I've been an avid user of fusesmb for a while. I found it to be very good, but a little hard to set up. For no readily apparent reason, it has stopped working for me.

So, now I am trying out sshfs instead. This worked better than fusesmb anyway — in particular directory listing was much quicker which was a real problem with fusesmb. However, I had a major problem which was that rsync did not work to a sshfs mounted directory. I got a wierd error about file renaming. This was a hassle — I use rsync quite a lot. In particular the —delete option is great for websites which I develop in one place, and publish to another.

Anyway, I found the solution today. Delightfully, it is this. Instead of mounting with sshfs, you add a new option to get sshfs -o workaround=rename. It's rare that you see such a honest command line...

I'd been saddended earlier by the closure of my local hippie-veggie shop, "OutOfThisWorld".

I was rather surprised therefore to walk into one in Beeston, Nottigham at the weekend. It turns out that the both this branch and the one in Leeds were bought by their managers from the parent company.

Good stuff! Hope that they do well. With any luck, they might expand. Newcastke might be a good place to go, as they are in need of a new hippie-veggie shop I hear.

I've been looking through the stats created by workrave. I'm slightly surprised to find that I make between 16 and 45,000 keystrokes per day (on my desktop at work — more if I include home). And around half a kilometre of mouse movement.

That's a lot.

I've been getting some needling recently for my grammar, spelling and composition, at least on these pages. There is clearly some justification for it. I normally have a relatively high standard for these things and, yet, these blog pages do fall below these standards.

Ultimately, the means of communication do affect how we behave; the blog feels more conversational, less formal. I tend to write this stuff out once, and rarely even proof-read it.

I shall think on this; my worry is that if I spend time improving the presentation, I might just not write anything at all. But then, if a jobs worth doing...

I was most entertained my Lord Falconers technically illiterate idea: that online news resources should remove prejudicial information about individuals during trials.

Pretty stupid idea. Apart from the technically difficult task of working out when a web page is about a particular individual, it seems to ignore the reality of the internet — that's is a global resource and British law does not affect it all. Asides from aggregator and archiving sites like http://www.archive.org, which would have to remove, and then reinstate potentially thousands of websites per day.

Suggesting that we pass new rules, attempting to put the genie back in the bottle, lacks any sense at all. Perhaps not a surprise from a judge.

Next week, I start teaching again. I've had to rewrite a practical for my microarray course, because genespring has totally changed (we used it in the past) and because I wanted to use something freely available which the students can use after our freebie license runs out.

It's been a lot of work. This has conspired with the early spring deadline for conference season; I am now in the review period for three conferences at once, including ISMB and haven't yet done a lot of work for Bio-Ontologies. Next week appears to be an "incredibly busy" week; I've just blocked out my entire diary with events.

Maybe there will be a miracle next week, and I shall be magically freed of work. Alternatively, maybe, google calendar will undergo a terrorist attack or, worse, a power cut which would have much the same impact.

There was much amusement in the CARMEN project today. The journal Neuroinformatics published what looked like an interesting article on data sharing.

Sadly, however, no one has been able to read it; it's a Springer article and none of us can read it because it's closed access and $32 to look at. A strange and ironic reflection on the state of data sharing.

Perhaps, is what the paper says. Data is Mine!

Addendum

Immediately after posting this, I started writing some lecture notes. I have so far copied images of Northerns, Westerns and several kinds of immunofluorescence straight of the web, all legal, all thanks to the wonders of PLoS. It's even easy to attribute them because they have given all of the figures individual DOIs. Working in neuroinformatics is interesting and exciting, but it also helps to remind me how wonderful bioinformatics it is.

Black Gold is a documentary about the coffee trade. It's conclusions are not perhaps the most astonishing in the world — the coffee industry makes lots of money while most of the producers, particularly in Ethiopia, are not doing nearly as well. Still, perhaps, these are points that need making again and again. The role of the WTO and the trade policies of the first world are, perhaps, less obvious.

The documentary seems to have a got a new lease of life, more or less entirely due to Michael Moore. Unlike his work, or Supersize Me, Black Gold lacks a comedy turn to keep the interest going although the main protagonist, Tadesse Meskela, is engaging and charismatic.

The music and cinematography are both wonderful, though, making this a clear and compelling film. Well worth a look.

I've had about 10 different sets of birthday greetings over the last day or two, which is very gratifying. Unfortunately, it's not actually my birthday. When I first created a facebook account, I put in a random date for my birthday, so I could get through the stupid forms as quick as possible. According, my birthday was yesterday and I am 29. To think that I missed out on the Golden Jubilee, the '76 drought and the Sex Pistols by so few years.

The funny thing is that I think I have had more birthday greetings than I have ever had in my entire life. Whether anyone will speak to me again, now that I have so cruely decieved them is open to question.

Well, I understand that they want to make some cash, but the sourceforge marketplace dialogue that keeps on popping up is quickly becoming more annoying that the Clippy.

Get rid of it. I only want to say go away once at most.