Went to see the wonderously named Devon Sproule last night at the Cumberland Arms. The venue was wonderful; an old fashioned boozer, comfortable, with an open fire and an equally open view over the post-industrial view of the Tyne, nestled in the less than salubrious surroundings of the Byker Bridge: the pub predates the bridge, it seems.

The gig room is small, closed and deeply personal, painted in red and wood. My legs were cramped for the whole time, because if I stretched out I would have kicked the stage mic stand over. It suited Devon Sproule down to the ground. The gig was gentle, intense and personal. Her music is lyrical, her guitar fluent and her voice delicate; there's a slight tendancy toward being little girlish, but it wasn't overwhelming. In the second half, she was supported by bass, drums and later pedal steel, but Devon managed to cut through none-the-less. When the room got hot, the fire escape doors got opened; I listened to the music while watching the British buses and trains rolling past. I like to think that, perhaps, the music bleed out over onto the bridge, and caught a few people who wondered where it all came from.

One of the best gigs that I've been to for a long time, at a perfect venue. I'll be back there again, thats for sure.

Just got home. Tomorrow, I am going to Edinburgh, but I've left my laptop power supply at work. I'm not going to pick it up and get the train at 7:30.

Pretty pathetic really. Why do laptops all have different power requirements? I can see varying voltage requirements, but all the different shapes and sizes? At the end, this variety is not for any good reason, but for an economic imperative. Vendor lock-in, to the direct deteriment of the user.

Going to be interesting doing a workshop laptop-free for the first time in ages. I'm falling back to old technology — pen and paper.

Busy weekend! I watched Gattaca last night also. I have to say, that I was unimpressed. The story was contrived, unbelievable and with a cheesy "human nature conquers all" happy ending. The design and direction was quite interesting, lots of angles, single colour-washed shots, with 50s or 60s stylism everywhere, except that it's all been done before from Brazil onwards. The film has a big message hidden within it — hidden in the sense of crassly stamped over the entire enterprise, with a sense of moral self-importance rarely seen outside of Star Trek.

Music's good though.

Finally finished Life is Beautiful last night, which I started last weekend, and have on rent from Amazon for nearly a month. Very strange film; how did anyone come up with a slapstick holocaust film? It was wonderfully acted, funny and adept. The story is compelling, sad and, of course, beautiful.

I found the second section rather disquieting. The concentration camp was basically clean, the inmates reasonably well-fed. Just occasionally, the gas chambers and slag heaps were thrown into your face. I didn't find it exploitative at all, though. So, perhaps, the disquiet comes from the subject matter. I guess, bringing humour to the holocaust allows the audience to think of it afresh.

Saw Thea Gilmore and Erin McKeown in the Sage, hall 2 on Friday. We were sitting in the seats which seats behind the stage — strange, but I quite like it there, because you are very close and can hear the sound outside of the amps. Apparently these seats are renowned amoung performers, for giving the audience a good view of their backsides; it's not actually true, as the angle is too acute.

The evening was truely excellent. I've never seen Erin McKeown before, but she is well worth seeing. She's a much better guitarist than I had gathered from her recordings, and has a fine pair of lungs also.

Thea Gilmore, on the other hand, I have seen before. The last gig, I remember, was wonderfully well but together, with strong, lyrical songs. All this was still present but, I think, she has been practicing her voice, which was richer, warmer and stronger than I remember. She closed the gig with an acapella song, which I don't think she would have pulled off before.

The gig seemed to have sold out. It's nice to see talented people do well, but it's also has an unfortunate side: next time, she may well be in hall 1. All of the intimacy and warmth will be lost.

Having a wonderful time at the 2nd Ontogenesis meeting. I've just escaped from teaching for the year, and have managed to fill my diary for the next two weeks with research.

There's been a large amount of discussion about ontology building. The practical upshot of this is that the two most important tools are the phone and the plane. It's all about talking to people.

We need more and better tools for allowing collaboration on ontologies; we need easy to use interfaces which encourage people to make small contributions, while remaining formality. We need to make better use of the internet — skype has turned out to be a boon, but it's telecon capabilities are poor. Best of all, we need to be able to put our feet up, share a coffee, beer and scrap paper without being in one place.

I think my proudest moment was when I spent 5 minutes managing to make the point that sometimes people take a long time to actually say anything.

Was particularly pleased to get the following error today:

I would have been somewhat less pleased if it had happened the next time I rebooted but, fortunately, it all sorted itself out.

My mother was very understanding about me forgetting Mothers day again. It's not true that I always forget, but it's not the first time. I even saw the scrum last night in the supermarket, with people buying flowers. This morning? Not a memory of it.

A first for me today. I have had an ongoing Silly Ideas wiki running for sometime, but someone finally tried one of them today, namely by Portable Music idea.

Perhaps this will spur me on, as I haven't written up a silly idea for ages.

I just listened to the archive hour on radio 4. It's an odd programme: sometimes it's dreadful ("in 1950 there was some obscure entertainer on the radio who was dull then and is worse now"); sometimes it's excellent.

Today it was about the Falklands invasion with recordings of the Island radio. The Falklands conflict was as enormous political event of my childhood, and I have many conflicting feelings about it. But the invasion itself involves a civilian population, with a few soldiers, at the end of military invasion they could not hope to stop. The archive hour described the events in a simple and straightforward manner, leaving the drama of the recordings to tell the story. The broadcaster showed extraordinary bravery, speaking to his children, then hoping for a return of the Islands to their peaceful state.

In the shop today, I noticed that they had some frozen soy beans. So, I thought I would give them a go. I've always been a fan of edamame that you get in Japanese food shops, so I decided to try and replicate it. Sort of. The beans were not in pods and I don't have a steamer.

In the end, I boiled them with some fresh garlic that I had, strained, the water of, tossed them with chilli olive oil and soy sauce (heat and salt), strained the excess and eat them. Nice actually. Needed a bit more than the 4 minutes simmer the packet said, so I ended up giving them a quick microwave.

Not bad, although not exactly refined. I need to work on this one.

The rest of the mean was dry, curried tofu and chickpeas, a spinach curry and rice. Done this many times before. I need to do it more often, not least as I appear to have 3 kilos of spinach in my freezer.

Took rather a lot of messing around, but I should have an "Everything" page now. The problem was that people kept saying I never posted anything. In reality, it's because the posts were split among four feeds. So, now, there are five!

As it happens, this is was a good thing. I use muse to generate these pages, but I've had to hack it a bit to split the files up — I want to maintain a single source file but then generate out a one per month chunk of HTML.

Muse is quite clever; it works out whether output files are out of date, but assumes that there is only a single file. I'd hacked the code so that it checked all the output files. This never worked well, so I've removed it. Things seem to work better now and there are less changes between the publish function supplied by muse, and the one I overload it with.

Perhaps, I should just take Dan's advice and use a content management system. But, this way I don't need databases and all that malarky.

Part of the infrastructure at Newcastle moved over to the Shibboleth provided by SDSS, at least as far I can tell from the login screen.

It's fabulous. The idea is to provide a federated login so that, at least as far as I can tell, login information is managed at a single point, and allows authorisation at multiple institutions. All of this sounds like a good thing, but they've actually managed to achieve the notable success of making logins harder than it was before.

In the past, I would go to a URL like http://ness.cs.ncl.ac.uk, which is our coursework system, be presented with a login screen, which would login me into the system. Nowadays, I get take to a screen like this:

The purpose of this form is to let me tell the browser to go back to the system that I asked it to go in the first place. There I get another login screen which, to make our life easier, has been nobbled so that the browsers won't remember the logins. It also seems to be crashing a lot now, so that you have to refresh your browser to get it to work.

The help link, incidentally, at the bottom takes you to a page which tells you:

SDSS Development Federation

The SDSS Federation no longer accepts new applications to join the federation. Applications should instead be made to the UK Federation.

Help is not forthcoming.