This weekend was also lovely; this time I cycled to the coast, then up to Beddlington, across toward Morpeth. By the time I got to the Morpeth road I was exhausted. I guess 12 miles up hill, against a wind will do this to you. So I cut out Morpeth and just came home.

42 miles in total. Too far, I fear. A bit disappointing as it should have be fine; less than last week and with a lot of road involved. Went at about the same speed too. I have some way to go before I can get to the 100 it appears.

Well, the new version of the software for this website is nearly done. I'm onto muse generation now, having got the scary make file and perl file generator done.

Of course, you could ask the question why not switch to wordpress or blogger or the like? Well, at the end of the day, I have to have an offline tool. Also, I like to have all my source files locally. All my electronic work is based around a single directory, and everything is in there. I guess that I am far from being a convert to the cloud.

It's probably going to take a few weeks yet, though. There should be only a few visible changes; first I am moving toward tags rather than categoies. I will be adding more than the current four. This means the individual RSS feeds — there will be only one. I doubt that anyone will mind this, but should if not.

My experiences with bazaar continue. I've used it to version my new blog software and, also, all my course notes from this years teaching. I've had one inexplicable crash (it core dumped everytime I tried to init one directory). In general, though it's really nice. It feels like going back to RCS in some ways. You don't have the SVN and CVS nightmare of importing a new project which tends to involve moving existing files out of place, then checking them out back into place.

I haven't actually tried any of the distributed facilities yet; it's all just me for which SVN was always overkill anyway. It's nice to know that I will have the option when I get to it.

I decided that I was going to try and cycle to Hexham to do. It was a perfect day for it, but then I haven't been out for a long bike ride for a while. I've been a lot of the way before, but forgot my map; not normally a problem on the road, cause you can follow the signs.

This time, it was more of a problem. I got as far as Corbridge and then decided to come back; when I got home I found I was only 3, maybe 4, miles short of Hexham; if I'd had a map, I'd probably have known. Flip side is, I was pretty popped when I got back; the extra 9 miles might not have been a good idea. As it was, I managed to do 45 miles, which was not too bad.

My adversary even responded to my email which ended with "I think it's time to stop this". I replied with an email saying "But I am going to get the last word". He replied to this as well.

He's turning out to be quite a nice guy; he's accused me of "displaying an incredible ignorance of the FLOSS community" — my reply was that I just didn't know what the acronym was and that this was probably a good thing.

Although, I'm really quite warming to the guy, there is a problem here. I like to witness the development of a community, but in many cases this seems to result in introversion and worse still exclusion. Regularly developing a pile of acronyms, like the tendency to generate new jargon in science, just services to exclude people. Having switched between quite a few different disciplines, I've been on the wrong end of this tendency to find a clear reason why someone else doesn't belong. "Ah, but our community isn't like that", "We're not the same as them though, so how can their solutions be of value?", "But you don't understand how we do things". It's a shame and it saddens me that people who are essentially good should still fall prey to it.

Well, there were a large number of specific outcomes from Neuroinformatics 2008, most of which I won't bore you with. The best idea, though, came out as piece of humour. I was ranting (yes, I know, it's hard to believe) about public understanding of science. I'm a bit fan of this because I think that as scientists we should be able to write about what we do clearly and at a level suitable for an intelligent but uninformed individual. Of course, I believe this because in Neuroinformatics, this covers me; I don't know much about brains, just computers and biology.

The suggestion was that, to every scientific paper we publish, scientists would be forced to add an explanatory paragraph; now, as I say, this was meant as a joke, but I think it's a great idea. It is the beginning of term, so it's going to take a while, but I intend to do exactly this; I shall add explanations to my publications page for each of my papers. I'm slightly worried about this, of course; it's a well-known secret but, like many scientists, I don't actually know what all of my papers are about; some of them were written by other people, some of them were written by me so long ago that I was "other people". So, I might even learn something in the process.

I shall announce releases here; the world will, no doubt, hold it's breath till it turns up.

I managed to find a solution to the problems with Bazaar; the problem is that vc-bzr.el launches "bzr" which is a python script; the cygwin version uses a magic shebang line which doesn't work on windows outside of cygwin. So, firstly, I fixed the problem in vc-bzr.el by making it launch the python executable directly and then pass "bzr" as an argument; I sent this into the Emacs Bug List. I got a reasonable reply from Stefan Monnier suggesting a wrapper script; I kind of agree that it's a nicer solution (it works with DVC too!), although it still leaves users in the situation of vc-bzr.el not working out of the box.

So I sent a report into the cygwin mailing and got replied with a blank no from the wonderful Christopher Faylor; just use cygwin or it's "do whatever you like". Meanwhile, off-list, I've been soundly castigated by another cygwin mailing list subscriber who has advised me "PCYMTNQREAIYR" and really doesn't like my quotation style. I never understood speaking with acronyms since I first met it in Perl land; but, hey, TMTOWTDI.

Some wonderful sections of the email conversation include:

  him> you can't be bothered to take 15 seconds to look something up, why
  him> should I be bothered to talk to you?

I don't know. And yet you are.

Astonishingly, he replied to this. It's been an entertaining conversation, but I think it's time for it to finish; I am hoping that this will work.

  him> I also care when you blatantly disregard the accepted practice of a
  him> community, and refuse to listen to members thereof when they try to
  him> tell you you're behaving in a way that is, by their standards,
  him> inconsiderate.

So bug reporting is inconsiderate? For the record, by the standards imposed by
my community, preaching at people is considered rude. I saddened that you
blatantly disregard these standards. But, hey, I'll get over it.

  him> A simple "I agree to abide by the list etiquette when posting to the
  him> list" would have ended this conversation long ago.

Yes, but then this conversation has been an entertaining diversion from my
otherwise dull and pointless existence which I would have been sad to miss.

I don't think I've ever received such a response for an attempt to publish a bug report. I guess some people need to just get out more; in this case, I mean me, but it's just about the start of term and that's not likely to happen.

Well, things have improved somewhat. We have notice from the bank that the hearing will now no longer go ahead, which suggests that the landlord has paid. Also, British Gas came and fixed our heating; it took a long time to work out, but this consisted of turning a valve that the first plumber had switched off, back on again.

It's all pretty tiresome.

I've never been here before. but I like it. The Scandinavian countries all seem lovely. They are understated, quiet and have an effortless beauty about them. It's a wonderful place; the sort of place that I would love to spend some time in, even if all the road signs are incomprehensible. If I could afford to spend more time here, then I probably would.

Now it's late, so time to sleep.

Today, we have neuroinformatics meets bioinformatics. I've been looking forward to this; unfortunately, I'm feeling a bit washed out having slept badly. I went to be at 10ish (I was tired!) and went to sleep at 2ish. The room was too hot and, by bad design, I left my melatonin at home so I lack even chemical solutions.

We've started off with a talk by Ed Lein from the Allen Brain Atlas. Lots and lots of gene expression analysis!

I've started to give bazaar a go in anger; my hope was that I could get the offline advantages of RCS, with a newer system (renaming and such like) as well as something that works for collaboration.

The emacs support is a bit primitive yet. There is a vc-bzr.el, though, so I tried this but it didn't work. This turned out to be because it doesn't work with cygwin out of the box. I've tried the windows version and it all seems to behave nicely. But it doesn't understand symlinks which is a major pain — I need those symlinks!

Life can be hard at times.

So far, we've had two talks, one from David Essen, one from Mary Kennedy. A nice bit of organisation because they have jumped scales — the first was mostly about brain gross anatomy and the second about molecular modelling.

A bit like it's forerunner — databasing the brain — there is not that much informatics here. The keynotes have been very much about the neuroscience; this makes it both novel and interesting for me, although fairly heavy going at times.

It confirms my feeling that neurosinformatics is much less mature than bioinformatics; it's not really a separate discipline yet. Not that this is a bad thing; I've been at bioinformatics conferences where the "bio" seems barely relevant. If I am honest about it, I think more about computers these days and sometimes forget the point — understanding life — although I guess this is inevitable working in a computer science department. Less mature is another phrase for new, young and fresh. It feels good to be in this environment.

Several months ago, I moved house. I should say now, that main reason for doing this was to move in with the other half; I only mention this because she was irritated that she got so few mentions when I was talking about our holiday. My explanation was this blog is called "An exercise in irrelevance" because it has nothing important in it and that she has her own blog so why should she want to appear on mine. Impeccable logic I thought; she didn't.

Anyway, coming back from the social melodrama, a few months ago, we moved house. It's quite a nice place; it's unfurnished so has required a lot of work buying furniture, screwing it to together and standing it upright (having, of course, carefully hoovered underneath first). Although it's left me tired and drained, I've enjoyed it. The flat, however, it turning out to be a bit of a disaster.

The letting agents, Countrywide Residential, have been fairly poor from the start. Obviously, this is all my misunderstanding, and is not what happened at all, but they appeared to phone me up the day before the lease at 4pm, say we were required to have contents insurance and then offer to sell us the same for 3 time the market average. My mistake, but it appeared to be a filibuster. Obviously, this is not what they did say, because the lease does not require insurance; probably, they were just trying to be kind and help us with some organising. No doubt, their deal was different from the ones we found on the internet and were no way comparable, hence the price.

We've now had the plumbers out three times to the heating system; once because the timer has broken, once because it was leaking and now, it's no longer leaking but it ain't working either. So, no hot water. Not too much of a disaster for me as I am going to Stockholm for a conference, but a pain for my other half (two mentions in one post!).

Still, this seems to be getting sorted now. But we got home last night to find that the Royal Bank of Scotland (my bank incidentally) is taking the landlord to court for repossession. For foreign readers of this blog of whom there are none, in most sane countries tenants have pretty strong rights; if you pay the rent, you stay in the property. In the UK, we have very few rights; you can get kicked out for little reason. One of the few rights we do have is an initial 6 month rental period; in that time, it's hard to get rid of a tenant. Unless the landlord doesn't pay his mortgage and gets repossessed. Under these circumstances, you are out. So, potentially in a months time, having not quite moved in yet, we'll be putting everything into boxes and moving again; in the middle of teaching term also.

As a society, I think that we have to learn that rising house prices does not constitute a boom and that falling house prices a recession. Both of them are a disaster. Steady, reasonably priced, affordable houses are the only way forward. It's about time that we grew up from our free market childishness and realised that a house is not an investment, it's something to live in.

For us, the worst case outcome is not a disaster; it's an inconvienience, a cost and a lot of hassle, so I'm not depressed, just irritated. I know for many others, the situation is much, much worse.

Ah, off to a conference again. Depressingly on saturday, so the airport is heaving. I'm going to Neuroscience 2008 which is a new one to me, in Stockholm which is also new. I'm taking a poster which seems distressingly old. Been a long time since I've done this. It's already been a struggle — some of my colleagues didn't like it; I think because neuroscientists tend toward lots of text, while I do a light-weight, advert-style, if-you-want-more-details-read-the-paper form of poster. And I hate travelling with a poster; it's hard to replace your belt while carrying a bag and an A0 poster tube. My subconscious tried to leave it at a Starbucks in Schipol, but my better judgement forced me to go back for it.

I'm not in the best of moods: my toe, which I appear to have broken is nothing but a a dull ache and I was frozen on the flight having got a bath between the terminal at Newcastle and the plane. Still the conference should be fun.

I managed to get our on my bike at the weekend; I travelled up the north side of the Tyne. I've done this before, but went further, through Wylam and out the other end; it's a really nice ride, although not that fast as the surfaces are a little rough. In the end, I decided to come back on the south bank, as I've not done this before. Took a bit of to-ing and fro-ing, but I mostly came down Keelmans Way. The Gateshead side of the Tyne is more industrial than the North, and Keelmans Way reflects this; instead of fields, pubs and villages, you cycle over steel bridges, peers and through industrial estates. It's still quiet, though, and great fun. I have to admit, though, as I came into Gateshead, that I was gob-smacked when I cycled through a gap in a hedgerow and found myself on the ring road of the metrocentre. I had no idea it was so close to the river, and that I was so close to it.

Only managed 30 miles, but this was mostly because I had other things to do. I want to try and up this. If I can keep going over winter, with any luck, I should be able to do the 100 mile in next years cyclone.