Sleep is for chelonians

It's aliiiive! (now with audio)

This blog has been in a vegetative state for the past -- what, two months? Can it really have been that long?

Well, I was busy. *petulant pout*

Anyway. I'm prodding it awake to plug (=advertise) my latest side-project.

inSCIght : the scientific computing podcast

Oh, it's not really MY project -- it's a collaboration with a bunch of other like-minded scientific computing geeks, mostly masterminded by ringleader Anthony Scopatz who recruited me to the podcast at Pycon* last March. I've been a panelist on a couple of episodes, and for a while that was the extent of my involvement.

But this week's episode is mine! My own. My precioussss...

Episode 12: Hacking Education: crowd sourcing for the win!

Feel free to make fun of my robot-mouse voice and be merciless in the comments.

* Pycon = Python programming language conference for which the registration website offers "Klingon" as a food preference option.

wget rocks my socks

Alright, this is me with my wannabe code monkey hat, singing the praises of a Unix command-line tool. I'll try to translate things into English where I can, but my apologies to y'all normals out there if I fail.

(Hey, at least it motivated me to write something on this blog! Nothing for weeks, then suddenly it's post upon post... what can I say, when it rains it pours.)

Simple English Wikipedia

I'm pretty sure everyone knows by now about Wikipedia, "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit". Well, I recently discovered, thanks to the always excellent webcomic xkcd, that there is also a simple-language version dedicated to "children, who might not understand the complicated articles in the English Wikipedia, and other people who are still learning English". The idea is not so much to simplify the content of articles, but to use more basic vocabulary. I find that a wonderful initiative.

Rock, paper, scissors, lizard, Spock

From my new favorite ultra-geeky show "The Big Bang Theory" comes this awesome variant of the classic rock-paper-scissors game.

Here's how it goes:

Too fast? Read the rules below the fold :-)

Now I understand

"Raving enthusiasm" doesn't begin to describe my boss's attitude towards Obama's presidential victory. It's like he's 8 years old and his birthday and Christmas have come early*/**.

* Not that I know if he celebrates Christmas -- it's interesting how living in a more diverse environment ends up challenging all these seemingly very basic assumptions.
** Not that I'm complaining, either... he's throwing us a party next week to demonstrate the new cocktail he invented in honor of our new President Elect.

Now, while I'm sure we're all very happy that the White House is finally going to be run by someone brainy, articulate and presumably competent (and who likes mutts), it all seemed a bit over the top to me... until I saw this picture.

Barack Obama is a Mac user. It all makes sense now. El Jefe has found his soulmate (I had to lie about having a PC to get hired here -- no not really; I didn't have a PC yet).

Note the Pacman sticker though. Two possible interpretations: A) he has a cute sense of humor, or B) he's also a drug user.

Well yeah, Pacman is a notorious Ecstasy junkie, as in the classic joke: "Video games don't affect kids. If Pacman had affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic pills and listening to repetitive music." Oops!

Domestic alchemy

Witness the amazing transformation of a sad fridge into a happy fridge.

The process is practically effortless and does not even require leaving the house.

Groceries ordered over the internet and delivered to your door. It's a kind of magic.

All the way from Reno

I've got me a new toy :-)

I'm not going to rhapsodize on how great it is just now, nor wax lyrical on how amazing it is to have so much screen real estate (24" is a pretty big diagonal) for such a small footprint, because that'd be just boring (not that whatever else I might write about would be considered worth interrupting the evening news for) but yeah, as I was about to say before these tiny digressions...

US economy rebounds... duh!

Well yeah, it was bound to, considering how much of my hard-earned (do I hear snickering?) Euro-cash I've been injecting into it.

Seriously, I'd say I'm almost single-handedly rebooting the economy of the state of Massachusetts at the very least; and I'm sure I'm having a net positive effect on other states via my Amazon.com purchases*.

But I'm calming down now; I'll leave it to the rest of the population to take up the slack, now that I've shown them The Way.

* Incidentally, this has been boosting my knowledge of US geography quite a bit thanks to the synergy of the UPS tracking system, Google maps, and the GPS-like/mapping function on my iPhone. Who ever said education and out-of-control consumerism are incompatible? Ah, I love package tracking. Although, it does have the potential to drive a person nuts, as this cartoon accurately ilustrates.

Kidding around

The Harvard Med School people sure don't kid around with safety, either in the lab or online --- I've had to attend "new researcher lab safety training" courses covering everything from cleaning up spills and evacuation protocols to packaging biological samples fro shipping; and in terms of access to online resources (which are extensive, including things like view of paychecks, benefits claims and orders for discounted transportation passes) it all seems pretty airtight.

So I was really amused and delighted to see, when I logged on to the "eCommons" portal that groups things like webmail access, newsfeeds and employee classifieds, that all that security wasn't choking creativity. The portal includes a "Preferences" tab that allows users to change the "skin", aka theme or graphical scheme of the portal interface, either by customizing it or selecting one of nine available designs. So far, so ordinary.

But among the available skins, you have --and I still can't believe it, though it's right in front of me-- one based on "Dungeons And Dragons" (the geeky role-playing game), complete with parchment textures and little swords framing your name at the top of the page, and one based on Austin Powers (the oversexed British spy/James Bond spoof) with Union Jack, lurid orangey colours and the "logout" button replaced by "BYE BABY". Makes quite a change from staid old UCL...

(for the record, I'm going with "Arctic White", which has a nice banner picture of snow-capped mountains and pine trees)

Giving us all a bad name

Well yes, I mean, lots of people already have a pretty bad image of research conferences as it is ("Hmm, so you're going to a conference, are you? Half a day of sitting in a room and the next four days of sunbathing and fine dining, am I right?" *wink wink* --- oh, spare me, I'm not in Industry *cue smell of sulfur*, I'm an academic *cue smell of roses and butterflies*).

So how serious does it sound when the first paragraph of a conference announcement reads like this:

CALL FOR PAPERS & EXPO
The Los Angeles/Anaheim area is known for its many renowned
attractions, such as Disneyland, Universal Studios and the
Hollywood Walk of Fame. Very few cities in the world offer
as much entertainment, excitement and diversity as Los
Angeles/Anaheim does.

The next paragraph clarifies: it is actually a research conference... for computer science and information engineering.

CSIE 2009 intends to be a global forum for researchers and
engineers to present and discuss recent advances and new
techniques in computer science and information engineering.

Pfft, computer geeks... they're in our namespaces, giving us legitimate science geeks a bad name.