know you appreciate it. Take advantage of your social network. Find someone working on this problem, and help them directly solve at least part of the problem.

In 10 years, I haven't learnt much about apocalypses. I still get worried whenever I hear about them. However, I'm more optimistic about our ability to mitigate this upcoming apocalypse. But, we're only going to get through this if we get our best and brightest working on this problem. So, instead of lobbying politicians, it's time to lobby people and get them to understand what it means to everyone to solve this problem. Finally, the poster that inspired this whole rant (click on the image to go buy it).

If you know anyone that needs to be inspired to act, I think it's $80 well worth spending.

Aspirational tendencies

2008-12-19T00:58:00.005-08:00

So, for those that don't know I'm back at my parents place. The nice thing about this is that I have access to the copious junk that I had left lying around when I hastily exited the country. One such piece of junk is this literature that I produced in high school back in London. Called (somewhat unoriginally) "Me, Myself and I" it is the autobiography of a 12 year old north London boy. I never really understood the logic of having a 12 year old write an autobiography, but the fact is, it exists. As you'd expect, the vast majority of the book is very dry, factual information, since I had about two great stories to tell about my life thus far, and they involved either something falling on me, or me falling into something. However, right at the end of this 38 page odyssey, there are two pages of glorious aspirational prose. They're linked at the start of this post, but I'll transcribe them here, for the graphically challenged readers. I'll leave the interpretation of this wholly up to you, but I've handily hyperlinked a few key terms.

Me in the future

20/10/2029
Dear diary, this year as I now recall, war is raging and robots rule the land, these are the afterefects (sic) of a war, Terminators walk the skull stricken land and the last Terrans hide awaiting their warriors to return, then a Terminator bursts in and after a great struggle wipes out the last of humanity.

To be honest that stuff was in the national archives and was made by a drunk geaser (sic). Most people think I was mad leaving science as I was getting too old. I would have kept the job but I never got enough pay, thats why I changed to Sierra on-line, you get a good pay and stuff like that, but I also love computers, I even wrote that down in an autobiography. Nice talking to ya diary, see you tomorrow!

P.S. - Today I got up on the wrong side of bed, but I really brightened up when I finished "SQ100 — ATTACK!", when I got home the kids were out and I had the most delicious meal in the world. I've finally got Sound Blaster Pro III. I hope I get a good sleep!

My hopes and dreams

My hopes are to achieve something, even if it means getting more merits than anyone else. Everyone says that I should become a scientist or a computer programmer. well, have I got something for them, I'm going to try to be both. My dreams are to Invent something, and make up my own computer application and start up a buisness (sic). My hearts set on computers and science so a job just between would be perfect. We'll just see what my exams bring up.

Me as a parent

For a start I won't let my kids go wild.
I'll just keep things nice and mild.
They better be a whizz kid
or I'll flip my lid.
I'll get a nice computer for them
and play with them,
I'd take Sunday off for them.
Now I'll be firm, let them be bad
but they better not get told off
I'll make sure they hve friends
and that's all I need to say.

Czars in the US

2008-12-08T22:23:00.002-08:00

Drugs czar - est. 1982
Terrorism czar - est. 1992ish
Cybersecurity czar - est. 2005
War czar - est. 2007
Copyright czar - est. 2008
Car czar - est. 2008/9
Czar czar - est. ?

Intelligence failures

2008-12-02T15:14:00.000-08:00

I was watching the news today, specifically about the Government reaction to the attacks. What struck me about the whole reaction was that people were very quick to blame intelligence failures for the lack of protection. It mirrors statements given by the US government regarding the Iraq invasion (see Bush's biggest regret), 9/11 or the Bali bombings. Interestingly, there was no intelligence failure regarding the London bombings.

It's starting to come out now, that there was actually intelligence pointing towards some kind of event like the Mumbai attack happening, but there was a failure to act upon the intelligence. It seems that the generic intelligence failure is a handy crutch, blaming these nameless and faceless intelligence operatives, who by their very nature cannot be held to account for their supposed failures. Could you imagine James Bond being hauled in front of a parliamentary committee?

The truth of the matter is that these "intelligence failures" are really more like a failure to identify and remedy threats. The decision-making and analysis at the appropriate levels of government is broken, and the capability to make good decisions seems limited. Rather than fix this, it is a lot easier to manipulate the language again, and just invent the meaningless concept of intelligence failure, which has decent recognition in the public.

How to fix the PhD system

2008-11-05T10:55:00.002-08:00

Ok, so here's my grand plan for fixing two problems I see with the PhD system - a) Sacrificing 3 years of rewards for a payoff which is entirely abstract (a "title") and b) The exploitation of later stage PhD students as slave labour.

Put simply, there should be significant pay/bursary increases for PhD students every year of their PhD. Each year should present an increase in pay up to the point of the end of the allotted time for the PhD student, where they will receive the salary of a postdoc. Doing this allows the student to be incrementally rewarded for performance over time, and will stop the often seen symptom burnout. Anyone who says that PhD students are doing their work for the love of science are big filthy liars.

Another big benefit of this is that eventually it gets very expensive for a lab to keep around PhD students. They have an incentive to get the PhD student out of the door so that they can save some money. Rather than keeping experienced students around because they actually know what they're doing, it becomes way too expensive to keep them. The best bit is, early PhD students can be paid less, since they don't have the experience, and you can take your chances to find good PhD students. Since it also becomes much more expensive to have a PhD student, there will be fewer students. This can be managed by possibly making the rewards scheme competitive. The bottom 10% of students don't get a pay rise, and will be gently encouraged to go away.

Comments people?

Privacy, and how to maintain it on Facebook

2008-10-08T10:41:00.005-07:00

I'm hearing a lot of smack about how people dislike the new Facebook intently. What people are kind of missing is how the new Facebook really helps you protect your privacy. Let's say you have some friends who are - to put it gently - technologically a few steps up from Homo neanderthalensis and bashing weird black blocks with sticks. These people may or may not be the same kind of people who randomly add friends, or are very loose with their passwords. These people present a liability to your privacy - private information about you can leak out through these people.

On the other hand, there are some things that you really want to control the flow of information for regardless of how special/re-gifted your friends are. In these cases, you have a limited number of people that you wish to share information with. These limited groups of people have often anachronistic names such as "Family" and "Friends". While there is the possibility for confusion with using such nomenclature, it is often useful to remember that your "Family" is genetically related to you somehow, and are usually around you during Christmas and other holiday periods to inflict maximal pain and suffering. Similarly, your friends are the people who you see in the physical world more than once, and who you drink with to alleviate the aforementioned pain and suffering. Poking your friends just because you're bored may in fact lead to either them not being your friends, or a slap around the head.

We have identified three groups of people here: The Friends, The Family, and The Privacy Train Wrecks (also known as Morons). Now, let's think of some scenarios where you can decide which of these groups of people should, and should not see your private information.

Example 1: The mobile phone number. It's usually pretty handy to have contact details on hand on your Facebook page, so that if anyone needs to contact you, they've got a way to get direct access to you. Here's the thing though, you don't want these Morons getting access to your phone numbers. What you'd like to do is block them from accessing this. Conveniently, there's an option to do this. Simply go to your Profile privacy settings, go to "Contact Information" and click on "Edit custom settings" for your Mobile phone. In the "Except these people" area, start typing Moron Figure 1. It should select the group for you. Once you select it Figure 2, you have now successfully excluded all Morons from seeing your mobile phone number.

Example 2: Pictures from that time that you were shooting up crystal meth. Let's say, for example, that you're a big fan of crystal meth. I mean, who isn't these days Figure 3? The thing is, you were shooting up crystal meth at your last private party, and frankly, you don't want the whole world seeing what you look like. So, let's say you've got pictures from your crystal meth sessions that you only want to share with your family, since you know, they're paying for rehab. To let your family see your pictures, just go and edit the album that you are stashing your pictures in, and change the privacy settings Figure 4. What you want to make sure is that some of your friends can see the album, and type in the group name Figure 5. Don't forget to change the network setting so that none of your networks can see the pictures. Now, you can be sure that only your family can see these pictures.

2008-04-07T07:38:00.003-07:00

Imagine, for a moment, that your boss asks you to write a very detailed report on what you've been doing. Then imagine that it has to cover every conceivable detail. Then imagine that everything you did was right. Then imagine that your work covers three years. Then imagine that you've got one of those anal retentive perfectionist personalities, and so even your crappy diagrams have to look perfect. Then imagine that your boss isn't even going to look at that report. That's a thesis in a nutshell.

Kids these days

2008-04-03T04:05:00.001-07:00

This post was written in April 2008, but lay dormant on my hard drive until I was bored waiting for Santa on Christmas eve, so I've finished it off, and am just going to pretend I published it in April. I'm currently cleaning up the English in a chapter of the thesis, so I'm writing blog posts in order to warm up the part of the brain that houses my long-dormant writing ability. Plus, it's not exactly fun rewriting large sections of text that you've already written.

I was reading slashdot this morning - specifically a story about the blackjack teams at MIT and a couple of comments there made me start thinking. A couple of people posting there are owners of businesses, or are independent consultants who dropped out of school. They're probably the same age as me, and I probably had the same access to technology as they did. So what exactly is the difference between me and them? I stayed in school.

There's a great commencement speech by Steve Jobs in which he evinces the benefits of dropping out. Given that I was about 15 when the big tech bubble began inflating, I was in a good position to do all this kind of tech stuff. Admittedly, I was studying to finish high school at the time - but even after that, at 18 there was ample time to try and start something up before all the cash dried out. Instead, I stayed on the academic treadmill, hoping for the eventual payoff once I finished university. What I didn't realise was that as I was finally (and happily) finishing off university, I'd find myself going through the same thing five years later.

The Brits announced their new coins yesterday, and I think they look pretty good. Most of the negative reaction, as far as I can gauge is that Britannia has been removed, and there's no representation of Wales on the coins. I don't know where the strong nationalistic feelings towards Britannia come from, but I can understand that people might be a bit miffed that she's not on the coins any more. The omission of Wales is somewhat of a non-issue, since the coins never represented Wales to start with, and it's not exactly a step backwards.

On the coins themselves, I think they look great - especially the 50p piece. They were designed by a guy called Matthew Dent, who was 23 when he submitted the designs to the competition.

There was this sort of running gag on The Panel ages ago, where they'd find some young whippersnapper, and comment how the achievers of the current day are getting younger and younger. This isn't particularly surprising in a way — with the improvement in the availability of education, the general improvement (at the top end) of education, and the widespread availability of technology that would have appeared as "magic" ten years ago, it's becoming easier and easier to skip the struggle part, and just get on with doing something.

That's not to take away anything from these prodigies. It takes a certain level of skill to achieve all they have achieved, and the circumstances simply allowed them to take advantage of it, whereas in other situations, this talent may have been laid to waste.

As mentioned at the start of this post, I had actually started scribbling this post together in April of '08. Right now, it's December, and the planet is on the precipice of a worldwide recession, or perhaps worse. The original theme of this post was that I had perhaps squandered my opportunities to take the risks, and invest myself in one of the two tech bubbles that I have seen pass. Now that I am actually on the other side of the academic treadmill, I'm a little pensive about drawing the conclusion that it has all been useless. Looking around at peer success stories, the gut feeling is, of course, that I should have taken advantage of the Golden age of capitalism while I could, milked it for all that it was worth, and hoped that I could ride off any wealth I built up for the rest of my life.

Rationally speaking, I believe the PhD has been a fantastic experience for me, as it has almost totally weaned me off the collection of physical artefacts, just for the sake of it. In fact, at this point of time, I take a totally utilitarian approach to my possessions. If it's helping me, I'll keep it. I guess it helps to know that you can live on a very modest salary, few trinkets, and still have the time of your life.

A year ago, the answer to the question as to whether I would have been better off leaving the educational system earlier would have been an emphatic yes. However, in light of this perception changing event, I wonder if I perhaps am in a better position now, since my world hasn't changed significantly at all (yet). Sure, there aren't so many jobs in industry out there, and there's probably no chance I'm going to be earning ludicrous moneybags worth of cash. But then, I now don't think it was ever the right for anyone to do so.

A disclaimer here: I have no idea if this credit crunch is going to affect the science industry at all. Not even the slightest idea. So, what I've written up there is correct for the end of 2008. There's still a chance it may all go to hell in 2009. Merry Christmas :P

Seal

2008-04-01T10:55:00.002-07:00

I'm writing again.

First of all, I performed my first rick-roll today. It was glorious. There was a message board on Facebook, chock-full of pro and anti seal-hunt sentiment. Emotions were high, arguments specious. I felt that I should do my best to add to the discourse on the board, so I found my favourite link to Rick, and pasted this message in:

I think anyone that supports the seal hunt should see this first hand to see how cruel you can be to small animals:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBGIQ7ZuuiU

I then sit back, and wait for the replies to come - you know, someone would get it, and figuratively scream in agony as they get rolled. There will be general ROFLing. Instead I get nothing. I give up, and go to get a coffee. When I return, I'm the recipient of a message from some random person called Dylan:

I'm very curious as to whether or not that video is ANOTHER video made by PETA or the Sea Shepherd organization to spread their lies and propaganda. I'm also curious as to why you'd bother joining a group that supports the seal hunt when you so obviously do not. You should educate yourself

Yes, Rick Astley is a member of PETA.

Then, a random link appeared to me in my newsreader. It's a link to the exhibition for Stanley Donwood in Japan. Linked off there is a blog. It's about his creative process, and I save it in my newsreader to have a read of later.

And then I write this post. You see, I realised something. The internet is the great democratiser, it gives anyone with a browser a voice. It's communication on a massive scale. However, the truth of the matter is you don't want to talk to anyone. What you really want to do is listen to people who do know what they're talking about. People with some kind of authority. That's the real magic. Right now, I can read the musings of an artist, and learn about his creative process as it happens. It's there, available to me, raw and direct. It allows modes of communication between people that would never otherwise have existed. However, it also introduces noise. Noise like debates over seal hunting - essentially emotional and moral debates, which are repeated ad nauseum on an annual basis, when the latest flock of high school graduates decide they want a cause to give meaning to their life.

No, I'll care about sealing when I find someone whose business it is to know about this. Someone who is actually hunts seals for a living. A scientist who is caring for the ethical treatment of the animals. Until then, I could not care less about the ramblings of activists one way or the other. Unless someone is stupid enough to give them power, in which case, it's my business to make sure they don't screw me over.

I know, there's a great deal of irony about posting this rant up on the interwebs. But a) you don't have to read this and b) I wanted to gloat over a fantastic rick-roll.

I'm back

2007-12-11T04:42:00.000-08:00

For those of you who haven't been talking to me on Faceblerg, the blog is back, after a small technical hiccup. I still don't have time to write anything - but at least you can read the old stuff again!

Office woes

2007-08-13T02:34:00.000-07:00

For the past couple of weeks, I've been avoiding writing Word documents or opening up Excel spreadsheets as my installation of Office had mysteriously died. I took the time out on the weekend to prepare my laptop for a full reinstall, since I figured the machine was getting massively hosed from all the different things I've been trying out on it.

I ended up not doing the reinstall, as I kind of wanted to put an encrypted home directory (I fear the Government) on the machine, which would mean archiving off my iPhoto library, which would mean spending US$25 on a tool to do that. All of which was a bit much for a Sunday afternoon. So, I stuck with the suboptimal install on the machine.

It's lucky I actually did that, since I finally got sick of the problem, and googled myself a solution. It turns out, the problem lies with updating the prebinding. Basically, prebinding is a performance hack used to make dynamic libraries not so dynamic, and is generally a very good thing. Unfortunately, a number of Java dynamic libraries (from older versions it seems) were breaking the prebinding, so the whole prebinding operation was failing, resulting in our lovely Rosetta applications failing too.

The fact that I can actually go in to the console, play around with prebindings, and fix my computer when it stops working optimally is one of the reasons I love using Mac OS X. It's like the best Linux ever.

Hiren is writing a blog post.

2007-07-12T09:05:00.000-07:00

Like some kind of zombie, I'm back if only just to let my dear RSS enabled readers know that I'm still alive. It's summer, and I've been pretty busy. I went to Barcelona last month, which was a massive hoot. Last week, I was in the slightly colder Dublin (no pictures I'm afraid). Those of you waiting for an overly long blog post or essay, I'm afraid you're going to have to wait a bit longer. The abundance of summer BBQs and other outdoors activities (coupled with an increased workload) mean that I don't have time to write my usual drivel. If you're after poorly formulated drivel, you can always hit me up on Facebook, where you'll find craftily crafted status messages written in the third person. I'm considering the implications of taking Facebookisms into the real world - talking in the third person, running around with a spray can tagging people. Following these people around for hours, only to get bored, and then to start following their (good looking) friends around, until you finally find yourself amongst a group of people banding together to try and get someone's child named Batman.

Late night photoshop session

2007-05-30T17:12:00.002-07:00

You can't Dutch this

2007-05-04T06:12:00.001-07:00

Last week I didn't spend much time hooked up to the digital sewer pipe that is the internet. Instead, I spent a week in the Netherlands, ostensibly for the EUROCarbDB annual meeting, but in reality it was yet another excuse to meet up with the Glyco-cabal that I've been getting to know over the past 5 years, and chat over a few tasty Belgian beverages.

We had our group meeting in a place called WageningenNetherlands. This place is known as the Life sciences city - a surprisingly accurate tag-line, since it's a largely drab city with a tiny social and entertainment district, and often smells of chicken and cow manure. On the upside, at least I didn't have to pay for being there. It was of course, good to meet up with the old crowd again - I keep running into Niclas all over the place, Tina was around, and I got some good time in with the other team members in EUROCarbDB. We had a pretty successful meeting, and in an uncharacteristic wellspring of optimism, I left thinking that the whole thing could actually work.

A quick note about drugs in the Netherlands. For a country that's meant to be all liberal about drug usage, I saw hardly any people smoking in the country. It's not that smoking was banned in all these places - there were ashtrays at every single table I sat down at - but it just seems like people don't particularly like smoking. I'd like to say that's a clear message that prohibition and control doesn't work, but I think it's more of a sign that the Dutch care about their health too much. It must be all that bike riding that they do.

After spending time in Wageningen, Alessio and I stuck around in the Netherlands to hit Utrecht and Amsterdam. Joining us on our little adventure was Anita and Sarah - from HeidelbergDeutschland. Getting out from Wageningen, I found the rest of the Netherlands to be a much cooler place. I've been singing the praises of UtrechtNetherlands to anyone who will listen. Like my fawning over Gothenburg, Utrecht is a city with a really good atmosphere. It's primarily a student city, so walking around you see so much street art all over the place, it's a real feast for the eyes. Also - as Anita mentioned to me - although Heidelberg is a pretty town, it's more of a panoramic pretty town. All the good pictures of Heidelberg really need the castle or the old bridge in them. However, with Utrecht, you get the feeling that it's a bunch of really interesting smaller spaces. Spaces that reminded me of LondonUnited Kingdom 20 years ago. Walking around on the streets, amongst the buildings, I could have imagined myself riding my bike there.

AmsterdamNetherlands is another city altogether. It's cool, and it's bizarre, and it's big. It's not my favourite place though. I didn't feel as immediately comfortable in Amsterdam as I did in Utrecht. The big issue was that I fell into a bit of a tourist trap there. You go and do all the touristy things, and you end up missing out on the real value in Amsterdam, which is their great subcultures and street art scenes. To get into that you really need to know someone who is not only living in the city, but also is into the scenes themselves. I guess Amsterdam is like Radiohead. Both are great, but you really need to spend a lot of time with them to fully appreciate their character.

What you don't need time to get into is the Koninginnendag celebrations which were going on in the country on the 30th. The streets were filled with people, parties blasting out of every open window, and every second person with a turntable, massive speakers and stacks of wax. We spent a fair amount of time wandering the town, getting a feel for the whole thing. It's certainly an experience. The flea-markets during the day were pretty interesting, although I think you're better off going to Etsy to get your handcrafted goods. I ended up picking up a mid-century gas mask bag, along with a real life working gas mask to go with it. You never know, it might be useful some time in the future.

The tipping point

2007-04-12T22:43:00.001-07:00

I've been a little hidden for the past few weeks - as some people correctly surmised, I'm in the process of doing a spot of writing and coding. That, and I've been trying to take advantage of the great outdoors. It's actually been an unusually warm spring so far (if you discount the light snow that we had on the first day of spring), and bodes very well for the upcoming summer. The weather here is just about perfect.

OpenOffice and Subversion

2007-03-26T04:09:00.000-07:00

This post takes the nerd all the way to 11. I'm in the midst of writing up a big report, and naturally, I'm using LaTeX and OpenOffice to make up the documents, so that in the event of catastrophic machine failure, I can go back into the stone age and use Linux if I get desperate. Contingency plans are where it's all at. Anyway, my boss likes reading stuff in Word format, so he can make changes to the document there, so I just really need to export from LaTeX to Word. That part isn't so much of a problem - but I'd also like to keep track of changes I'm making to the documents and the diagrams. Each word document I make for my boss should live on a branch, and then I can merge in changes from the trunk back onto the branch and so on. Thing is, I can't figure out how to get any OpenOffice document to play nicely with version control. First of all, OpenOffice uses a binary format for its data, so there is no way I can add svn keywords to the document. The second problem is that there's a long standing bug in OpenOffice draw which means that I can't insert arbitrary fields into OpenOffice.org draw documents. This means that my drawings can't have a versioning watermark on them - which is useful if I've got lots of hard copies flying around. Does anyone have any ideas how to deal with this?

Snow? Snow?

2007-03-21T02:49:00.000-07:00

21^st March, and it's snowing here. Someone needs to do something about this. Now.

My Chemical Romance

2007-03-19T02:26:00.000-07:00

Sleep - when not being used as a verb - can often be used as a noun. Being a greedy little human, I try to get as much of this noun as possible. This endeavour is becoming increasingly hard nowadays. In the evenings, you're either working late, in the gym, down the pub, or doing all the domestic things that you haven't had a chance to do (such as late night shopping at Rewe or the Penny - 10 O'Clock shopping!). Looking over my average day, I used to wonder exactly how I managed to maintain any kind of chemical balance in my body. I don't eat particularly healthily, exercise happens in bursts - three times a week, the pub is all about the alcohol and copious second-hand nicotine (damn you and your lax laws Germany), and I spend my day at work downing cups of coffee to cover the lack of sleep I get.

I've learned to stop worrying about it now, and just to embrace the dream of better living through chemistry. To that end, I ordered a massive pack of Penguin mints. My trips on the bus in the mornings usually are pretty short - or at the very least they feel short as I fall asleep when I get on the bus, and then wake up at work. I tried my first bus trip this morning with the caffeine mints, and the mints work absolute wonders. I can now cut out coffee as a drink and go back to tea, since coffee was only really a drug delivery mechanism for me.

This whole practical usage of chemicals thing got me thinking about which other chemicals I could use to improve my health. The benefits, of course, need to outweigh the detrimental effects to my health (both long and short term), but I'm sure there's a whole world of chemical hacks you can make to get the best performance out of your body. In that spirit, I happened to come across this quote from bash:

<PhoenixBourne> Ok, so a friend of mine had an AWESOME idea at school <PhoenixBourne> You know rohyphonol? (whatever the spelling is) <linforcer> Is he gontna make a trebuchet <linforcer> no <PhoenixBourne> You know date rape drugs? <linforcer> Sure <PhoenixBourne> Right, rhyphonol is one of these. It knocks you asleep after an hour or two. <PhoenixBourne> I should also mention, a side affect of rhyphonol is amnesia of events whilst under influence of the drug. <PhoenixBourne> Now, a friend of mine had this idea: 1) Prepare ingredients 2) Take rhyphonol 3) Bake cake 4) Fall asleep 5) ?????? 6) Wake up 7) CAKE?! CAKE! Where did this come from?! <linforcer> SURPRISE CAKE!!!!!!

In the comment section I'll add any new ideas I have for practical usages for controlled substances as I come up with them, with an aim to have a list of 20(ish) innovative drug hacks. I welcome any suggestions on the comments.

Vindication

2007-03-14T05:26:00.000-07:00

I wasn't the only person who thought the ban of an ad where a toddler is driving an SUV was stupid. Boy, do I have egg on my face.

English is a beautiful language

2007-03-06T11:16:00.000-08:00

.. even though what they should really have done, if there was any justice in the world, is smash the desk to pieces, select the longest wooden splinters they could find, then drive them firmly into their imbecilic, atrophied, world-wrecking rodent brains.

This man, he is my hero.

Spiffing up

2007-02-18T12:14:00.000-08:00

I've spent a few hours spiffing up the photos section. It's now pulling data directly from my Flickr account, and making up a set of purty looking flash slideshows. You know it's cool.

Oz Day

2007-01-27T02:33:00.000-08:00

I had large plans for Australia day. Involving a BBQ and a case of VB. These plans had their genesis in my trip to Gothenburg, and witnessing the insanity that was the Dancing Dingo. The plan (basically) was to get a BBQ, trundle it out to the middle of Marktplatz, cook up food and drink beer in a safari suit, possibly wearing an Aussie flag cape. Like all my really good plans, it was wholly idiotic, and I had to give up after I realised I didn't have a BBQ, any VB, or a safari suit.

I tried to make up for it - I made a special trip to the Australian Juice store near my place, and had a chat to Steve, the guy running it. I felt kind of stupid just going in there to say hi, so I ended up buying a smoothie. For future reference, if anyone asks you if you want a cold drink in -2 weather, the correct answer is no.

Later that evening, I met up with Geoff and the fabled Amanda - two Australians who I had recently met. It was a good evening - thankfully no Waltzing Matilda being sung, and a decent number of brews imbibed. It didn't really compare to say sitting around in the sun with the Js in the background, but the weather turned out quite nicely - with the snow falling as we left the pub.

To be honest, I don't have much to write about in terms of funny stories, or pointless debate. I just wanted an excuse to post up a picture of the snow. It's the only snow we're getting this year.