thoughts of a knowledge geek

The power of paper in a digital age ...

2012-02-03T13:50:00.001+11:00

Building on the literary history of word processing theme here's an interesting post from the Guardian

The power of paper in a digital era | Robert McCrum | Books | guardian.co.uk

McCrum's major point is of course that due to the inherent revisability of wordprocessed documents we cannot necessarily follow an authors thought processes through drafts. This is of course not quite true, the dreaded 'track changes' can go someway towards this, even though what it produces is incredibly overloaded and impenetrable.

However the situation is even worse for historical archives. We may have 'track changes' set on and the documents correctly indexed and filed, but we are missing the marginal notes, the comments (and the postit notes and highlighting) that might reveal how a decision was arrived at.

We would only ever have the official version with the official revisions. Even in the days of typwritten memos we always had the marginal notes because of the expense in time and effort of creating revised versions.

Nowadays of course clean copies can be produced at the click of a mouse, and the scribbled annotated drafts end up in the big blue secure disposal bin ...

are we living in a post-pc world ?

2012-02-01T13:44:00.001+11:00

yesterday I tweeted a link to a Guardian article by Jean-Louis Gassee about how the rise of the iPad means we may be living in a post-pc world.

JLG used to run product development at Apple, helped run BeOS and later had a major role with Palm so his opinion probably both matters and is based on some considerable industry experience.

It's undoubtedly true people want iPads. Not Android tablets, even though they may have a similar end user experience but iPads. We can argue about why this is so but people want iPads.

The consequence is that a lot of the applications development focuses on developing for the iPad which has a ratchet effect meaning the iPad has by far the largest software base out there, be it for new house searches in Sydney or whatever.

This has some interesting side effects. Consider you favourite newspaper application. This of course actually pulls content using http from the newspaper's content management system and displays it. No website or browser involved. The newspaper may front end it's content management system with a website (or sites - the Guardian now has a UK and a US website with differing content) - but the website is just another delivery mechanism.

Equally take a look at the Guardian on Facebook - it's an app displaying content and you could just about imagine a scenario where Facebook became simply an application or plugin multiplexor, just as iGoogle could evolve into an application portal.

What we can conclude from the iPad and Facebook experience is that people like apps more than browsers and that people like iPads.

Apple controls the app store through iTunes, a service it honed during the iPod era, and thus potentially controls access to content. Your tablet's browser of course provides a escape hatch to this expansive but walled garden.

What is also apparent is that the chromebook has been less than a resounding success. While it is possible to do most of your day to day work (email, write drafts, meeting notes, surf, blog etc) with a browser alone the applications don't feel as rich as a desktop application and don't have the attractiveness of a tablet app.

Much as I like Google docs, a local wordprocessor gives a richer experience. What using Google Apps gives is pervasiveness - access your content from anywhere with any browser.

A superficially persuasive model for education - give the kids chromebooks and let them connect to moodle and wikipedia - but not the moment they need to write something serious or create something. A chromebook is simply a stateless ookygoo - great for travelling, but unlike the ookygoo (or any other netbook or lightweight laptop/ultrabook) dependent on the internet to be more than a kilo of gubbins.

So are we living in a post pc /post browser world?

It would seem so. That doesn't mean that we won't still have things that look like personal computers around - we will as long as we need to write letters, email things, run presentations, hack code and anything else that creates files and stuff but these will go back to being work tools.

iPads and their descendants will be what we use at home and recreationally. We'll use them to watch movies, read books, share photos and listen to music - I've already seen real people - tourists outside Old Parliament House - using an iPad to take photos of each other.

Browsers will still exist, but increasingly they won't be the prime content access mechanism for mainstream content - the stuff everyone uses like newspaper websites, wikipedia, youtube and the rest and become something a bit specialist for searching and accessing information.

So we'll end up with a screen full of icons, each of which do some special thing - just like in Windows 3.1 ...

dropbox, evernote and the digital repository

2012-01-25T14:44:00.000+11:00

Over lunch I watched a couple of videos from the DepositMo project and one thing that grabbed ny attention was the way one of the speakers referred to repositories as 'dropboxes'.

Conventionally they are quite different and do different things:

A dropbox is where you want to put stuff you either want to move/share between different machines eg home and work, or share with a small number of other people. The files have no context, ie no metadata at all, except any you create by way of the file name eg picture_of_lily.jpg. Only you of course know if it's a picture of a lily or a person, dog, cat, hamster or whatever called Lily. In fact a quick look at wikipedia's disambiguation page for lily shows an even wider range of possibilities for 'lily'.And of course just because it's called .jpg doesn't mean it has to be a JPEG.

So dropbox items are context free. You may create a set of naming and directory conventions but they mean nothing. An example might be the mp3 of a presentation that you transfer to home, download to an mp3 player and listen to on the bus. You might give it a meaningful name or you might simply call it preso.mp3. As long as the name means something to you that's all that matters

Evernote or indeed OneNote, is different. You could simply treat it as a dropbox, but infact it lends itself to organising data, and the natural trend is to group data thematically. Therefore I have material grouped by project, so I can find anything that relates to DC7D. I can also add metadata as tags, eg 'invoices' so I can search for all invoices or indeed only the invoices referring to DC7D.

This is of course reliant on me being organised but at least instead of picture_of_lilly.jpg I have a pictures notebook, with an entry tagged 'Lilly'.

If I've done my tagging right I end up with a pile of data organised as a de facto folksonomy. Thus in my pictures folder I have a picture of Wen Xiu, the mistress of Pu Yi, and it is tagged 'China' and 'Manchuria'. (I also have a folder of material related to Manchuria some of which is tagged 'Russia' and "Korea', which contains material relating to a personal project, which may or may not turn into something about writers and journalists 1930's China - the point being it makes sense to me to classify things that way, not due to strict logic. A folksonomy is a contextual aid to organistion, not a substitute classification schema)

A repository is of course something else. In the classic model it is a collection of published documents about which we need to know a number of standard things, basically who, what, where, and the format. In a digital preservation system - say for holding electronic versions of historic documents, say early pictures and recordings of Yolngu ceremonial events - we never want to change things. In a repository of research preprints we may want to replace items with corrected versions of documents.

Of course we may want to transfer the content to a curated system such as that being developed by Project Bamboo and add value by creating a transcript of the sound recording and an English language translation of the transcript and annotations for the image data.

As this work is revisable we may of course want to put it in a separate transcripts and annotation repository separate from the preservation repository.

Just to muddy the waters we could imagine a work in progress repository, where updates to a document are regularly submitted but the basic metadata remains the same. In fact we should probably just admit that repositories are really (just) content management systems and it's a repository when used by librarians, a preservation system when used by archivists and a CMS when used by everyone else. Architecturally they're the same, it's just that the workflows around how content is ingested, retrieved, displayed and disposed of differ.

However let's assume that when we say repository we mean a system that has the characteristics of using standard metadata data and containing objects subject to little or no revision, as in any classic university research repository.

Digital asset management systems, or preservation repositories are effectively the same. Not quite as they need to have systems in place to maintain the integrity of the data and more complex metadata and access control models.

This might lead you to think that a data repository was effectively the same. After all, if you digitise an audio recording using a specialised digitisation workstation like a Quadriga workstation you capture some machine based information and technical information which is typically embedded in the technical metadata section of a WAV file, perhaps with some added vendor extension fields.

The preservation repository ingest process would typically both extract the technical metadata from teh file and have some human created metadata - the who, what, where component.

Functionally the process is the same as acquiring information from any other instrument, be it a seismometer, a radio telescope, or whatever.

Except it's not. When you are preserving data you are preserving 1's and 0's. Unlike TIFF's or WAV's there are no rules about data or format integrity checks, all you have is the metadata, either that entered by humans or acquired from instruments. Even though we pay lispervice to using standard schemas really it's much more like a an Evernote notebook, with some tags and information that make sense to the user or groups of users, plus a human readable description of what all the columns in the data mean. Without that it's meaningless. Context is everything with data. At least with an image you can guess what it might be showing. A spreadsheet or set of spreadsheets can be utterly opaque.

As a system a data repository look a lot more like a software archive, such as that run by Mirrorservice.org, than a classic dspace implementation. Yes, it needs to speak someting standard such as RIF-CS to produce standard descriptions of the items, but unlike a print or image repository where we know implictly how to deal with the different media types, we have no idea of how to deal with the data stored in the object.

A data repository is a collection of data objects stored according to a standard set of rules. So, just as we expect a software tar file to unpack and show a readme, a manifest, and perhaps a makefile we should expect a data set to unpack to contain the data, the technical metadata, and a description of the files, both their structure and significance, a bit like you get with either SEED or FITS.

So, when we build a data repository are we really building something more like an evernote for data, rather than a dspace for data?

And in that context should simply use off the shelf CMS technology, such as Alfresco, rather than a dedicated repository application ?

Travel writers and typewriters

2012-01-24T11:49:00.001+11:00

Back at the start of the month I wrote a post inspired by a NYT article on Mark Kirschenbaum’s work on the literary history of word processing.

Last night, because I rode the bus home, I finally got around to listening to a podcast of a talk given by Mark Kirschenbaum at the New York Public library in the middle of December.

Listening to the talk I was suddenly struck by the thought that advent of the portable typewriter suddenly made travel writing possible.

Certainly Ella Maillart and Peter Fleming took typewriters with them when the crossed the Takla Makan on the way to Kashgar and Maillart writes of Anna Schwarzenbach and herself cramming their portable typewriters into the dickey seat of their Ford when they were driving to Afghanistan in the late 1930’s.

Travel writers are essentially journalists. The typewriter liberated them from the need for legibilty and coupled with that great Victorian invention, a regular mail service, meant they could prepare and send their copy while en route. Importantly, by using such rudimentary techniques as carbon paper (which of course lives on in email’s cc:) they could also ensure that they retained a copy should their draft get lost in the mail.

Just as the 35mm camera liberated photojournalists and made some of the innovative photography of the 1930’s possible.

Journalists of course have moved on from the typewriter - for a while the Tandy 100 and it’s successors were popular - due to their lightness and the fact that they could run off standard batteries if necessary, which was probably a great advantage when out in the field.

Nowadays journalists use netbooks, or ultrabooks, and complain about the lack of power for charging and internet connectivity.

In fact it’s much like the fun of running field surveys in the days before decent battery life.

For example, in the mid eighties I was responsible for running a couple of small scale botanical surveys. Even though the data was entered into a database, the field surveys were done with squared paper, a pencil and crib on what species we were looking for and how to estimate abundance.

Lack of suitable portable devices, battery life and the rest. Now you’d use either a laptop or a tablet computer. The same goes for archaeological surveys, technology is adopted when the ease of data entry and battery life makes it practical.

And in this there’s a lesson. Elsewhere I’ve written about how some key technologies were what enabled to modern world. A decent reliable postal system, coupled with trains and steamships enabled communication and commerce. The arrival of the safety bicycle that anyone could ride in 1885 meant that people could get somewhere in a day that would previously have been difficult to get to, be it historians documenting medieval buildings, or botanists counting plant species.

Likewise the advent of the truck. It’s notable that both Joseph Needham and Peter Fleming rode trucks to get to parts of 1930’s China not connected to the train system, or Ella Maillart ‘lorry hopping’ to Afghanistan, in much the same way as William Dalrymple did some fifty years later in search of Xanadu.

Like the wordprocessor, the typewriter was an enabling technology in that it allowed travel writers and journalists to work in a way that had previously been impossible, by being able to compile notes and prepare material in the field.

And any history of the modern needs to take account of these enabling technologies - even though the end points may have remained essentially the same the process of getting there became simpler, more immediate, and was suitably flexible to be adapted to a range of needs

Handwritten - an exhibition at the NLA

2012-01-23T16:02:00.003+11:00

If you're in Canberra, as well as all the publicity for the NGA's summer blockbuster exhibition you may have noticed some of the buses are carrying adverts for 'Handwritten - ten centuries of manuscripts from staatsbibliothek zu berlin' at the National Library.

Last Sunday, as well as taking an old film camera for a walk round Canberra (part of the photography project) I went to this.

For some inexplicable reason I have always been interested in old documents, something got me started in digitisation as a means of preservation for a the relics of a culture on the other side of the world.
This fascination goes back to when I was child in Stirling, Scotland and the main library used to have this display of the town records and transcriptions. And one day I realised that all this stuff about people being fined for having dungheaps where they shouldn’t actually told you stuff about how the town was laid out and how it functioned – something that years later gave me a great deal of insight into the whys of digitisation preservation and reuse.

The exhibition itself is quite small and unexpectedly popular so you need to book online, even though it's free. This can mean that you get a bunching effect round about the hour breaks so I'd suggest that being fashionably late, by which time the crowd has thinned a bit.

There are some quite nice medieval manuscripts including a very plain matter of fact ninth century copy of the Aeneid, as well as lome late medieval examples and herbals, but no examples of correspondence or charters from before the mid 1400's ( a letter to one of the Medici). From then on it's all the correspondence of the rich and famous, Michaelangelo, Volta, Humboldt, Darwin, Cook, Einstein and the rest, not to mention Dostoevsky and Marx.
Most of the letters are fairly prosaic, Darwin for example writes about sea temperature, but what is interesting is to track how handwriting evolved, and also what crappy writing the prolific correspondents of any age developed through the need to write a lot, and quickly.

It's also not just text, there' also a selection of various handwritten musical manuscripts which demonstrate that the great composers were just as messy as the rest of us.

Inevitably, being from the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, there's a focus on German authors and scientists, but even that demonstrates the internationalism of the day, for example the correspondence of the Forsters - who despite their name were solidly German - who sailed with Cook.
Tellingly, the exhibition ends with a typwritten page.

All in all quite a nice little exhibition, and well worth spending 30-45 minutes enjoying.

There's an exhibition website with booking instructions, plus a blog giving useful background that's worth a read before visiting.

the day the web went dark ...

2012-01-19T14:53:00.001+11:00

Not really of course, but the SOPA black screen protest by Wikipedia and others has prompted an outpouring of angst plus the usual spate of articles about 'could we live without the web?'

One of the better articles was from the New Zealand Herald, which referenced the experience of Egypt during the Arab Spring, but even then failed to mention that one of the side effects of the Egyptian blackout was the loss of e-banking.

That's right, e-banking, or paying people electronically, or indeed finding the cash machines didn't work. Killed a lot of normal business stone dead.

We can manage without a lot of the internet and certainly without social media such as facebook and twitter. Same goes for Skype, and at a pinch, email (you know it's amazing, you can still print out some text, put it in a wrapper and stick a special payment receipt on it and put it in a dedicated red collecting box and it gets to the other side of the world, and even Gundaroo, in three or four days).

The killer is banking. It's all electronic. No more traveller's cheques, no more cheques, no more bank statements, just track it all online. No more banks even, get your cash from a machine in a wall.

I know from personal experience travelling that you can last without the internet for a few days without difficulty, and being out of email contact can be a relief, but the real killer has always been banking to check how you're doing, whether or not a particular credit card purchase has gone through, or indeed how much you've been stung for that multi currency ATM withdrawal in Dubai airport.

You even need access to e-banking to top up these special multi currency visa cards you can get from Travelex.

In fact one of the reasons we started taking the Ookygoo with us was online banking. The other main one was checking flight details and hotel reservations, the only problem was not being able to print boarding passes and the like.

Nowadays most people are happy to scan your phone or tablet, afterall it's only the bar code they're really interested in.

So yes, its is possible to go back non-internet way of life as long as the legacy services are still there. The moment that you are expected to do anything at all for your self - online banking, flight confirmations, etc the wheels come off. And that's the key. One could happily live in a hut in the bush, type letters on an old typewriter. Couldn't buy anything except what was available locally and can be paid for with cash.

Allow yourself a debit card (remember, no more cheques) and you can order stuff by mail or by phone, and that's giving you all the functionality of the 1980's ...

I've published a book !

2012-01-18T08:43:00.000+11:00

Well sort of.

If you're a regular reader you'll know that I've periodically ranted on about e-readers, e-books, espresso book machines and the like.

And then I read the recent Guardian article about Amanda Hocking and self publishing.

Curious as ever I got to wondering just how easy it is to self publish. To do that you obviously need something to publish, so I reverted to my account of our trip through Laos and Northern Thailand at the end of 2005.

It only comes out to 47 A4 pages, but on the other hand the free version was picked up by a number of people as a valuable background source, including at least one UN agency. So, we'll assume it has some merit.

Creating the book was simple. Register with Amazon's self publishing service, sort out the bank details so you can get paid, upload the file, do a little bit more work and 'hey presto!' - you're done.

Frighteningly easy.

No I'll admit I was kind of sloppy. The upload and conversing service offered by Amazon lost some of the page breaks from the pdf version and so on, and I didn't bother fixing the format, but I did check the text and it's all there, and available to purchase as a Kindle book for the grand sum of US$0.99.

I don't seriously expect to get rich out of this, in fact I'd be gratified if I made any money at all out this experiment.

The key learning is that the Amazon platform makes it incredibly easy to self publish, all you need to do is have something to publish.

The other learning is that while it's ok for hobby publishing, or perhaps for publishing obscure academic publications (there are options to also have your book printed through CreateSpace, Amazon's print on demand service, though I havn't explored these), probably the degree of editing, proof reading and marketing required means that the Amanda Hockings of this world will be few and far between. It's telling that she has now opted to have her work handled by an agent and a publisher, in part because of the amount of time proof reading etc was taking up.

If I was a small university publishing house I'd be worried - on the other hand if I was one of the big boys I'd only be mildly concerned ...

Using the cheapo MP3 player

2012-01-17T13:35:00.001+11:00

Well, I used my cheap MP3 player bought off of ebay for $17 today.

Basically it just works - select a file, click play and it plays it. When you're done you can delete it or keep it. Your choice.

The fact you add content just by copying it to the player makes the business of listening to ad hoc mp3's of seminars and preso's simple

In use the menu structure is a little odd, and the thing that looks like an ipod control switch doesn't work the same way but essentially all the functionality is there, and the sound quality is pretty reasonable too. I've actually got to say I'm quietly impressed with the device. Not as slick as an iPod, but certainly a lot better than my original USB stick MP3 player.

That's the plus. The minus is my decision to use gPodder as a podcast management application. It works, it downloads, it syncs but it's by no means perfect. And it's slooow!

It lacks the comprehensiveness of some of the commercial applications, meaning you quite often have to track down the url of the rss feed for the podcast you are interested in, and then add the feed to your collection manually.

Now if you wanted to crowd source a database of podcast feeds this would be an interesting and perhaps innovative way to build content, and perhaps it's intended as such. Unfortunately the database is eccentric, perhaps reflecting the demographics and interests of the gPodder community.

The other problem is that it doesn't have a two stage sync mechanism. It downloads the sound files to a directory on your pc. It would be nice to have an on demand second stage where it syncs the podcast directory to a particular filesystem path, which as the mp3 player presents itself as a filesystem would be a fairly simple thing to do, with the device name and path stored locally in a configuration file. Given that it already has an 'export to local file' function extending it to do synchronisation should not be too difficult ...

However, grumbles aside, the set up basically works and lets me do what I want to do, and $17 plus some free software seems a hell of a lot better than an iPod or an iPhone ...

MP3 players and me

2012-01-11T13:40:00.001+11:00

There are people who listen to music on an mp3 device almost every day

I'm not one of them - and while I do like to listen to music at home, in the mornings and when commuting radio is my preferred drug (Newsradio and Classic if you're asking). Radio has never been just background to me and I've always listened to 'serious' radio as a form of entertainment, and over the years I've heard some great performances, some stunning plays and truly informative documentaries, not to mention almost running off the road once due to laughing so much at a political satire show ...

I've always had decent radios, and in the days when I used to go bush I always used t take a halfway decent radio with me, as part of the fun was sitting out in the dark by a fire listening to the radio.

However it not just been radio, there's been recorded music as well, but that always came second. Over the years I've had various walkmen and so on but it was always radio I valued including good serious talk radio. In fact one of my favourite toys (still have it) is a solar powered radio that I used to use on my walk from the bus to work. Leave it out on a sunny window sill during the day, and there it was, charged, for the journey home.

Life of course changes. Over the years life has got busier and somehow serious radio listening time got squeezed out. Not that I havn't tried to find space for it.

For example, when I started riding my bike regularly to work I bought myself a little USB stick sized MP3 player that had an FM radio. Well listening while riding isn't that safe but I discovered podcasts, so on days when I took the bus rather than rode I found myself taking the USB player and listening to podcasts of BBC talk radio.

The interface on the player was one of the old style not very intuitive two line displays, so I ended up replacing it with an 4GB iPod classic (bought from the Apple store in Cupertino, no less). That was truly superb, with excellent sound reproduction, and iTunes provided a truly wonderful sync mechanism.

However, after two or three years the rotary switch thingie on the front became unreliable, and I never got round to replacing it, and no, I didn't move over to doing the obvious and start listening to podcasts on my phone. Instead I stopped listening to podcasts altogether, as to tell the truth I was struggling to find listening time. Driving more and more rather than using the bus or riding my bike killed my listening time.

At the same time more and more interesting broadcasts ceased to be available over the web as podcasts, but instead were available as on demand content.

On demand content is fine - I can still listen to interesting shows from the BBC, NPR and RTE, but it does mean having to sit in front of a computer and doesn't have the convenience factor of being able to listen to them in the car via the aux cable, or while doing something else like waiting for a bus, weeding or pruning.

On the other hand I miss my periodic fix of intelligent talk radio, so, as new year's resolution I've decided to revisit podcasts. The good news is that old favourites like the BBC's From Our Own Correspondent are still available, so it has legs as an idea, but how to download and play them?

I could of course have gone out and bought myself an ipod and bought back into the whole iTunes thing, but with open source alternatives like gPodder still being available, a better solution seemed to be a no-name 8GB MP3 player from ebay for less than $20 - cheap enough to lose, break, or whatever but chargeable via a standard ipod style cable and mountable as a windows formatted disk. It also comes with an FM radio meaning I can easily setup presets for Newsradio, Classic and Artsound (no FM ABC local or Radio National in Canberra) for those times when I just want to zone out, or have to ride the bus.

It's also simple to use - just like my old USB stick MP3 player, content is simply added by copying the files to the player. The other thing is that, late to the party as always, I now have a car with an aux socket on the sound system meaning I can plug the player in and listen safely while driving.

So player #3 - let's see if it makes it on to 2012's what worked post ...

Office on the iPad

2012-01-10T12:00:00.001+11:00

The idea of providing access to Office from the ipad seems to be on of this week's themes with both CloudOn and OnLive garnering some interest CES this week.

I've not played with either of them so I'm not going to pontificate on how well or how badly they work but there's a couple of features worthy of note.

CloudOn uses dropbox to synchronise documents between your ipad and your main computer - this is actually very clever as (a) just about everyone on the planet has a dropbox account and (b) most people need office on a tablet for document review and a bit of highlighting/commenting - realistically no one is going to use it to write a 27 page project report.

OnLive is interesting due to its use of thin client technology - something that should have had a lot of traction, but which through a combination of licensing restrictions and the near universal availability of cheap hardware never quite made it to the mainstream.

Now what is interesting is the use of thin client technology to get decent performance on a slow network connection (such as a 3G connection) meaning that you can get access to full featured environment without all the computation overhead implied.

Both products seem to be assuming an always on network connection - which is not always the case, but certainly don't seem to support offline use. What's also interesting is that they seem to have made little or no use of the Office 365/Windows Live/Skydrive type infrastructure - perhaps due to slow response over slow links, or lack of an obvious api.

I find the focus on providing full access to office puzzling, given that tablet pc's tend not to lend themselves to document editing - if you need to edit you need a proper keyboard etc etc. If I was to develop an office client for a tablet pc, I think my first approach would be to write an app that essentially functions as a document viewer with some annotation and simple editing functions, and uses the Office 365 infrastructure with local caching and periodic writeback - allowing me to go offline or suffer network dropouts in a fairly seamless manner. In other words something to give me more or less the functionality of google docs but generating word format files by default, and accessible to Office on my home machine ....

Xubuntu

2012-01-10T11:17:00.001+11:00

Despite the fact that I no longer use it on a daily basis, I occasionally still dabble with linux.

Everyone tells me that Mint is the new black but I have singularly failed to get it to build a vm on virtualbox, so I resorted to going back to Ubuntu with the latest version of Unity.

Call me prejudiced, but I just plan don't like it - there is something in the user experience that jars. I am not a window manager freak, but in these days when Windows 7 is the most common one out there, closely followed by OS X, window managers need to give people a comparable experience - if it looks and feels like windows 90% will never really notice if all they do is fire up a browser to read mail.

Now there are two distributions that I've used for lightweight virtual machines, crunchbang and xubuntu. both of which use the lighter weight window managers, OpenBox in the case of Crunchbang and Xfce in the case of Xubuntu.

Of the two, OpenBox is even more cheeseparing in its use of resources than Xfce, and for that reason I would certainly consider crunchbang for use on an old netbook (or other old laptop) but with Xubuntu as a fall back position due to its better hardware support.

Crunchbang is a good stable distribution but Xubuntu, in my experience, supports a wider range of hardware, and being built on Ubuntu is generally slicker, and Xfce conforms more closely to the generic window manager meme than OpenBox

Certainly building a Xubuntu vm was a fairly slick experience, and I was impressed by the way it picked up it was running on virtualbox and offered to install some extra drivers.

The interface is the interface, the software manager is neater than it used to be - my usual test of installing kwrite just worked without any confusing messages about extra libraries etc. The default set of tools is good, abiword, gnumeric etc, but I'm guess that a lot of people using xubuntu will be doing most of their work in the google ecology.

Unlike crunchbang, the browser is still firefox, rather than chromium, the open source version of chrome, but that's an easy fix if it's important to you. (Just to complicate matters, the latest distribution of crunchbang has changed to iceweasel)

Xubuntu still produce a version for ppc machines, and I'm tempted to try installing it on one of my old glass imacs - perhaps not the original one, but the second one which has a little bit more memory - I've always had this idea of having a machine available for visitors to use to check their email, blog or tweet from, and while smartphones have kind of taken over the email checking role, they're not yet universal ...

magpies, 4-inch nails and precursors of tool use

2012-01-08T17:18:00.001+11:00

Our main bathroom doesn't have windows, instead it has a skylight for natural light, and that means you can lie in the bath, see birds (and the occasional Qantas commuter jet) fly overhead, and on one occasion have the cat look down at you through the glass,

Yesterday morning I was wakened just after dawn by a tremendous repeated clatter - my first thought was the the cat had brought a rodent home and was chasing round the kitchen or the laundry, but no, it was a juvenile Australian magpie repeatedly picking up and dropping a four inch nail on the glass.

I stared at it, torn between trying to get it to bugger off and fascination with the behaviour, which looked as if it was trying to break the glass with the nail, perhaps a miscuing of an instinctive response to ice.

By the time I snapped to and went to get my phone to take a picture, the bird had flown off.

Crows are of course clever birds, and some species such as the New Caledonian crow are known for tool use but this is the first time I've heard of or seen such a behaviour in an Australian magpie ...

Lenovo Ideapad K1

2012-01-05T11:11:00.001+11:00

Just before Christmas I bought J a tablet of her own - this time a Lenovo IdeaPad K1, rather than another zPad.

The Lenovo came preloaded with a whole pile of demo apps and games, most of which were completely useless and ended up being deleted. The one bundled app that took a trick was Drawing Pad, which J, as an artist at heart, absolutely loved.

The rest were crap, except for the printershare app which neatly solves the tablet printing problem by using Google Cloudprint - a non Lenovo branded version made it onto the zPad some 30 seconds after I discovered it.

Setup was slicker than the zPad - a gmail address and suddenly email was there. Add the Jorte calendar app and J's Google calendar was there as well.

Now my dear wife is somewhat of a refusenik with technology - she knows how to get it to things she wants but she's not interested in it. The tablet however is something else - checking email, googling for stuff, wikipedia, not to mention news and weather, and again the experience was socialised - sit on the couch, surf, doodle or email, or whatever.

Performance doesn't seem any better than the zPad, and the custom Lenovo Android 3.1 skin doesn't seem quite as intuitive in some vague intangible way as the zPad's close iOS skin, but it's a tablet and does tablet things, and all the apps seem to work as reliably as anything else.

The Lenovo cost me $100 more than the zPad, but that still works out $200 less than an iPad, and unlike the zPad comes with a decent warranty.

Certainly worth a look if you're in the market for one, but it's a pity they don't provide a 'no crap' installation and configuration option ...

Partitioning Korea in 1896

2012-01-03T14:41:00.001+11:00

As I've previously written, Russia has long desired to maintain a buffer state on the Korean peninsula, to counter Japanese influence in the area and help defend Primorye - the very east of Siberia around Vladivostok, and possession of which gives Russia access to the Pacific.

In 1894-5 Japan and Qing state fought a short war over Korea and Manchuria, in which the Japanese sank most of what China possessed in the way of a modern navy and successfully invaded Manchuria. The result was a fairly humiliating defeat for China.

Imperial Russia took fright at this, rightly fearing long term Japanese aims to expand and colonise Manchuria and Korea, and thus threaten Primorye and eastern Siberia.

In an act of bare faced cheek, Russia proposed to Japan that they partition Korea between them along the 38th parallel, which is today roughly the cease fire line between the DPRK and South Korea.

At the same time, Russia, France and Germany pressured Japan to return territory in Manchuria seized during the 1894-5 war, at which point Russia seized the territory returned by Japan and hence the war of 1905, and the whole sorry tale of the DPRK as a Soviet buffer state.

The interesting thing about a lot of the commentary around the death of Kim Jong Il was that it emphasised the role of China in supporting the DPRK, rather than the role of Russia.

Historically it is Russia that has wanted the DPRK to continue to exists, as a buffer to protect the Primorye, first against American forces in Japan and Korea, and latterly against any pre-emptive move by China to regain the territories in the east of Siberia informally ceded by the Qing state to Russia from the 1860's onwards.

China's support is probably pragmatic. A hungry chaotic nuclear armed neighbour is not a nice prospect. One with a stable government, however repressive, is probably a comfortable neighbour, and there always remains the prospect of managed change...

Literary word processing and empowerment

2012-01-01T17:34:00.001+11:00

A few days ago I tweeted a link to a piece in the NYT about the literary history of wordprocessing.
This piqued my interest as in the mid eighties I worked as a technology evangelist at the University of York in England and taught word processing (Wordstar no less) to undergraduates and at the same time spent a lot of time doing document conversion between the myriad of different word processors, disk formats and sizes, not to mention delving into WPS+ on Dec Vaxes.
At the time we didn’t have a set of public access pc classrooms and consequently were unable to offer a public access wordprocessing service. However the Vaxes came with WPS+, part of the Dec All in One office management suite and a decision was taken to deploy this as a way of meeting the pent up demand for access to wordprocessing by the student body. In hindsight, a wonderfully wrong decision as to a means of providing a student word processing platform accessible from every timesharing terminal on campus and utterly incompatible with anything else on the planet (we later converted to WordPerfect on VMS which was compatible with the DOS and Mac versions and as student PC labs and individually owned PC’s became more common the students gradually self migrated over to DOS and Windows.
However, this got me thinking.
People tend to equate the arrival of the PC with the arrival of wordprocessing. This is not the case. There were dedicated word processing systems from IBM, Wang, Dec all of which were based on the minicomputer/timesharing terminal model long before the personal desktop computer was anything but a plaything, and there were specialist mainframe type services like Runoff and TeX (which is still with us) which was originally designed to talk to various high end typesetters for the production of journal articles and the like.
But all of this was used by scientists, lawyers and banks for specialist purposes. For example while TeX supported templates for letters it was not exactly a user friendly free form writing tool.
The things which made wordprocessing was first of all escaping from character oriented terminals to something resembling a properly addressable screen – something which good old Wordstar and Wordperfect never quite did – so that the user could see what the text would look like. This was of course part of the appeal of the first Macs, suddenly WYSIWYG was a reality, and secondly the rise of individual computing power, meaning that people could have a computer of their own, at home, in the study, to use when they wanted, without having to go to some ugly concrete data centre, interact with the priesthood who administered the machines (and who tended to come from a scientific programming background and never quite saw the point of wordprocessing), get an account, and then fight for a terminal.
Personal Computers were exactly that, personal and it was this that set productivity based computing free.
And that’s exactly what wordprocessing was – productivity based computing. No more days spent listening to the radio mindlessly retyping drafts to fix some spelling mistakes, or to restructure paragraphs, take text in, change the order, or take text out. Suddenly editing was easy.
Of course there was a downside - a plethora of wordprocessing applications - all with incompatible document formats. Wordstar, WordPerfect and Word were fairly mainstream, there were suddenly popular applications like AmiPro, and strange ones like NotaBene preferred by humanities researchers. This meant that documents had to be converted between different formats to be shared, printed edited and so on - which spawned a whole range of conversion tools and filters, perhaps the best of which was Word For Word, some of whose filters still live on in OpenOffice. Of course nowadays we have a monoculture of Word, with the odd weedy sprout of open office in the difficult to reach corner ...
Wordprocessing’s unique selling point was the ease or revision, not the ease of production. Making the text look nice was secondary – in a world of monospaced Courier even Computer Modern or Arial suddenly looked sexy.
In fact the appearance of sexy looking documents had to await the arrival of decent inkjet and laser printers in the late eighties, before then all you could hope for was some nicer looking daisywheel printer text.
The appearance of better printing technologies at an affordable price of course caught word processing by surprise – hence the desktop publishing phenomenon of the late eighties/early nineties where text was fed into a separate program to do complicated page layouts. Now of course, applications like Office do it all for you.
But again the DTP phenomenon was about empowerment – no longer was it the case that you had to take your draft and have it properly and expensively typeset for publication (you may not believe me, but the number of publishers that rekeyboarded text into a typesetting system in the early nineties was phenomenal – the idea of converting between documents and correcting any introduced artefacts never seemed to gel with the professional typesetting community.
DTP and wordprocessing meant that you could produce good looking text and text for filmsetting from your desktop – not exactly self publishing but it allowed authors and manual writers control of the publication process.
Likewise multi lingual, multi alphabet text was a breeze – I remember in the early nineties after the fall of the Soviet Union and going to Nerja in Spain, and being amazed by the number of real estate agents with badly spelled, badly handwritten Russian language adverts for villas (always with a swimming pool). For a moment I seriously thought of setting up in an office with a Mac and a Laserwriter producing Russian language real estate display ads.
So, wordprocessing was about empowerment. It made the production of text easier by making the tasks of revision and publication simpler and meant that the drudgery was taken out of the writing process. It still meant that the process of creation was the same, but it gave control to the author – no longer having to fight with the copy bureau or indeed pay for the quite considerable costs of having the final version of a draft, or a thesis professionally produced, or indeed the need to have a publisher’s advance to defray the costs of production.
Incidentally it could probably be argued that scientific journals’ publication model is a result purely of the costs of rekeyboarding and typesetting journals in the seventies and eighties – as arxiv.org and others in the open source journal business demonstrate, that’s no longer the case, but that’s a an arguement for a different day.
Literary wordprocessing probably made the barriers to publication lower – easier to produce a revised draft, easier to get published without the need for agents and substantial advances. In short it made it easier for people who wanted to write, to write, just as nowadays anyone can produce an e-book from their desktop and distribute it themselves – which may be the saving of obscure and learned texts. More mainstream publication still benefits from advertising and promotion, but for how long is an open question – the music industry has been through this already ….

The funeral of Kim Jong Il

2011-12-31T16:16:00.001+11:00

We have all seen the pictures of a grey snowy Pyongyang, the car with the the oversize portrait and the following car with the absurdly oversize wreath of white roses, the wailing crowds, the serried ranks of soldiers bowing in respect, and the son leading the funeral car by holding the mirror, as if leading a horse.

At first it seemed merely to show how far the world has come in the last twenty years - for those of us who grew up in the cold war, the funerals of dead dictators in distant cities formed part of the backdrop of our lives. The funeral seemed like a throwback to the time of Brezhnev and Mao.

But the other thing is how Confucian it was. The white roses and chrysanthemums. The wailing crowds - in Shanghai you can still hire professional wailers - and the funeral walk. Not the death of a communist leader more like the choreographed funeral of some past emperor from an earlier time ...

Saturnalia and solstices and other celebrations

2011-12-22T09:15:00.003+11:00

As I'm sure you've noticed, today's the solstice, and in another three days we're going to have another sort of celebration.

If you've ever wondered about the three day offset, I've a post on it over on one of my other blogs.

However, if you're one of my the regular readers, or even if you've just happened by, compliments of the season, and to quote a Bangkok cabbie a couple of years ago, 'happy jingle balls!'

Kim Jong Il and the war of 1905

2011-12-19T21:17:00.001+11:00

Today’s reports of the death of Kim Jong-Il and the subsequent uncertainty are the latest in a chain of events that started with the Russo Japanese war of 1905. Given the the events in the lead up to 1905 one could make a plausible argument it started earlier, but 1905 will do

One of the key learnings of that war for Russia was just how fragile the Russian hold on Primorye and the strategic port of Vladivostok. If the war had gone on longer they could have concievably lost Vladivostok as well as losing warm water access at Dalian.

That learning was reinforced during the Russian civil war when the West, along with Japan, attempted to sustain a viable puppet government in Siberia, based first of all on the Menshevik SR rump government in Omsk, and later by engineering a coup by Admiral Kolchak against the Omsk government to ensure that there was no rapprochement with the Bolsheviks.

Japan, which had occupied Korea in 1910, devoted 70,000 soldiers in support of the west, and clearly hoped to play a significant role in any rump Siberian state.
Under pressure from the west, Japan withdrew in 1918, but events in Manchuria showed, Japan still retained ambitions to expand beyond Korea.
The Russians also realised this, retaining control of the rail line to Vladivostok via - Harbin as long as possible, and indeed by not risking a war with Japan until 1945 after victory with Germany was secure.

It was into this context that Kim Jong-il was born, most probably at a Soviet army camp in Eastern Siberia, in 1941,where his father, Kim il Sung was being groomed to lead a Soviet puppet state in Korea. The date is significant – already by 1941 the USSR was planning for a war in Manchuria and Korea, and before Pearl Harbor and the bombing of Darwin.

While the Japanese Communist party was a significant force in post war Japan, and Stalin may have entertained hopes of proSoviet government in Japan, Kim il Sung and the DPRK was a backup plan to ensure the security of Primorye, Vladivostok and access to the mineral resources of Eastern Siberia. The last thing Russia wanted a pro US state in Korea.

By 1949 it was clear that there would be no socialist revolution in Japan, and that the DPRK route was going to be the only way of establishing a friendly buffer state on the Korean peninsula.

Later, after the Sino Soviet split the DPRK had an even greater value to the USSR as a means of protecting Primorye from the Maoists, especially after the government of China began to claim that Primorye had been unequally and unfairly annexed by the Russian empire from the Qing state.

What the Buryat or the Evenk or other tribal peoples inhabiting the area thought was of course ignored, as were the wishes of the vast majority of Koreans.

However such was the strategic value to the USSR of the DPRK that it even managed to acheive a degree of East German style prosperity, and was possibly even a little richer than South Korea during the seventies.

Of course, when the Soviet Union came apart the DPRK lost its major backer, but it struggled on, perhaps on the odd crumb of aid from Russia as the strategic imperatives remained the same, even if the flags and slogans remained the same.

It’s no surprise that Kim’s last foreign foray was to meet Dmitry Medvedev in Ulan Ude.

Korea is a hostage of geography and its recent political history a result of this hostage-dom. With Kim’s demise there is the possibilty of change, but to a large extent it will depend on the ability of the army to manage change and for Russia to resist the urge to meddle and pursue its own strategic objectives ….

A fantasy on the genitive plural

2011-12-15T10:42:00.000+11:00

For those of you following my Russian strand, I've just added a little bit of creative writing about the genitive plural to one of my other blogs ...

2011 - what worked

2011-12-14T12:24:00.000+11:00

For the last couple of years I've done a 'what worked' personal technology review at the end of the calendar year. Like the Inca new year it's now a tradition on this blog - here's the view for 2011

Evernote

Evernotehas turned out to be the real success of 2011. Accessible fromtablets and phones running iOs or Android, and from Macs and Windowsnatively, with a web client for everything else it has turned out tobe incredibly useful. Notes, web clippings, invoices for taxpurposes, contracts, all sorts of work stuff and personal researchmaterial, it handles it all.

OneNote was good but was hobbled by a poor web client and lack of truemultiplatform capability

Chrome

Ichanged over Chrome as Firefox seemed to have chronic memory leaks. Ihave used Firefox since but Chrome delivers, and the silentbackground updating means that bugs and issues are fixed quickly andsilently

zPad

Thebest $285 I've spent in a long time. Truly game changing in that working with a tablet means working with a truly portable device, onethat can be used from the sofa, bed, the kitchen bench, basicallyeverywhere within wi-fi reach, and also it socialises the experience.

It'stelling that J, who tends to be a technology refusenik wants one ofher own (this time a Lenovo IdeaPad) for compiling teaching materials via evernote, and generalweb based research. It'll be interesting to report next year how theexperience went ...

Stilldelivering...

Windows7

Iwas a reallyreluctant convert toWindows 7. Having been a Linux and OS X user for years I felt kind ofdirty going back to Microsoft. But, it's like driving a Holden -they're pretty good these days, and kind of fun ...

Cloudservices

WindowsLive Skydrive, GoogleDocs,all these services that let you create, maintain and store documentsremotely have really helped this year, making it easy to build andmaintain a portfolio of working documents and backgrounders on lineand accessible from anywhere. Coupled with One Note and wikidot,invaluable.

Coolere-reader

stillwonderful, light and versatile with wonderful battery life

AsusNetbook

Stillgood, and as both using as a tool to catalogue books and our trip to Thailand showed,light weight, reliable, versatile, and coupled with cloud services.highly effective

Droppingoff....

Linux

GivenI used to be such an evangelist for Linux I've hardly used it thisyear apart from a couple of vm's now and then. Ubuntu's move to Unityhasn't helped but them I'm finding I can do everything I want onWindows 7 or my tablet computer ...

OpenOffice/Libre Office

Again,ashamed to admit it but the Open Office/Libre Office split andOracle's shenanigans have ended up with me increasingly using Office2010, with Skydrive for document portability, and Google Docs foranywhere anytime document creation, no matter which computer I use

dem stones, dem stones, dem dry stones …

2011-12-12T21:04:00.001+11:00

I had trouble sleeping last night, and about three in the morning one’s mind starts to wander and I got to thinking about the Archepiscopal Museum in Ravenna, or more accurately about a collection of inscriptions that they have there, that irritatingly they won’t let you photograph.
Ravenna was of course the seat of the last Emperors of the West, of various Ostrogothic kings and later of the Byzantine exarchate of Italy, and was one of the wealthiest cities in Medieval and early Renaissance Italy.
I’ve previously written how the current Renaissance exhibition at the NGA allows you to track the evolution of technique and of art from a purely devotional activity to a rather more secular one.
So with the museum in Ravenna which we visited last year on our trip to Europe – or it could if they organised the display of inscriptions.
The late Roman and Ostrogothic ones are beautifully carved and the letters are well set out. The Byzantine ones perhaps less so but still pass muster. Lombard ones from the ninth and tenth centuries are increasingly crude, badly set out, letters crammed together when the stonemason ran out of space etc etc.
And then the miracle. One can see culture returning. The inscriptions get clearer again and better set out.
And when I saw that collection of inscriptions I thought ‘you could make an online exhibition of this’.
But as I said they wouldn’t let you photograph them. I’ve tried mining Flickr for open source/creative commons licenced examples, but no, it’s clear that photographing Ostrogothic inscriptions is not the first thing people think of doing when on an Italian holiday.
So I’m afraid that the online exhibition will have to remain in my mind, as I designed it in the wee small hours, but should you go to the Archepiscopal museum in Ravenna, be sure to look at the collection of inscriptions and see what story it tells you ….

Russian spam

2011-12-12T13:15:00.001+11:00

One of the side effect of being interested in Russian history is its effect on the spam you get.

In among the usual invitations to enhance the dimensions of one's penis, have longer harder erections etc (does anyone else think that these say something about the sexual insecurities of the American male - I've never given it much thought despite a happy and fulfilled sex life) comes the Russian spam - from the trite 'hello my name is Elena and I want to chat' to the bizarrely confronting 'hello I am your hot Russian pussy', sometimes in English, sometimes in Russian, often accompanied by pictures young physical looking women in serious danger of hypothermia, to the plain odd - the advert for a mig welding kit accompanied by the obligatory young and clothing challenged woman , or offers for sets of (overpriced) spanners.

Normally of course, all this goes into the spam sump and is deleted, but sometimes one sneaks through, or I happen accross it while checking the spam sump's contents for a missing email - usually one from some supplier that includes some advertising blurb - things like the email from the credit card company telling you that your statement is available for download, which has a pile of advertising included - the 'buy more shit at Christmas' meme

But I digress. The English language spam from Russia, or more properly the former USSR is just that on the whole, spam selling sexual titillation to the lonely and inadequate.

The Russian language spam is different - is it aimed at Russians living abroad, or does it tell us something about life in Russia today, its insecurities or its inadequacies. Or indeed plain old fashioned sexism where Marya still needs to get her kit off to sell welding rods ..

Renaissance–pictures from the Accademia Carrara

2011-12-11T21:41:00.001+11:00

This year’s major summer exhibition at the NGA is Renaissance – pictures from the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo.

I guess the first response is ‘Where?’ – in fact the Accademia Carrara has a good, if obscure collection of works from the late Medieaval onwards through the Renaissance and it was this collection that has been mined for the current exhibition – starting with late medieval devotional works that – while more stereotypes and individualistic than Byzantine works of the same period show the same stilted repetitive composition – here’s St Peter – don’t worry he looks the same as St George, you can tell them apart one has a big gold key and the other a sword.

Iconography to tell the stories to the people by the use of standard set of images. But behind the seemingly similar images you can see signs of change – a crucifixion that might almost have been drawn by Goya – portraits of young men that start to look like people rather than stereotypes.

You see a similar effect in the Madonna paintings. The Madonna moves from this stereotypical image to a much more individualistic pictures of a real woman with a real child. Now personally my reaction to Madonna paintings en masse is ‘God! not another bloody virgin Mary’, but put together as they are you can trace the evolution of style, of individualism, as well as the gradual improvement in technique

There are two other things that are interesting – first of all the exhibition covers the change from painting in tempera on smooth wooden boards – as in Byzantine icons, to canvas as in modern oil paintings with oil based paints, which allows more fluidity and larger paintings.

The other is the change from purely devotional art to the development of secular portraiture, first by the inclusion of pictures of the sponsors of the works in devotional paintings to portraits in their own right – saying ‘here I am, look at me’ such as in the portrait of Giovanni Bendetto Caravaggi, Rector of Padua University, which is most definitely all about saying how important a scholar Giovanni Caravaggi was.

The change in technique from board to canvas and the development of secular portraiture is neatly brought together at the end of the exhibition with two full length portraits by Giovanni Moroni that could easily pass as Dutch old masters. Comparing these with the first, late medieval, paintings in the exhibition shows just how far art travelled during the Renaissance.

The exhibition is on from now until Easter. Being members we went to the members private viewing on the opening night. Like the exhibition a couple of years ago of paintings from the Musee d’Orsay the NGA had managed to get access to the paintings due to restoration work back home.

Unlike the opening night of the Musee d’Orsay exhibition, there were no frightening haircuts or beards on show – perhaps because the exhibition this time required a serious interest in art history. Of course there were those there who were there to be seen but make no mistake – this is a serious exhibition – not intellectually easy but definitely rewarding.

All the Ways are open [Review]

2011-12-07T21:12:00.001+11:00

Annemarie Schwarzenbach // All the Ways are Open // Seagull Books // translated by Isabel Fargo Cole

This is not a travel book. It purports to be but it is not, instead it is a set of highly impressionistic pieces by Annemarie Schwarzenbach recounting experiences during her journey to Afghanistan in a 18HP Ford with Ella Maillart.

Ella Maillart published her own account of the journey as the Cruel Way, a book that is much more a travel book in much the same way that Robert Byron’s Road to Oxiana is a travel book.

That said Schwarzenbach’s book is enjoyable, in no small part due to the polished translation, Its impressionistic nature adds rather than detracts to its charm, giving glimpses of a more innocent world now vanished.

And that is its value – not as a travel book but as a portrait of a world that was ….

3 months with a zPad

2011-12-01T12:15:00.001+11:00

as I’ve previously mentioned on several occasions I bought myself a no name Chinese made Android tablet roughly three months ago.
Since then I’ve used it fairly intensively and this is a fair summation of my experience:

Apples are not the only fruit. Tablets don’t have to automatically be iPads. The Android experience is pretty good.
The software ecology in Android isn’t quite so rich – there are quite a lot of iPad only apps out there, but everything you need for something resembling work and recreational stuffing around exists for Android.
You don’t need to pay $600 for a tablet experience. My tablet cost me just under $300 direct from an overseas wholesaler . Lenovo and Acer periodically have specials on tablets for around $350, which seems a fair price if you want some local support and a device sourced from somewhere in Australia
You can type on a glass keyboard but if you’re seriously taking notes invest in a cheap bluetooth keyboard or use a netbook.
It's really good as a way of sharing images or handing to someone to show them a document or a web page
It would be really nice to be able to print …

Russian and me

2011-11-30T15:38:00.001+11:00

When I was six I wanted to be an archaeologist. I also wanted to be a train driver and an astronaut, but unlike the latter two the urge to be an archaeologist stayed with me.

I have no rational explanation for this, it just did.

No one around me - family, school or whatever - had much idea what an archaeologist did other than digging up old things - so wanting to be an archaeologist sort of turned into a fascination with late antique and early medieval history.

Now you would have expected that with that sort of interest somewhere alone the line I might have learned some Latin, some Greek, perhaps some old French and a bit of Old and Middle English.

Well no - while I can puzzle out a little Middle English and Old French, and on a good day manage a simple bit of Anglo Saxon, that's just what I've taught myself over the years. A smattering of random phrases and words. My Latin and Greek is even worse.

Never learned them you see.

Now this isn't because I'm a linguistic klutz, but rather because I'm not. I learned Russian as well as the more conventional French plus a bit of Spanish and German on the side.

This was back in the cold war days, when the ability to speak Russian was a rare and useless accomplishment. We didn't talk to them and they didn't talk to us with the result that it really was a singularly useless accomplishment, unless you ended up working for Foreign Affairs, or some related agency and even then that probably meant sitting in a darkened room translating chunks of Izvestiya and Pravda and producing summaries on the implications of an upswing in tractor oil usage in Uzbekistan.

Or I could have become an academic - except that I'm not a literary type.

So I did something else.

But actually what studying Russian gave me was the same thing that studying classical languages gives some people - an entree into a strange alien half recognised world, which while their motivations may be the same the culture is different, they have different interests and interactions, and more interestingly the way a different society works (or not).

And strangely, like my love of archaeology this fascination with a now vanished world and its history has stayed with as in my recent post about Fanya Kaplan and Bruce Lockhart.

And the odd little stories - how during the civil war the SR leaning Siberian provisional government in Omsk tried to withdraw the Kerenskas - the paper rubles issued by the Kerensky government between March and October 1917 in favour of their own notes, and how the population refused to hand over their Kerenskas and accept the (probably worthless) Siberian rubles. (In case you're interested there's a vague mention of this in Dr Zhivago where Pasternak talks about people refusing the lemons, the yellow banknotes issued by the Omsk government)

Or the role of the Japanese in the allied intervention in Vladivostok and the way that it really was a precursor to their expansion into Manchuria to gain access to additional resources.

Or the way that Vladivostok was an invented city - in 1860 it consisted of a few trapper's huts, yet by 1918 it was a respectable little city, even if it did lack a decent sewage system - something that reminded me of Seattle, which also started out as a little outpost clinging to a forested coast - it might even be interesting to do a 'compare and contrast' bit of analysis comparing the settlement of the American and Canadian Pacific North West with the Russian settlement of Primorye ...

Odd what fascinates people, isn't it ?

Photography update

2011-11-29T11:54:00.001+11:00

A few weeks ago I blogged about my intent to try some good old fashioned wet film black and white work. At the time I said that I reckoned I could do the job for less than $200.

So far, sourcing via ebay, I'm well on track as this spreadsheet shows - just under $115 for the hardware. I'm assuming that I won't have access to a dark room, and as a consequence the change bag is a necessity for getting the film out of the cassette and into the developing tank.

That's why I went for a small format developing tank, and a film puller - while in the old days I just used to pop the end off the film cassette by brute force (or occasionally with the aid of a bottle opener) but I had the luxury of a dark room then with enough space to spread out.

Given that a change bag is kind of cramped inside I reckon that being able to retrieve the leader and then feed the film into the tank spool might be a better approach under the circumstances.

I obviously still need to source some developer and fixer plus a couple of measuring cylinders but I don't see that breaking the $200 budget. All costs are in Australian dollars, but at the moment costs are near enough 1:1 with the US dollar to make currency fluctuations irrelevant. If you'd prefer to see pounds just multiply all costs by 0.6 or 0.75 for euros.

The other interesting thing is that there is obviously a trade out there in wet film technology and film cameras ....

Who needs a landline?

2011-11-28T14:26:00.001+11:00

Our landline died a couple of weeks ago, or more accurately, our analogue voice service did.

The ADSL service kept on working so we're not really sure when the analogue service died - I just happened to be sitting having breakfast one day and noticed that the phone base station said 'check landline'. So I did, and sure enough it was buggered with no dial tone.

Did the usual - unplugged everything, plugged in an old corded phone I keep in case of bushfires and the power going out, and definitely nothing. Plugged everything back in, logged into the phone company website and logged a fault.

After three separate visits, various phone calls, an occasion when they sent me an SMS saying the fault was fixed when it wasn't, they decided the fault must be on our side of the installation - possibly downstream of the ADSL filter/splitter that they installed to try and fix our ADSL dropouts.

All of this has taken about ten days so far. Some of it down to the phone company's inefficiency and miscommunication, and some of it down to procrastination on our part.

All this time we have had no analogue voice service. Have we noticed? No. We have our mobiles, we have a Skype account that lets us call landlines in Australia for free and landlines overseas for pennies.
We even have a cloud based fax service for dealing with those places (mostly overseas hotels and travel agencies) that need to to have credit card information faxed to them. Basically, while we're dependent on the ADSL service, the analogue service really doesn't matter any more,

Tellingly, at one point the phone company helpfully redirected our landline number to our Skype dial in number (this is a number that lets you call my Skype account as if it was a standard landline). tellingly we were not overwhelmed with voicemails - in fact we had exactly zero calls.

The only noticeable impact of not having a working landline is all the calls I've racked up dealing with the phone company - who to be fair have offered us a month's free line rental, which will probably offset the cost of these extra calls somewhat.

If it wasn't for the thought that we might have a creeping problem with our internal phone wiring, I'd be tempted to ignore the issue and leave the service permanently down.

However what it has proved is that the analogue service is basically irrelevant and we could happily move to a naked DSL only service. In fact the only reas we havn't is the attenuation and drop outs our ADSL service is prone to in the early evening due to it being basically overloaded ...

[update 01/12/2011]

We finally have a working landline - has only taken 17 days and 4 the last of whom we hired to check the cabling.

A Greek guy - described the efforts of the previous three as 'They bloody idiots' and fixed the problem in about 40 minutes after tracing it to a duff connector installed god knows how long ago and by whom, but which looked suspiciously like a Telstra style splice unit ...

KCL to open a Russian Studies Institute

2011-11-21T11:05:00.001+11:00

Back in February 2010 I wrote a post commenting on the short sightedness of closing Paleography at KCL. In the post I suggested that it was just as short sighted as the wholesale closing of Russian faculties in the nineties.

The justification for closing Russian departments, departments of Slavic studies, departments of Soviet Studies etc was something along the lines of 'We've won the cold war, Russia is no longer a credible threat, we can't justify the investment', which of course really meant we can no longer get funding from the military and the spooks, and no one else will pay for it - oh yes and Russian is hard, no one will study it.

Well studying Russian is hard. I know, I studied it back in the cold war days. But Russia sits on a vast part of the world's mineral wealth, some of the central Asian successor states are rich in gas and oil, and have immense strategic significance. Just because the genitive plural is mind numbingly complex is no reason for not studying Russian. Just as the complexity of Chinese is no reason for not studying Chinese given the economic significance of China.

Russian companies own aluminium plants in Queensland, newspapers in London and god knows what else. Russia also still posesses a fairly serious military capability. In other words Russia is economically and militarily significant and that means it's in our interests to know something about their language and culture, if only to negotiate more effectively with them.

Unfortunately the wholesale closing of Russian faculties means that the people who could conceivably have taught the mysteries of the genitive plural are now pursuing alteranative careers such as running market gardens in Queensland and the pool of expertise has largely been lost to academia.

So it was with a wry smile that I saw a report this morning that KCL was to establish a dedicated Russia Studies Institute. The wheel is coming full circle ...

Britain, Russia and Brest Litovsk

2011-11-20T18:30:00.001+11:00

An interesting little conundrum here. On August 30, 1918, Fanya Kaplan attempted to assassinate Lenin.

To put this is context, this was some six weeks after the murder of the Tsar and his family in the Ipatiev house, and nearly six months after the signing of the Treaty of Brest Litovsk, which settled the Eastern front in world war I.

What is less clear is the British role in all of this.

Immediately after the (post revolution/pre-treaty) ceasefire in the east British secret agents continued to organise partisan groups that sneaked across the ceasefire line in the Ukraine to harry the German and Austro Hungarian forces there, with the aim of continuing to tie down a substantial part of the German army which might be otherwise deployed to the Western front. It wasn't all one way - various Habsburg proteges such as Basil the Embroidered were involved in attempts to create new states in the west of Ukraine.

The British are also claimed to have tried to persuade the government of Russia to allow the transit of Japanese troops prior to Brest Litovsk to fight on the eastern front, and when initially it appeared that Trotsky was against a treaty with the Germans, to persuade the Russians to maintain at least a token force. They even sent a general, General Poole, to take command of the Czechoslovak legion with the aim of reinforcing the token Russian force in the east.

In short the British were afraid that a settlement in the east would allow Germany to move its forces west, and maybe finally achieve breakthrough on the western front. Which is exactly what Ludendorff tried to do during the spring offensive in 1918.

All this came to naught. Lenin, fearing that continued involvement in a war with Germany, however token, would inevitably divert resources away from any internal conflict, and would mean that the Bolshevik government would have to compromise with other factions and have to form a more moderate coalition of the left leaning parties, forced through a pro-treaty motion in the Central committee, effectively overruling Trotsky and mandating him to make an agreement, however distasteful.

Enter Bruce Lockhart – alleged diplomat but clearly a British ‘black operations’ officer to advance the British position, and responsible for organising several plots, including one to rescue the Tsar.
Bruce Lockhart (his surname, not his full name) was arrested immediately after Fanya Kaplan’s failed assassination attempt. It’s clear that Bruce Lockhart and another British intelligence officer, Sidney Reilly had a more than passing involvement in the plot.

The question is – was the assassination attempt in revenge for the murder of the Tsar and his family, or more an attempt to remove Lenin in the hope that the ultra left Bolshevik faction would implode and a more moderate government emerge which would repudiate Brest Litovsk and again open hostilities in the east?

And was Britain’s earlier apparent lack of interest in a serious attempt to free the Tsar and the Imperial family because they expected other things to happen which would allow the Tsar to leave for exile, much as later happened for the Kaiser and Karl of Austria?

[by happenstance, when checking one of the background facts while correcting this post I happened across this article from the BBC, which gives an alternative but not dissimilar view]

daily life with the zPad

2011-11-15T08:58:00.001+11:00

there's been a flurry of posts recently about how a quarter of iPad users hardly use them.

as someone who bought himself a no name Chinese android tablet a few months ago I thought I'd add my $0.02 about it.

First of all I do use it a lot - and I do mean a lot - so much so that the inkjet printed zPad name and banding information has worn off the back.

The way you use it is interesting - all these click and read operations - like email, like google reader, scanning the news on the BBC and Guardian apps, checking the weather, Twitter, all can be done from the lounge room or a chair on the deck, in a way that couldn't be done comfortably with a netbook or full size laptop.

Anything needing more than two lines of text to be written, photo editing, any vaguely serious work remains on a 'proper' computer.

In short, the tablet socializes computer use - just as in the same way reading the paper can be a social activity where one can engage with the cat, pass the device to one's partner if one finds something particularly interesting, wander into the kitchen with it.

I would however still take a netbook travelling in preference because of the convenience of having a keyboard and a set of editing tools, but certainly I could imagine taking the tablet travelling, and possibly a bluetooth keyboard is all that's needed to make the difference.

So, back to the quarter of iPad owners who never use it. The one question that doen't seem to be asked is their pattern of conventional computer use. Those of use locked into the great buzzing booming world of technology forget that there are a lot of people out there with fairly minimal computer skills and who only use a computer because they want skype, they want a little bit of email and to deal with online banking and billing.

These people probably don't create or consume much in the way of content, nor do they feel the need to. Just because they suddenly acquire a tablet are they not going to change their behaviour - people on the whole change when they need to, not when the potential exists

The war of 1911

2011-11-14T18:12:00.001+11:00

When I blogged about the ‘Long War’ hypothesis I completely failed to mention the Italo Turkish war of 1911.

No excuse other than ignorance on my part as while it doesn’t alter the hypothesis that the first world war really started in the east with the Russo Japanese war of 1905, the war of 1911 uncannily predicts the first world war in the Middle East some five or six years later with the use of armoured cars and aircraft by the Italian forces and the use of native mujahadin levies on horseback by the Turks, led by a dashing commander – not Lawrence of Arabia, but one Mustafa Kemal, later known as Ataturk.

And the Turks damned near won. Italy, which had decided that the Turks really shouldn’t be left to govern what is now Libya, and that the people of Libya would be much better off having the Italians as colonial masters (after all the world was made to be ruled by the European powers and France and Spain had divided Morocco between themselves a few years previously). The Turks, and the Libyans, had a different view and put up a fairly stiff resistance despite having no significant military presence in Libya. And despite their eventual defeat, the Turks learned that they could European armies could be beaten.

The other side effect was that the Ottoman Turks learned early the value of military aircraft using them to some effect during the Balkan war and later on to attack Greek and Allied targets in the north Aegean during the Gallipoli campaign – where the commander on the Turkish side was again Mustafa Kemal.
One can speculate, but Kemal’s experience in Libya, where the Ottomans so nearly beat the Italians must have added to his determination to resist at Gallipoli – for the simple reason that he knew that European armies could be beaten …

zero thru' one of minus one

2011-11-10T14:56:00.001+11:00

a little gmail message count snafu:

If you click on the picture to blow it up and look at the right hand figures you'll clearly see that the message count is displayed as 0-1 of -1. This little gem appeared after I deleted a message - it fixed itself on refresh but even so ...

A cultural weekend

2011-11-06T18:31:00.001+11:00

Sometimes it seems like all we do is work.
Being human we do need a break and this weekend with its promise of 30 plus weather breaking down into storms seemed an absolutely ideal time to go and take in a little culture.
Saturday saw us decamp to the Portrait gallery to see their exhibition of of new portraiture from South east Asia – some of which was interesting and some of which was simply odd.
I personally found Vivan Sundaram’s photo collages and Nusra Latif Qureshi’s prints especially striking.
In Sundaram’s work I was especially struck by what seemed to be beautifully photographed Indian familty portraits that looked as if they could date from the 1930’s set in conjunction with artworks in a way that one suspects was never normal in middle class India. For example:

Sunday saw us catch the end of the Fred Williams exhibition at the NGA.
Fred Williams has a style of inspired minmalism building picture of the Australian Bush amiout of sparse paintings of swathes of colour enlivened by what can only be described as textured blobs.
I have a great weakness for such minamalist paintings – I am a quiet fan of Rosie Scott’s Cornwall paintings for example, and Fred is definitely a master of the abstracted minimal.
What was especially nice about the exhibition was the shear range of paintings allowing one to trace the evolution of his style from his early student work on to his mature work.
What was also nice was that as well as his landscapes they included some of his portraits – proving that the man could indeed paint in an (almost) conventional style if need be…

Photography

2011-11-06T18:29:00.001+11:00

Photography, as we all know has gone digital – and for its utter convenience it’s difficult to see a reason to go back to the good old days of film.
Except I’ve never been totally happy with black and white photography on digital, I’ve never quite found a technique to get the depth of contrast one sees in 1930’s photographs with their high silver prints. For example, this UK National Portrait Gallery picture from the 1930's of Jasmine Bligh, one of the first BBC television announcers.

So I’m starting a little experiment to see if you can get some thing similar by choosing your source media carefully – amazingly, you can still get a range of black and white films of various characteristics from a range of online retailers, and ebay is your friend here for sourcing them.
There are also still people who develop films, admittedly for around $25 a time –. not cheap, but I’ve thought up a little project that should make the whole exercise fun and cost effective.
I have a digital negative scanner. I also once, admittedly nearly forty years ago, was an enthusiastic amateur photographer, taking my own pictures and developing my own films. While I still have my own enlarger, I no longer have a developer tank, change bags, film loaders etc I could process my own. So if I could source the things required, for example a film developing tank, a change bag in lieu of a darkroom, the chemicals, and so on for less than $200 I'd still be ahead. And I do still have my film cameras.
So my project is this – source a tank and a change bag from ebay, and I should be right to process my own films. The chemicals might be a bit of a problem in Canberra, but there are still shops that sell them in Sydney and Melbourne, meaning I could if necessary take the train to Sydney to pick some up – carrying a range of strange chemically smelling liquids and powders through security at an airport is probably not really going to be feasible.
Then once in business work my way through a range of films to find one that gives me effects I’m after.
First thing was to check my film cameras. One of the first problems was that my Vivitar SLR had died – probably only a battery, but the TTL meter was never totally reliable when I used it, and while I still have an Olympus Trip in working order, it’s not the best for composing shots. Probably meant that a new camera was required for the project – but of course no one makes film cameras any more …
However, if you look on ebay for old film cameras it’s clear that there’s a trade in old hi-end camera bodies and lenses among afficinados but that wasn’t what I looking for – I need something good but basic.
Well, I was outbid on an old Pracktica, but I managed to snag a Seagull ( a Chinese clone of an old Minolta model) for around $30 including shipping – and assuming that it’s OK I should be in business.

So in anticipation I've ordered my first batch of film - Lucky SHD ASA 100 from China - popular with the lomography crowd ...

No more computer labs

2011-10-20T12:12:00.001+11:00

Stenden School Workspace
Originally uploaded by Arjen Stilklik.

I've periodically fulminated about how University computer labs are an outdated concept and how they should be replaced with a mixture of workspaces for people to either use their own technology, or places full of high end specialist equipment - and even that is kind of moot given that reasonable recent desktop can do what a three or four year old specialist Unix workstation can do in terms of raw compute.

And now that spring is here, the thing I notice when I walk across campus is laptops, or more accurately students sitting outside in the fresh air using their laptops. Note their laptops, not the institution's. I have no figures for any of this but I would guesstimate that students only use institutionally owned computers for dedicated lab exercises or to access software that's not readily available due to cost.

The rest happens on their own machines or via google docs, or whatever.

What's interesting is that this idea seems to be gaining a little momentum - with the recognition that a lot of computing takes place elsewhere.

However, there's three things that need to be considered before completely closing down labs (to be provocative I used to say we should close them all tomorrow and see what happened).

1) There needs to be a service of last resort to cover those whose laptop breaks, dies, gets stolen. I used to be a fan of recycling old computers for this, put linux and libre office on them and sell them very cheaply, but these days computers are cheap enough for most people to afford a decent machine and an academic Office licence.

2) we need to carefully evaluate specialist software. Some might be better provided as virtual PC's, some might still need to be deployed on dedicated hardware. The advantage of the virtual pc route is that it provides a mechanism for the 'old but worthy' bits of software that don't run well on new hardware to continue to be supported

3) we need to ensure that we adequately provide these services that we expect students to use, and that access and setting them up is simple. Email is easy. It's the rest that is difficult. The services required include a filestore service that can be used from the desktop and allows material to be shared easily. A printing service to allow access to printers while on campus. Collaboration services such as wikis and a blogging platform for group exercises. Easy access to the learning management system. An online essay submission system etc etc. We need a thorough understanding of what services are required to move to providing services (which is what we are doing here) rather than providing resources.

However, assuming that we can meet #1 and #2 and #3, I'd say break out the beanbags. My own real epiphany came in the King James Library in St Andrews - turn up, login via eduroam and do your work just as if you were sitting at your desk on the other side of the world ...

Blackberry Fail = #firstworldproblem ?

2011-10-20T11:56:00.001+11:00

There's an article in today's Toronto Globe and Mail with a similar title to this post.

I'm not taking issue with the article as it's clearly supposed to be amusing, but with the idea that a collapse of email services (or any other twenty first century messaging system) is a first world problem.

It's not. Visit any country struggling up the ladder and you'll see that cellphones are everywhere, and smartphones are not far behind - witness the blackberry toting tuk tuk driver we encountered on our trip to Thailand earlier this year.

It's a simple story, but worth telling. We were in a tuk tuk in Ao Nang when the driver grunted sorry and pulled over to the side of the road. It was in the middle of a monsoonal squall and I half expected that the tuk tuk had died in the rain.

Not a bit of it. The driver pulled a plastic bag out of his pocket, unwrapped it to unpack a blackberry, which he looked at, tapped a response, re wrapped it and set off again. Now a blackberry must have been quite an investment for him but is obviously how he kept in touch with his touts and regulars to pick up traffic.

The thing which always impresses me about poorer countries is how good the hi tech infrastructure can be and to what extent services are enabled by them, and indeed how cheap smartphones from China are changing the way things get done in these countries.

A dead email solution is just as much a problem for a tuk tuk man chasing bookings or a millet farmer trying to decide if this is the week to sell his crop as it is for anyone in Pitt Street

Stuff elsewhere ...

2011-10-18T11:22:00.001+11:00

I've got stuff scattered in various places on the internet. To try and bring some coherence to this here's a couple of noteworthy snippets ....

I've done a semi autobiographical review of Trinity Tales on my wordpress blog. The review has been picked up by Ninth Level Ireland, which is mildly cheering. The review is also linked to from my LibraryThing page for Trinity Tales

On a more technical bent I've done a quick Tumblr post on how the iOS/Android debate is kind of like the PC vs Mac debate in the late eighties/early nineties.

the trouble with indexing ...

2011-10-12T10:23:00.000+11:00

One of the problems I find with all note structuring applications is indexing and categorisation. Most of them have moved away from the strict hierarchical categorisation model (if it's this it sits in this bucket, and if it's that that bucket) by using tags but even so you do tend to end up with a pile of thematic buckets.

This is absolutely fine when collecting material with a purpose - I'm going to write a paper on X - but not so fine when collecting ideas - what I describe as post-its on a wall.

Post-its on a wall is a technique I've used a lot. Write down an idea or concept on a post-it. Stick it on a white board Write down another on another post-it. If your'e clever you can use tricks like using different colours if the idea or concept comes from somewhere else. Draw a line between the two post-its describing the relationship between the two. Do it again. Draw a line. And so on.

You end up with what I used to call a connectedness diagram, but is really an informal representation of linked data. It's a technique I find really useful for understanding and organising material. It's also not a new technique, I used it, with sheets of butcher's paper and coloured pencils at the end of the seventies when revising for my finals and finding links and references across and between modules (We can say this about foraging behaviour in prosimians because their visual systems have this characteristics, and the environment in which they live lacks distinct seasons, etc)

I havn't really seen an alternative to the post it technique - mind mapping tools like freemind for some reason seem to lack the flexibility required, and what one wants to do is to arrange and diagram the relations between objects.

One alternative which does seem to do the job well is LORE - the literature object re-use and exchange tool developed as part of the Aus-e-lit project.

I'm going to guess that conceptually it started out as an annotation tool to allow the linking of notes and material together, but crucially what it allows is for you to develop and diagrams sets of links between objects and share them with collaborators (or the whole world should you want to) but also to creatively organise material.

Such a model also delivers what I call 'active curation'. Texts in other languages can often have ambiguities in translation, especially as when the language is something like Middle English.

One could take two versions of the same text, link the two and compare the readings and perhaps reference similar less ambiguous bits of text in other documents, etc, etc, to show why a particular interpretation should be preferred over another.

And of course this is not just for Middle English, the same approach could be taken to analysing witness statements, when investigating criminal cases, especially where we are talking about cases such as fraud or other forms of financial malfeasance which can be extremely difficult to prove but where the case is built of little facts and inconsistencies ...

and there's pliny ...

2011-10-05T15:35:00.000+11:00

in my off again on again investigation into note taking and annotation software I happened across Pliny.

The download link for the Mac version was broken for me but I found a second copy on SourceForge which downloaded and installed just fine.

Like the Zotero client it provides annotation, which is the thing that Evernote does not do, which at the least allows you to flag relevant passages in documents.

However Pliny does not look as if it has had substantial development since 2009, and if I was a serious user I would be hesitant committing to it long term - Zotero overall would look to be a better bet, with a larger user community behind it, especially in academia.

However Zotero would need to truly escape from the Firefox ghetto and perhaps get itself onto iPads and Android tablets to be truly useful, given that seems to be the way the world is going ...

Zotero standalone

2011-10-05T09:57:00.001+11:00

Just to say that I've been playing with the Zotero 3.0 standalone beta in a very desultory way.

Basically it seems to have taken a leaf out of Evernote's book and the standalone client has many of the same capabilities as Evernote.

Certainly this would offer an opportunity to break out of the Firefox space, the question really comes down to whether Zotero's citation and bibtex output capabilities are enough of a usp given that their storage costs seem to work out rather more than Evernote's freemium model.

More when I've delved into this some more ...

The Vitruvian Wheelbarrow

2011-10-05T08:46:00.002+11:00

Last night I watched a show on the ABC (I think it came from Channel 4 in the UK originally) , Rome wasn't built in a day, in which a group of tradies try to build a Roman villa using the techniques described by Vitruvius as a guide and only historically or archaeologically attested tools.

This means that most hand tools are allowed, and most of them are pretty similar to those found in Bunnings or Mitre 10 today - if you doubt me go look at the rather fine collection of tools from Silchester in the Reading Museum.

However Vitruvius does not mention wheelbarrows. Neither does any other Roman author, so no wheelbarrows. In fact one of the archaeologists in the show had a tanty over the builders trying to sneak wheelbarrows on site.

This of course begs the question as to why Vitruvius doesn't mention wheelbarrows. The obvious answer is that the Romans didn't use them. Certainly carvings of Roman squaddies building things, eg Trajan's column are fairly wheelbarrow free.

Now the Romans were reasonably clever and innovative, and also in contact with a lot of other cultures so the old 'they didn't think of it' argument is a bit thin. Let's assume that they did think of it and it didn't work for them, and try and work out why that might be the case.

At its simplest, a wheelbarrow is two levers, the shafts in an inverted V pivoted at the apex of the V on the wheel. This means that most of the weight and force acts down through the wheel. Overload a cheap wheelbarrow often enough and the wheel, its axle, or the mount will break. This is why builder's wheelbarrows often seem to have overly robust wheels and axles.

Modern wheelbarrows are built of steel. Nineteenth century ones, as used by navvies building the first railway lines in England were of wood, but often with cast iron wheels. Wooden wheelbarrows were probably heavier for their strength but nothing precludes using wood for the shafts or the frame.

What is interesting is the adoption of cast iron wheels. Obviously the wheel and it's axle was seen as a weak point and hence the adoption of cast iron to reduce the risk of failure. Equally there is nothing to stop you building a wheel barrow with a wooden wheel, perhaps with an iron rim and straps for strength.

The question is whether nineteenth century construction workers adopted the iron wheeled wheelbarrow because of its greater durability or because it was cheaper (or both). Answering this question would probably give us a clue as to why Vitruvius does not mention wheelbarrows - it might simply be that making one durable enough was uneconomic for the Romans. Handcarts and extra slaves to push and shove may simply have been more cost effective .

[update 07 October]

I'm quite possibly wrong on some of the above. Wikipedia, who else, has an excellent article on wheelbarrows, and I now know that the Greeks may well have used wheelbarrows, but they seem to have disappeared from the historical record in Roman times only to reappear in northwestern Europe sometime between 1150 and 1250. I'd personally view this date with some caution, as it coincides with the appearance of illuminated manuscripts and their associated maginalia - which form a source of information about daily life along with some more fanciful suggestions such as alternative uses for trumpets - in the area under consideration, but there appears to be reasonable agreement that wheelbarrows were relatively uncommon until the 1400's.

I could wave my hands and claim that this was possibly in part due to the ongoing shortage of labour after the Black Death, which made using a wheelbarrow with its risk of breakage and accompanying cost of replacement worthwhile, but I am making it up with no evidence at all.

Certainly a very superficial study of pictures in which wheelbarrows feature suggests they were used for lighter as opposed to heavier work, so I still feel my suggestion that it was not until the advent of iron wheel assemblies and mounts that the wheelbarrow became useful in heavy construction, such as canal and railway building in eighteenth and nineteenth century England.

This is however only a supposition, and having been wrong once, I could be wrong a second time ...

Living with the zPad ...

2011-10-04T11:12:00.000+11:00

I've had my zPad, my no name Android Froyo tablet for about a month now and it has changed my life.

Admittedly only in some small ways, but there's definitely change there. For example I now use it most mornings to check my email my diary and the news headlines while making J a cup of tea, feeding the cat etc.

And that's a function of it's instantness and portability, and the fact that both the Guardian and the BBC have free Android apps (the SMH doesn't, but then we get the print edition anyway).

The other thing I ended up using it for is happenstance browsing ( or creative buggering about if you prefer) where you look at the weather, hop over to the Irish Times web page, something about an early medieval burial site catches your interest, you tweet the link, google for the detailed press release etc etc.

Previously this would be done from my laptop in the study, now it's easy to do sat on the sofa stroking the cat and while talking to J.

And that change in behaviour is purely the result of form factor - it's easy to hand across to someone else, and it's comfortable to hold in your hand for happenstance browsing, while a laptop of a netbook has to end up balanced on your knee. In other words, while it doesn't let you do anything you didn't do before it does make the experience more congenial.

And that's it's key - congeniality. While in some ways it does less than a netbook or a full size laptop, it does those things that don't demand intensive input - such as blogging - in a good enough manner that it gets you out of the study and into the house. The keyboard, once you get used to it's eccentricities, is god enough for composing short emails and notes. I did start writing a blog post on it, but gave up - sometimes a proper keyboard is just plain better.

Strangely the one thing I thought I'd use it for - as an Evernote based replacement for meetings paperwork - is the one thing I havn't used it for - yet ...

victoria and calixtus ii

2011-09-27T15:33:00.002+10:00

While I was recently circumnavigating the globe to take in a Project Bamboo management meeting in Maryland followed almost immediately by the DCMI conference in the Hague, I started reading Lytton Strachey's biography of Queen Victoria.

When describing the opening of the Great Exhibition of 1851, Strachey recounts how a Chinese, in formal (Chinese) dress appeared, and no one knew who he was and where he had come from, but that he was co-opted into the opening procession on the ground that there was no official Chinese representative present.

The gentleman in question later disappeared without anyone being any the wiser as to his identity and whether he was indeed Chinese.

This instantly reminded me of the man who appeared at the coronation of Callixtus ii in 1119 claiming to be Archbishop John, Patriarch of India. He also was allowed to take part as he looked plausible and appeared to add gravitas to the proceedings.

Of course, in the world before the First World War, governments really had no way of identifying individuals with any degree of reliability given the near universal absence of passports or identity cards which made it extremely easy for people to travel and present themselves as other than they were - such as King O'Malley, one of the founding fathers of Canberra and quite probably in retrospect a complete shyster.

One of the things you realise reading English travel writers of the 1930's was just how new and imperfect this new world of passports was. For example, volunteers for the International Brigades from the UK simply bought an excursion ticket to Paris as no passport was required to buy or travel on that type of ticket. When they got to Paris they then made contact with people who facilitated their onward journey. Or indeed Laurie Lee who basically just bummed a ride on a boat to Spain - no documents, nothing.

The bureaucracy of passports and visas was very new - take for example the care with which Peter Fleming explains his difficulty with his exit visa from the Soviet Union to Manchuria and how he had to double back and leave by the route he first thought of rather than the more convenient one, or George Orwell explaining the bureaucracy of obtaining an exit stamp in civil war Catalonia - something that both writers clearly expected their audiences to be unfamiliar with.

This is now a vanished world - we are all too familiar with the joys of ESTA's, landing cards, exit cards and the like, and of course it would be almost impossible for someone to masquerade as something that they are not given that we all leave a trail of clicks and cookies behind us these days , and are much more monitored than we were even ten years ago ...

travels with a laptop redux

2011-09-26T16:28:00.001+10:00

Note taking on my recent conference trip wasn't all as hi-tech as I may have seemed to suggest in my previous post. On day two of the conference I ran very low on battery and my laptop shut down on me forcing me to the old fashioned pen and paper note taking

I then typed the notes in a structured and coherent manner into evernote

And the notes actually look better, are more coherent, and it took no longer that the 45 minutes I usually spend editing my notes.

So, while evernote is a great tool, I've come round to the idea that note taking on paper and writing the notes up afterwards - the discipline is to do this consistently and structure the notes sensibly.

So I think my conference workshop/toolkit looks like this:

netbook + psu + mouse
small digital camera + transfer cable
android tablet computer
cool-er e-reader
cable to charge tablet from netbook
ditto for e-reader
australian power board, and plug adapters as required
2m ethernet cable (hotel cables are always too short, knackered or both)
headset for skype
go-sim phone to minimize roaming charges on these occasions when you want to call someone but can't access skype (airports for example)
decent hardback notebook and pens

the e-reader stays on the list due to its excellent battery life (and being small and light it's ideal for sticking in an airplane seat pocket) The zPad's there really as an experiment, I'm actually not sure just how useful it would be in practice until I try it seriously. Making sure all the devices you lug about charge via usb saves carrying the psu's with you.

Taking an ethernet cable with you is essential - it's surprising how many hotels only provide a wired service. Unfortunately the ethernet cables provided for loan have usually had a hard life and have been twisted and bent in unfortunate ways and have broken clips.

As for power adapters, I havn't yet found a universal power power adapter ( the ones with multiple prongs or ends) that actually accepts an Australian plug reliably and will at the same time plug into a Dutch or German Schuko plug receptacle - most of the cheaper ones don't deal with the Australian thin angled prongs properly or are intended to plug into a flush two pin power socket as opposed to a recessed one.

The only other problem I had was not having a US phone number in the states - possibly the answer would to get one of these dual sim phones an a cheap payg sim which you chuck away when you get home. That way you could make local calls and still be able to use the go-sim sim for international calls ...

solving the zPad calendar sync problem

2011-09-26T15:46:00.001+10:00

Well,

I've finally cracked it - add the device to my GooSync account and then sync using the funambol client.

It shouldn't be this complicated but it does seem to work....

travels with a laptop

2011-09-22T05:44:00.002+10:00

Well I'm seven days into a 10 day circumnavigation of the world with a Project Bamboo meeting in Maryland at the end of last week, a trip to see family in Scotland at the weekend, a session with eduroam and a borrowed desk in St Andrews on Monday and now the DC-2011 conference at the Netherlands National Library in the Hague, where I'm presenting tomorrow, and then a 22 hour flight home from Amsterdam via Frankfurt and Singapore.

Throughout this marathon I've been toting my work 15" MacBook Pro which after what seems like three hundred million security checks, not to mention typing on my actual lap, seems increasingly heavy and bulky.

So I looked round this afternoon at a moment when nothing particularly interesting was happening at what my fellow delegates where using.

There was a sprinkling of people like me either using full size Macs, Dells or Thinkpads. Quite a few, mostly from the US, had Macbook Airs. The Europeans tended to netbooks in preference, and of course there were a few iPadistas. I didn't notice any Android tablets in use.

So, what do I find I use on the road?

Evernote - notes are typed directly into Evernote these days
Google Docs, for writing, reviewing slides and recording expenses in a spreadsheet
Gmail - which I've now got configured as allowing me to masquerade as my corporate email should I want
Google Calendar

and that's about it. While I have a local install of both Libre Office and Microsoft Office, I hardly use them, and the same goes for the standard mail client. Otherwise it's all websites for flight check-ins, conference stuff and seeing if it's going to rain.

So I need the web, but nothing particularly fast in compute terms. Given my use of the Google ecology, using Chrome as a browser seems to be a first choice, but what to choose as a lightweight portable computing platform?

mac book pro - too big and heavy evernote ok, chrome's ok
mac air - expensive but long battery life evernote ok, chrome's ok
netbook - light cheaper than the air but shorter battery life, evernote ok, chrome's ok
chromebook ??? evernote support ??? web client ?
linux netbook, ookygoo interface, native evernote compatible client not stable, web client a possible alternative, installing chrome hampered by ookygoo window manager
ipad, good battery, glass keyboard, evernote, must use safari but some specialist apps
zpad, uncertain battery, android, glass keyboard, evernote native, better though not perfect integration into the google ecology

On balance, I think the answer is a netbook with a native evernote client. Most times you can manage your battery life pretty well even when there's nowhere near enough powerpoints to go around, and there's usuaully more than enough in workshop sessions - just pack your travel adapters. My experience last year taking the ookygoo to Providence has shown me how little you need to stay productive. While the same might be true of a conventional laptop, they're heavy and bulky, and actually a pain to work with on your lap for an extended period.

The need for chrome and evernote drives me to a windows netbook. While I'm sure an Air has a longer battery life, is lighter and generally more aesthetic, the fact remains that the windows netbook cost me $250 as opposed to a touch over $1000 for an Air. If it wasn't for my lingering uncertainty about the zPad's battery life a zPad and a bluetooth keyboard might do the job, but again the cost is the same as a discounted netbook, so I'd probably go for the netbook on the grounds of greater perceived reliability, and a much wider software base.

As for the Chromebook, I don't know. The model is incredibly sound, and almost everywhere you go has wi-fi. In practical terms I'm using my laptops as internet terminals already, the only question is whether I'm emotionally ready to abandon having a local client.

I suspect my answer is no, purely because of my dependence on evernote and the fact that the local clients are much more responsive than the web based client.

So next time I go travelling, I think it'll be with a netbook. The zPad might tag along as well purely for it's instant on and general immediacy when checking schedules, flights and Google maps, but I think a netbook for note taking because of it's half way decent keyboard. A Chrome book could be an alternative, but at more than one and a half times the price of a discounted netbook, it would have to be a hell of a use case ...

Eduroam ...

2011-09-19T20:28:00.001+10:00

As is fairly obvious, I work at a university, and my institution, like many others in Australia provides an eduroam service so that academics visiting other campuses can log in to the wireless network using the credential from their home institution.

Until now, I'd found it mildly useful, perhaps because most of the visits to conferences and meetings that I make tend to take place in hotels and other places offsite from university campuses.

Until last week. I'm currently half way through a back to back trip to a Project Bamboo review meeting at the University of Maryland and a conference in the Hague.

UMD had recently deployed an eduroam service. I just opened up my laptop, logged in and there I was - magically connected and authenticated against ANU half a planet away. No more fiddling about setting up network connections or using visitor accounts. Quite magical really.

Then to add to the fun, midway through the trip, I stopped off in Scotland to see my father at the weekend. I also realised that I hadn't writing my conference presentation. However I had time on the Monday morning before I went to the airport before I flew on to the Hague.

Now I'd most of the presentation done - but in Google Docs as I'd started it at work, did a little at home, and then meant to finish it off in Maryland. That meant to finish it off I needed the internet, if only to download it to work offline.

My first though was 'Coffee Shop'. That's a problem as the rural north east of Scotland is not well endowed with wi-fi enabled coffee shops. I'm sure they exist, but I don't know where. And then I had a brainwave. I could drop down to St Andrews and use the University library there as I was sure they'd have eduroam enabled.

So, on my way through London, a quick check of the St Andrew's website to check that they'd got eduroam onsite, they had, and a courtesy email to St Andrew's library asking them if they'd mind if I borrowed a desk for a couple of hours.

I didn't realise when I sent the email that this was a big ask, as the main library was in the midst of refurbishment for the start of semester, and the library was operating out of St Mary's College, but they were truly wonderful and let me sit in the Georgian magnificence of the King James library while I worked on my presentation - as always the paper was submitted months ago and things always change slightly between the submitted paper and the conference.

More to the point, I again connected quickly and seamlessly, and everything just worked. Networking as it should be. Thank you eduroam, and thank you St Andrews!

Living with a zPad

2011-09-12T09:45:00.002+10:00

Well, one week on I can say it doesn't disappoint.

I especially like its 'instantness' - want to check your email or the weather - just pick it up. Want to check a document - just go into evernote. None of the interminable buggering about Windows 7 is prone to coming out of hibernation or sleep, or even OS X with its pretence that it's woken up quickly, when all it's done is show you your dekstop while furiously cranking up in the background.

Battery life is pretty good too. How good I'me not sure yet but it seems good enough, even with GPS running to make it through the day with periodic wakeups for email checking, dropbox and evernote syncing.

The screen and image display quality is pretty good, images of paintings, photographs, are sharp and clear, and the image form factor is excellent. Book reading is similarly sharp and the text is highly legible.

However, for recreational reading (ie stuck on planes and trains) I'd still use a an e-reader on a long trip t because of the near infinite battery life of 6-8k page turns between charges - enough for a three or four week trip (not to mention the lower weight).

The weight is comfortable in both portrait or landscape, not nearly as light as an e-reader, but comfortable enough for reading through a pile of rss feeds on the couch, and making notes.

The onscreen keyboard is good, once one gets used to it's habit of occasionally slipping into pinyn character assembly mode, but for extended typing one would probably want a portable bluetooth keyboard. I still think I prefer a netbook for travel and notetaking in conferences because of its general purpose style nature, I'm prepared to concede that one could imagine replacing a netbook with a tablet given that 90% of everything is in a browser anyway.

My only real irritation is calendar syncing or rather it's lack. I thought I'd found the solution in that GoogleCalendarSync.apk was missing from /etc/system/apps, and that all I needed to do was install it.

Unfortunately installing the calendar sync tool wasn't as straightforward as some blog posts suggested as protections have been set on the system such that I can't install it as a normal off the shelf user, either from the command line or using one of the common installation tools for non market place apps.

Once I've cracked that I also need to install the contacts syncing apk, and possibly a similar library for Google Docs. I am working on this, and incidentally learning a bit about Android configurations along the way ...

Changing to Chrome

2011-09-06T11:58:00.003+10:00

For the last fortnight or so I've quietly ditched firefox - which seemed increasingly slow and bloated - for Chrome on both Windows 7 and OS X.

Apart from being more responsive, I've hardly noticed the difference, except that Chrome seems to have a little trouble rendering one of our in house private sites ( the one that lets you check your leave and salary balance).

Both addthis and evernote have chrome plugins, and they both installed cleanly and work well. Unsurprisingly the components of the Google ecology (Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Reader, Blogger) that I use all the time work very nicely, as do all the common websites that I visit,

I have not used it (or its open source equivalent Chromium) on Linux extensively enough to comment on performance but my dabblings suggest it should be equally slick ...

zpad - first look

2011-09-06T09:59:00.000+10:00

Despite ranting on elsewhere about tablets versus netbooks, I am now the proud owner of an Android powered tablet computer.

Why did I buy it?

Convenience, for access to evernote and my mail

What did I buy?

A zPad - which is an Android 2.2 (Froyo) tablet with a ZMS08 CPU @ 1GHz, 16 GB SSD, 1 GB RAM and a 9.7" capacitive screen. It's styled to look like an iPad and Android has been skinned to make it look a little more like iOS than usual.

What was in the box?

A zPad, a fairly skimpy Chinglish manual, a USB cable, a power supply with a Chinese straight pin end and a converter for Australian power sockets.

What did it cost?

Around half what an equivalent iPad would cost and around a hundred bucks less than an Acer Iconia

How did I buy it?

Mail order via DHGate from a wholesaler in China. Service was prompt, efficient and the unit was well packed and took a week to get here.

What's it like?

Rather good. The screen is bright and clear, and as responsive as my iPhone 3. The keyboard has a PinYin mode which caused me some confusion at first but it works well as an English language keyboard once you realise how to avoid going into PinYin character choice mode. All the Android apps downloaded so far just worked.
WiFi setup was also trivially easy. I've made a couple of stuffups along the way, including breaking calendar syncing that I'll need to fix, but that's due to my unfamiliarity rather than anything wrong with it.

What next?

I need to spend more time with it and use it seriously. Certainly it looks very promising.

Mork food …

2011-09-04T18:17:00.001+10:00

Saturday morning we had bagels and coffee for breakfast. Nothing unusual in that except that the bagels were distinctly … purple.
They were supposed to be blueberry bagels and for some reason, the bakery had used fruit puree rather than berries themselves, and the result was that the bagels had come out distinctly purple, looking what J described as Mork food, incidentally revealing that her youth was not all Russian novels, renaissance art and Tudor history as she would sometimes have you believe.
And that got me thinking. While purple fruit is common, such as plums and damsons, purple food is not. The only other time recently I’ve had purple food was at Cabbages and Condoms in Bangkok where we had dumplings dyed with onion juice to make them come out purple.
As primates we’re quite good at detecting red fruit as it’s probably ripe, and given we evolved in equatorial forests, where trees fruit randomly, being able to see in colour was useful. Having stereo vision was also useful as it probably meant we were less likely to fall out of trees reaching for the fruit.
The same argument probably holds for fruit bats being able to see in colour and have stereo vision.
But purple is a colour that can be difficult to see, even though lots of fruits are purple/black such as plums, blackcurrants, blackberries and mulberries.
But the interesting thing is that these are all temperate zone fruit, ie fruit from regions where primates did not live. But of course birds lived there, and birds can see different and more colours from us, which would lead me to guess that these fruits appear more brightly coloured to birds than they do to us.
And at a stretch, I guess this could explain why purple food is uncommon. We have a natural affinity to red and yellow food as tropical fruits when ripe are often red and yellow, but not to purple food, as while we have learned to enjoy purple fruits, we don’t have that association between purple and food buried way back in our evolutionary past.

reading books on the bus

2011-09-02T12:17:00.002+10:00

yesterday, for the first time in a long time I rode the bus to work. It was a lovely bright sunny day and the first day of spring, and like most Canberra buses they had Mix 106.3 piped through the bus. And because Canberra is a low density city the 20km commute took around 40 minutes, even though the bus turns into a direct service straight to the CBD for the last 10 or so kilometres.

But what was really interesting was what my fellow passengers were doing.

When I used to ride the bus to work regularly, which is about four years ago now, people either listened to their iPod, read books and newspapers or stared out the window.

Well I'm glad to say people still stare out the window, but precious few were reading a newspaper or a real paper book - mostly it was a swathe of e-readers of various brands, the odd ipad and smartphone - you could tell the smartphone users by the way they flicked on to the next page repeatedly.

The other interesting thing of note is that the iPod phenomenon seemed to have been and gone. People were stil listening to things, but things stored on their phone.

Also missing in action were netbook users viewing spreadsheets and email and furiously composing offline memos - I'm going to guess that they have migrated to tablets.

So what does this mean?

Well I don't know. One bus ride on the first day of spring does not a survey make, but we could probably say the following:

despite the absence of a clear market maker such as Amazon with the Kindle, e-readers have wide adoption in Australia.
there are a lot of different brands of e-readers in use, but I spotted a couple of Kobo and different Sony models and a Kindle, plus some others I didn't recognise
dedicated MP3 players are on the way out - people prefer to use their phone to reduce the number of devices carried
Netbooks are also on the way out - possibly being replaced by tablets
Tablets are not there yet - people still see them as too expensive to flourish on the bus or else penetration remains low

This is all based on the #170 bus service - which goes through a range of suburbs, some well off, some less so. Most commuters were heading to either the CBD or the City West terminus, very few people used the bus for a short two or three kilometre journey suggesting that most people would have enough time to read or listen to music if they so wished.

Help wanted

2011-08-24T14:25:00.005+10:00

It's fair to say his blog has a fairly mixed audience - some read it for the hstorical speculation and some read it for the information science stuff.

If you read it for the latter you might be interested in knowing that as part of my day job, I'm currently looking for two people for a set of ANDS funded data capture and Seeding the Commons projects (and incidentally build an archive solution along the way). Details and information on how to apply at http://bit.ly/qwgOH if you're interested. For background on what we're trying to accomplish here take a gander at Extracting, Transforming and Archiving Scientific Data at archive.org.

Please note that the timescale is fairly tight on submitting applications. Applications need to be lodged by 1700 Canberra time (UTC+10) on 04 September (which coincidentally is the traditional anniversary of the deposition of the last western Roman emperor ...)

SSO, social and institutional identities

2011-08-24T11:53:00.003+10:00

I've periodically ruminated on the future of university information services and how if everything is outsourced, all we are left with is access mediation, ie providing institutional logins that allow access to institutional resources, federated institutional resources such as a research cloud, and external resources such as Jstor, for which you gain access because your home institution has paid a subscription to provide access to the resource.

Now if everything was happily outsourced via the institution, say Google Apps, or Live for Edu, we would have something quite nice and tidy. The id you use would still be tied to the institution and therefore you can have institution level access.

But in fact we see that people are starting to blend resources accessed through their social identities with their institutional work. Essentially self outsourcing.

And of course there is no reason why they shouldn't - or example if someone finds Windows Live and One Note ideal for managing research notes why shouldn't they, especially as they can access it from almost everywhere and from a range of platforms.

Your social identity is your google id, twitter id, Live login etc etc, and as increasingly there are lot of services that invite you to login with your google id or twitter id people start doing exactly that, rather than creating yet another id and password.

The UX lesson is that people don't like having multiple id's and passwords. The other lesson is that Google and Twitter are winning the account federation war.

The trouble is that anyone can have a social id - even my cat has a blog and a twitter account and consequently social id's are reputation free.

This of course doesn't matter in 99% of cases. It doesn't even matter when creating a virtual organisation, say an online collaboration, until we get to the problem of access to resources.

Now as people self outsource, this will be a growing problem - the Internet 2 wiki has some real world use cases and I'm sure you can add your own without too much thought.

The solution is probably a gateway of some type where people self declare their preferred social id's and link them to their institutional id's - this is not so different as what happens with a reverse proxy service, where for example, if you want to work from home and access a resource that allows access on the basis of ip address, you log into an institutional reverse proxy service, in my case virtual.anu.edu.au with your institutional credentials to gain access to the resource.

The logic is quite instructive:

you log in with your uni-id to prove you belong to the university
the service provides you with a connection as if you have a campus id address

You could then imagine this enhanced scenario:

you are logged into google and you google credentials are cached locally
you connect to the proxy server.
The proxy server inspects your machine and notices your google credentials are set. It looks up your gmail address and sees you have previously linked that to you institutional id
it asks you to type your institutional password to confirm it's really you
just as in CAS it creates an obfuscated token it passes to all services that request it to allow access to institutional resources including federated resources

And, given the Jasig/CAS Sakai tie up, allows you access to a collaboration platform which allows you to share resources with you colleagues in a collaboration or virtual organisation. providing they all have an electronic institutional affiliation

Operating system streaming

2011-08-23T13:15:00.005+10:00

I'm having trouble here. There are a couple of news stories circulating [ 1, 2] today about Mircrosoft seeking a patent for operating system streaming.

From the patent description it doesn't seem that much different from staged remote booting of diskless workstations - something that seems very 1990's.

To recap, a long time ago, when God wore short trousers and I didn't have white hair Edmund Sutcliffe and I implemented a staged remote boot environment at the University of York - Edmund had previously done some prior work on this at Bangor.

The way it worked was this:

Machines had no internal hard disks. When a machine fired up the boot rom on the network card sent out a broadcast message and a bootserver replied and allowed the client machine to download a boot image, which as essentially a dd'd 1.44Mb floppy image containing an operating system, and network drivers, plus some configuration information.

In the original version there was a single boot image. In later versions there were multiple boot images die to the need to support different hardware configurations. We had a backend database that allowed the bootserver to lookup the ether address of the calling device, and provide a boot image based on that ether device.

This proved rather useful as it allowed us to have special purpose ase well as general boot volumes.

One example of a special purpose volume was a dedicated workstation access for email reading alone where we took some old computers with limited memory, network cards and no hard disks. I then developed a specialist 1.44Mb floppy image with an operating system on it, a tcp stack and a locked down version of kermit (actually ms-kermit and freedos) in terminal emulation mode that logged into an old Sun server and forced the user into pine. Logging out of the system forced the pc to reboot (basically we waited till we saw the word logout go past) to ensure a clean session for the user - basically a quick and dirty university email reading terminal - login, read mail exit and walk away. Another example was a variant on the same theme for dedicated library catalogue access.

Unlike these specialist environments what the general models did, after starting the operating system and network was to mount a virtual disk image that other operating system components and continue booting. We also experimented with creating a virtual disk in memory and copying components to that. Memory constraints meant that it didn't give us a significant advantage, so we went back to network volumes on topologically close servers for better performance. It also mounted a second disk image for applications and a third, writable, volume on a per user basis to allow users access to filestore to save their work.

As the user storage volume was sitting on a Unix server, they could potentially access it over the internet. As this was 1992 that meant ftp and terminal access, but nowadays it would mean webDav.

So, the boot sequence for general machines was:

mount hardware specific startup volume
mount the rest of the operating system and continue booting
mount the user and application volumes

In the case of machines with hard disks, the sequence was much the same with the local disk being treated as cache and scratch space. This allowed a portable machine to have files coped to a directory on the local disk from a users network storage, the machine disconnected from the network, and, provided it had a valid local install of the operating system it could boot up locally and still access these files. I'd like to claim we provided some clever synchronisation a la Dropbox, but alas no, we didn't think of it at the time.

Now what we did was arguably clever for its time, as it meant that we had only a small number of boot volumes to maintain, and the separation between specific and component environments meant application deployment was pretty simple, but it was by no means unique.

While we used PC-NFS you could easily have built it using a range of other network solutions. What I am struggling to understand however is how does this differ in concept from Operating System Streaming ?

When did the great war become the first war?

2011-08-17T11:02:00.008+10:00

Neatly blending the Long War theme and what Google's Ngram can tell us about Turkestan, my friend Tim Sherrat has, through his work on methods for harvesting data from Trove, produced a rather nice graph based on Australian newspaper articles to demonstrate when people started referring to the First War as the First World War rather than the Great War.

Interestingly, using Google's Ngram viewer one can see that the results are broadly similar for the English Corpus:

and for American English:

although the Brits were a little later to the piece:

30 years of the IBM PC

2011-08-12T15:03:00.004+10:00

Today, 12 August 2011, marks 30 years since the introduction of the original IBM PC.

Personally, I've a lot to thank the PC for as it has kept me more or less gainfully employed for the last 30 years, through the rise of the clones - when just about anyone with a wrist strap and a torx driver seemed to be making clone pc's in their shed, the wordprocessor format wars - wordstar/word/wordperfect - I still have a wordperfect mug - operating systems - dos, windows, windows 95, NT, OS/2, Windows 2000, XP and windows 7 and of course not forgetting peripherals along the way - principally printers.

And while I like to accentuate the sexy, doesn't everyone, it's been the humble desktop computer and laptop that's been my mainstay. And even when I've strayed to other architectures and operating systems, I've got to admit that the original concept behind the IBM PC design has stayed good - allowing you to easily make and upgrade systems out of standard components as seen in my $83 linux PC - which was actually only $20 for the box, memory and disks, with bits stolen begged or borrowed from other dead machine - the principal cost being a second hand Sun LCD screen.

And that's it exactly - the design took the world by storm because it was so open so that in the end it had so much momentum behind its general purpose open extensible architecture many of the non Wintel suppliers ended up using the design and the components to get costs down. And whatever anyone tells you about PC's being dead, ignore them. Have you ever seen an ATM boot up? or an airport self check in terminal, not to mention all these train station screens telling you windows has failed to restart correctly ...

Sharing or Syncing ?

2011-08-11T11:10:00.002+10:00

Thinking about the sharing large files conundrum, it's actually more complex than it first appears, as sharing with others is different from sharing with yourself.

Dropbox of course lets you share files with yourself, applications such as zend.to and yousendit make it easier to share files with others.

We therefore have two slightly orthagonal use cases:

Use case 1 (the zend.to scenario)

user wishes to share files or data with another user (or group of users) on campus or elsewhere. The files are too large to send via email, nor are they lodged on an open repository

Use case 2 (the syncany scenario)

user wishes to ensure that files held on a local directory on their personal computing device are backed up to a central location on a periodic basis
user wishes to share these files across multiple computing devices in various locations
user does not necessarily wish to share contents with other users

Use case #2 is essentially the same as an on demand or periodic backup, and also allows you to provide a synced backup store for devices with local storage that are periodically off the network such as travelling netbooks.

Incidentally Asus's webstorage does exactly that. If I hadn't let mys subscription lapse (my bad) I could have experimented with doing this with the Ookygo for local files. However given that 95% of everything that I use the Ookygo for on the road is done via a browser I probably wouldn't have much in the way of a valid experiment ...

sending big files (part ii)

2011-08-05T08:55:00.004+10:00

Arthur (@fatrat) suggested Zend.to as a solution to the problem of sending big files. It certainly seems to tick the boxes:

you run it on a server owned by you - no nasty questions of trust and third party intermediaries using transit servers in Ktoznaetistan
you tie it into local authentication making it easy for your users to exchange files
it presumes that if you are a home user and are sending the file to an external user the external user is known to you
it does some standard address verification if the external user wishes to send a file to an internal user - again there is a presumption that the recipient will know/recognise the email address of the originator

and this works rather well i a consenting adults sort of way allowing people to exchange files. It also bypasses the rather ticklish problem of what to do with users outside of your shibboleth access federation, say from commercial partners of small reasearch institutions without an IdP, or indeed from institutions overseas whose IdP is not part of a federation your home federation recognises.

I also guess it would be possible to add shibboleth authentication as an option for originators for added verification for cross institutional collaboration...

file sharing - It's about trust

2011-08-04T12:27:00.003+10:00

Building on my previous about sending big files I happened across the following in the wikipedia article on the Somali Shilling...

... Traders avoid the need to carry large amounts of Somali shillings by converting them to U.S. dollars and then wiring them to money houses in Somalia. Because identification can be easily forged, those seeking to pick up wired money are required to answer questions about their clan and kinship relations ...

What's interesting is that the de facto solution is based on private knowledge. So for data transfers, rather than send the key, one should perhaps think of a two or three factor response system, similar to those used by banks to establish your identity for online banking.

I've also suggested in the past that such a solution would help in digital cultural repatriation in Aboriginal communities where, as custodian of digitised cultural heritage, you need to maintain the trust of the traditional owners of that heritage by putting in place measures that require people requesting access to demonstrate that they have the right of access under traditional law.

As a content sharing solution it also has the merit of not requiring people to remember passwords or do something sophisticated with encryption keys, but of course it does mean people having to register with the file sharing service, ie establish their bona fides, before being able to use it - which would constitute a barrier to adoption ...

sending big files

2011-08-04T11:36:00.002+10:00

in this wonderful synced everywhere world we're sliding towards, there's a problem - sending or sharing big files. Or more accurately doing it between different workgroups located at different geographic or institutional locations.

In the old days of course it was simple - mailboxes were small and any (relatively) big files were transferred by ftp either from your machine, or via some server.

Nowadays. mailboxes are considerably larger, but quite a few systems impose limits on the size of attachments, which can be a problem when sending verbose files such as scanned pdf's of contracts.

Now we could simply use ftp, or better sftp, but of course this has a problem - distribution. Using an ftp solution is reliant on the end user bothering to download the file. A proportion won't. And these days a greater proportion won't know how to use ftp. Email wins as all they need do is click on an icon and the file opens in Acrobat, Preview, or whatever.

Commercial services like Yousendit are a bit better. Even though conceptually simple as an http file upload/download service they generate an email with a link that you click on and the download happens. It's immediate and almost as good as clicking on an attachment.

However, to send a file you are entrusting your content to a third party. A third party elsewhere. And the server is in?

The Dropbox sign in fiasco tells us that however good third parties services are we need to reserve judgement. Sure 90% of the data shared is cat pictures, but what about the 10% that is contracts or X-rays or something equally private or confidential?

In Australia we do at least have Cloudstor that uses Shibboleth to ensure that those you share with are members of the club but this has a disadvantage - one you can't share with non Australian Access Federation people (or the NZ equivalent) ie you can't share with non university people or people in the Northern hemisphere eg UK or US.

So, do we have to trust a third party - for the moment yes, otherwise it's down to sending encrypted USB sticks through the mail. What perhaps we need is a third party encrypt and submit service that sends the key separately to the uploaded file ...

Waiting for the Dalai Lama

2011-08-03T14:40:00.001+10:00

If you’re a regular follower of this blog, you’ll realise that one of the themes is central Asia. So when Librarything offered me the chance to review Waiting for the Dalai Lama by Annelie Rozeboom I was more than happy to do so.

You can find both my, and other, reviews on the Librarything website, or if you just want to read my review, the original is online as a Google Doc.

Some of the review was written on the plane back from my recent trip to Evanston, any misspellings and mispunctuations are mine, even if I would like to blame the airline for the rather cramped journey …

And what about the filestore ?

2011-07-21T13:22:00.003+10:00

The odd thing about this synced everywhere world is that no one is talking about the role of company or institutional filestore.

Which is kind of interesting. One of the remaining justifications for maintaining a central corporate filestore is control of intellectual property. The other big one is ensuring data integrity.

Of course people don't save things logically to the central store anyway - disk space on their laptop is such as to be effectively infinite, and the reason dropbox is so popular is that users don't need to think about it - just set it up so it syncs your working documents folder - never mind that a copy of your files is now spinning somewhere in Ktoznaetistan ...

Yet there is a role for corporate filestore - control of crucial documents, be they financial data, research data or what ever. Control does not just mean access it also means measures to ensure the integrity of the data, and by implication the value placed on it.

Windows live mesh

2011-07-21T12:11:00.002+10:00

In a previous post I mentioned how I thought the ideal filestore for a Chromebook style device would be something like dropbox.

You don't of course have to use dropbox, you could of course use Windows Live Mesh that does much the same thing, syncing files between (windows) computers and also between these computers and Skydrive.

And it's now multi platform - or more accurately you can now use it to integrate Mac devices, which probably gives them about 98% of the desktop and laptop computers on the planet. Linux doesn't really count, sorry, but that's the truth.

Crucially of course you can't yet access them natively via Android or from an iPad. Native access is one of the advantages of multi platform sync - having all the documents right there on a highly portable device. No more ruffling through folders at meetings, or discovering too late that you havn't printed a crucial spreadsheet. Hunting through folders with a browser window isn't a substitute.

Compare dropbox's ability to display pdf files on an iPhone or iPad out of the box - or Evernote's (sorry to bang on about it) true multiplatform access.

But it does mean that online/offline/online working is now possible on a 'normal' computer. Sync your documents, work on them on the plane, sync them again when you get where you're going. Couple this with folder sharing, and you've got a pretty effective content creation mechanism...

Chromebooks and the Ookygoo

2011-07-20T10:19:00.004+10:00

I've just tweeted a link to the NZ Herald's review of the Samsung Chromebook, ie Samsung's new laptop designed for the Chrome environment.

In the Chrome environment you have a browser and you run applications in the browser, and store files on the web. Your laptop is not actually a standalone local computer but is in fact an internet terminal.

Exactly how we've been using our Ookygoo, our Asus travel computer for years - purely because the dumbed down interface didn't allow for a lot of flexibility we didn't really use any of the local applications portfolio, with the exception of using the factory installed version of OpenOffice a couple of times at conferences to deal with long complex documents. Most time loading stuff into GoogleDocs is more than adequate.

Also being fundamentally stateless it's an excellent way to work - your data is elsewhere, files are uploaded to somewhere in the cloud, meaning that if the laptop is broken or stolen you havn't lost your data. It's just like having a portable diskless workstation of old, with all the advantages and disadvantages of that - the advantage being is that your data is accessible from any internet connected device that supports a reasonably recent browser, the disadvantage is that you do need that recent browser (and why the ppc imac ceased to be my home desk machine) and that internet connection

Where the Ookygoo scores, and my newer windows based netbook is better, is that it is possible to do stuff locally, or more accurately, where you don't have wifi access.

And this is the rub. One thing that my various experiments with Evernote have taught me is that the ability to have a local document cache is key. If you work with documents, be they copies of emails, pdf's, word files or whatever you need a local copy to add files to and modify. In essence what you need is a dropbox style filestore where you can sync when you get back online. That way you can work on a plane say, and know that you can sync as soon as you get to your hotel, and that the documents will be there in the cloud and shareable with colleagues.

And the lack of this offline capability is probably the greatest downfall of the Chromebook model. It's reliant on good wifi (or 3G) access. Now good wifi access is spotty, as free (as in beer) access is limited for most people to work, home, and just possibly the coffee shop on the corner, with paid for hotspot or 3G internet access being a pretty expensive option on a regular basis, especially if you roam between networks. Certainly my experience with the Ookygoo has shown me that you can do pretty well with access in hotels and coffee shops, but it's often not good enough for serious work on the road.

So, love to play with one, and I think it's great as a travel computing option, but I'm not convinced as to its long term usability as a work solution, especially where there is a substantial offline component - on the other hand it would make a great low maintenance for environments like schools where IT support can be minimal at best, and kids only go from home to school and vice versa, and with all the data stored in the cloud, the 'cat ate my laptop' style dramas are avoided ...

Using Evernote on the move

2011-07-15T15:45:00.002+10:00

A long time ago, Ok, a year ago, I mentioned the existence of cheap logoless Android tablet computers. Like Christmas, alternatives to the iPad have been a long time coming but its now possible to buy reasonable looking devices for under $200.

Now they are not iPads, they use resistive touch screens, and from the various English language reviews I've read (and there's not that many out there) battery life is so-so and the speakers are less than flash.

Unfortunately people seem mostly concerned with using them to play videos, while I actually want to do something else - use Evernote on it as a means of stopping the lunacy of having put all my documents into Evernote, and then printing out the relevant ones before a meeting.

But didn't you spend a lot of time arguing that netbooks have advantages over tablets and even go and buy a new netbook?

Yes, I did. And I still believe that for a lot of purposes, mostly revolving around ease of input and content creation that a netbook has significant advantages over a tablet. But equally, having played with Evernote on an iPhone having a tablet like device is ideal for accessing and reviewing documents - pdf's mainly, and as such having a portrait orientation screen is useful.

In other words there is a role for tablets, but as substitutes for armfuls of A4, not as substitutes for netbooks as data input devices. Question is, is it worth $200 to find out if the logoless tablets are a sensible device for this purpose?

Crowdsourcing with retirees

2011-07-14T14:18:00.003+10:00

Retirees, old people, the people you swear at in supermarkets when they can't use the self scanning terminals properly. Well they're not all like that and we will all be old (or dead) one day.

Retirees of course have often had professional careers and have significant, if slightly out of date, expertise. They also often happy to undertake volunteer work, as often they have time to spare. Spot the number of weekday volunteer staff in any museum or art gallery if you have any doubts about this.

Now one of the major problems in digitising museum collections is not photographing and recording the objects, but transcribing the accompanying labels, some of which may have been written over a hundred years ago (and despite what people say, people in the early 1900's or earlier were just as prone to crappy writing) in difficult faded handwriting. Pre computer age retirees, say those who were 45+ in 1990 are of course expert in reading crappy cursive as it was an important lifeskill in deciphering handwritten memos, doctor's scripts, court transcriptions and the rest. They also, quite often, have significant professional expertise in record keeping - in the days before extensive computerisation it was part of their job.

Of course the other advantage in harnessing those retirees who are between 65 and 75 now is that while they learned their skills before computers became widespread in their professions, they are young enough to have had to have used a computer in one form or another in the latter part of their career.

It would be an interesting project to engage people of this ilk in a digitisation and transcription process and then to compare the transcription accuracy with other projects not using retirees to do the transcription.

I suspect that you would find the retirees to be more accurate, if perhaps sometimes a little slower on transcription ...

How many (long) wars?

2011-07-14T11:18:00.001+10:00

I've been thinking further about the long war model for the conflicts of the first half of the twentieth century, and now feel it may make more sense to think in terms of two long wars - a European long war which starts in 1914, subsides into a de facto ceasefire in 1923 with the conclusion of a peace treaty with Turkey, only to begin to smoulder again in 1936 with the Spanish civil war, the Saar, followed by the 1938 Anschluss and Sudetenland crisis.

1949 will still do as an endpoint as it marks the end of the Allied military government in Germany and the creation of the GDR and the Bundesrepublik.

In the east, we can posit a second long war, beginning in 1905 with the Russo Japanese conflict, or perhaps a decade earlier with the first Sino-Japanese war, which can be argued to mark the start of a sustained attempt by Japan to expand into Korea and China, and also to acquire territory in the Russian Far East.

That way, Japan's alliance with Britain, France and the US in the 1914-18 conflict makes sense as an attempt to acquire German concession of Kaitschou in China to add to Dalian, which it had acquired as part of the Russo Japanese war and to build a zone of control.

Equally the Japanese reluctance to withdraw their forces from the Amur and Primorye region in the wake of the Russian civil war and the Soviet establishment of a client state in Mongolia, their involvment in Xianjiang, and the Japanese encroachment in Manchuria and Mengjiang make considerable sense.

At the same time we can see Soviet policy aimed at countering Japanese influence and building an effective buffer between themselves and the Japanese area of control.

The endpoint remains 1949 with the establishment of the People's Republic of China, and which marks the end of the Soviet invasion and occupation of Manchuria.

Pre Raphelite drawings at AGNSW

2011-07-14T08:25:00.004+10:00

Last weekend we played hooky and went to Sydney, and while we were in Sydney we took in the exhibition of Pre Raphelite drawings which is currently running at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

For those of you interested, John McDonald has a thoughtful and well written review in the Sydney Morning Herald. Well worth a read, as is a trip to the exhibition itself.

a monopoly of booksellers (part deux)

2011-07-06T09:47:00.003+10:00

hot on the heels of news that the Big A was to swallow Bookdepository, comes news (smh, Bookseller) that here in Oz, Pearson, the owners of Penguin, are to buy the online assets of RedGroup.

The reports might be a little confusing but what it means is that the Borders and A&R online sales businesses have been split from the rump of the Borders and A&R bricks and mortar business, and sold off. Borders was a franchise in Australia, originally operated by A&R, which was in turn owned by RedGroup, a private equity group, currently in administration.

Strangely, this might be a good thing as it might provide some local online competition for the Big A, and importantly, allow a way for Australian and NZ publishers to get their material on sale online (as well as short circuiting the absurdity of having books shipped to the UK from the publishers warehouse, only for them to be shipped back again...

A monopoly of online booksellers

2011-07-05T09:20:00.002+10:00

News that Amazon has bought the Book Depository opens the prospect of a near monopoly of online booksellers, given that Amazon already own AbeBooks, the online used book store (and incidentally via Abe a chunk of LibraryThing).

Now the reason that people use online stores are twofold (a) they're cheaper (or should be) and (b) they have everything. Here in Australia we have Borders still hanging on, and well almost no one else. Borders of course is not cheaper, and doesn't have everything, but at least you can have a browsing experience.

Otherwise you buy your books from overseas. And now you really don't have any alternative to the Big A, which doesn't strike me as healthy. One only hopes that competition overseas keeps the buggers honest ...

Otto Habsburg ...

2011-07-05T08:54:00.002+10:00

As a coda to my posting on the end of the first world war, today brings news of the death at 98 of Otto Habsburg, otherwise ArchDuke Otto von Habsburg, the eldest son of Karl, the last Emperor of Austria Hungary.

ABC NewsRadio had a nice obituary from Deutsche Welle this morning, which is currently not up on either broadcasters website. Other obituaries include:

Primorye

2011-07-04T14:58:00.004+10:00

I've long been fascinated by the Russian revolution.

Put it down to studying Russian at highschool, and the almost apocalyptic nature of the revolution and subsequent civil war. It is a big, dramatic, frightening story of chaos and collapse, including some very odd characters, some just odd, like Basil the Embroidered, some dangerous, like Nestor Makhno and some both very odd and dangerous such as Ungern von Sternberg.

Simplistically, one could say that the cartoon version goes something like this. "the Bolsheviks seize power. Armed forces loyal to the tsar (and/or the provisional government) try and crush the revolt. Bolsheviks organise a coherent armed response. White forces collapse into individual factions and ethnic liberation groups. White forces fail to come up with a realistic alternative government. White forces collapse into ill disciplined maurauding mobs. Red army crushes individual White armed groups".

As a cartoon it's not too far from the truth. What it misses out is the interventions by the western powers in Azerbaijan, to attempt to secure access to the oilfields, in the north at Archangel to try and bolster the white forces, or in the east, for much the same reason.

The Vladivostok interventions are perhaps the least well known, but the most interesting. Canadian, British, American, Italian and Japanese forces invaded Siberia via Vladivostok with the aim of bolstering the Omsk government of Admiral Kolchak which in 1919, looked most like a coherent opposition and a proper alternative government.

Vladivistok was the port of intervention as it was the terminus of the Trans Siberian railway and the idea was for the forces to proceed west along the railway. Most Russian settlement in Siberia was a string of cities along the railway, separated by forest and largely inhabited by tribal groups who hoped that all the forigners, both Western and Russian would simply go away.

Neither the American or Canadian forces engaged in any substantial military action, although the Italian forces did, in conjunction with the Czechoslovak legion control large parts of the Trans Siberian railway by the use of armoured trains. The American, Canadian, Italian and British forces amounted to less than 10,000 men in total.

In contrast, the Japanese deployed a substantial force of around 70,000 men and clearly intended to establish an amenable regime in Siberia.

In the end it was not to be. The white forces collapsed, and the Japanese, under American and British pressure, withdrew their forces at the end of 1922 despite engaging the Red forces on several occasions in the course of lending support to the Primorye republic.

The point of course is that the Japanese didn't go away. While they withdrew from Russian territory they of course retained control over the South Manchuria railway, which allowed them to later stage the Mukden incident and later occupy Manchuria and establish the short lived puppet state of Manchkuo.

This is a story little known in the west, but one that perhaps ought to be better known, as it clearly was a dry run for Japanese expansion out of Korea into northern China, and thus for the study of the causes of the second world war. Unfinished business indeed.

The long war ...

2011-06-30T08:46:00.007+10:00

Australia, Britain and France are littered with memorials to the men who died in the first world war. One curious feature is that they fail to agree on a date - some say 1918, some say 1919.

I suppose that - like most people this disagreement over dates hadn’t really registered with me - war memorials were simply part of the urban landscape and of no great significance.

However, I’ve been doing some reading around the February and October 1917 revolutions in Russia, and had begun to realise that the end of the first world war was distinctly messy, not just because of the chaos in Germany and Russia, but over the whole of eastern Europe.

When exactly did the first world war end? Was it 1918 or 1919, or some other later date?

The conventional answer is of course 1918 with the Armistice, or if one is being pedantic, the treaty of Versailles in 1919 which formed the peace between the Allies and Germany.

Of course Germany was allied with Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, and while 1919 saw the peace treaty with Germany, the other treaties took time to negotiate leading some people argue for 1923 on the basis that the treaty of Lausanne, which brought to an end hostilities between the Allies and the Ottoman Empire, was the last to be concluded. It's a minor point that by then the Ottoman Empire no longer existed and had been replaced by Ataturk's Turkish Republic.

Let's wind back to 1912. The world was at peace, save for some unpleasantness in the Balkans in the form of the first Balkan war, revolution in Mexico, and growing instability in China. The defeat of Russia by Japan in 1905 and the consequent rise of Japan and its expansion into Korea and towards northern China was a worry to be sure, but that was for the future - a complacent view to be sure, but a common view at the time. Most military experts of the time were not so complacent and had realised that it probably represented a dress rehearsal for wars to come.

Also the world was on the whole governed by men who spoke English, French, or German as first or second languages, and who had been through the various military academies of the English, French or German speaking worlds. Even the young Turkish army officers who had deposed the Sultan had been educated overseas.

A middle class European could look back at the previous century and assume that the world was increasingly at peace, and that peace and prosperity would continue to spread. War might not be completely unimaginable, but it seemed unlikely with diplomatic and political problems being increasingly resolved in offices and on paper than on in the muck and gore of the field of battle.

How wrong.

1914 changed everything, and like all wars the First World War had a messy ending. 11 November 1918 marked the cessation of hostilities on the Western Front - the Bolshevik government in Russia, seeking an early exit to better devote its forces to the civil war, had already made its own arrangements with the Treaty of Brest Litovsk in March of that year, although they were later to abrogate it on November 13 after the armistice between Germany and the western allies. By then Austria Hungary had collapsed and the withdrawal of German troops and the collapse of effective government, combined with revolution and insurrection spilling over from the civil war in Russia, meant that for the peoples of eastern Europe the war definitely did not finish in 1918.

Just to emphasise the speed of change - when my father was born, in February 1917, there was still a tsar in Petrograd, if only for a few days more. By the time my mother was born at the end of 1918, the tsar and his family had been shot, and there was no longer a Kaiser in Berlin, the Austro Hungarian empire had collapsed and the last Habsburg deposed.

So, was can agree that 11 November marked the end of hostilities, if not the end of the war.
The treaty of Versailles in 1919 is another suggested end date. Again this will not do as while the treaty of Versailles represents the formal conclusion of hostilities between Germany and the western powers it did nothing to help end the confusion, anarchy and uncertainty in the east.

Austria-Hungary had by this time fractured into various de facto successor states. The 1919 treaty of Saint Germain-en-Laye between the Allies and the government of the Austrian rump state did little more than formalise the fracture lines in the former Austrian part of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

Revolution and chaos meant that there was no effective government in Hungary for the western Allies to negotiate with in 1919, meaning that the second part of the Austro Hungarian settlement had to wait until the Trianon treaty of 1920, and while that formalised the boundaries, it didn’t put an end to the conflicts in the east - perhaps making 1921, with the treaty of Riga marking the end of the Polish Soviet war or the treaty of Rapallo, between the RSFSR and Germany in 1922 marking the formal end of conflict in eastern Europe, by which time the civil war was effectively over in the European part of Russia and Japanese forces were withdrawing from the Amur region of Siberia in the face of the advancing Soviet forces.

It's important to remember that this was a world war and that Japan was on the side of the allies, and shared in the spoils gaining a number of German outposts in the Pacific, such as the Marianas and the German concession of Kiatschou (Qingdao) in China.

China was of course continuing its slide towards instability and warlordism but the re-establishment of Soviet power curbed Japanese expansion for the moment and delayed their annexation of Manchuria to form a colony to add to their existing colony in Korea although the north east of China remained an area of conflict between the Soviet Union, China, and Japan throughout the twenties culminating the the Japanese annexation of Manchuria in 1931.

So 1923, when the Allies concluded an agreement with Ataturk’s government in Ankara might well do for an end point for the first world war. Borders were stable, Britain had acheived a settlement in Ireland in the previous year, and governments were beginning to govern again and power no longer teetered on the edge of falling into the street.

If one considers stability of government a criterion, one could perhaps argue for 1924 rather 1923, as by then hyperinflation in Germany was over and the new economic policy was bearing fruit in the Soviet Union. But 1923 will do, as a date when something like a settlement had been achieved for the moment.

Of course there was unfinished business that led eventually to the second world war, and of course there were those for whom it never really ended, those who had to flee across borders and those who found themselves cut off with friends and family mysteriously living in a separate country that didn’t used to exist.

The fact that hundreds of thousands of Nansen passports were issued in the 1920's to people who suddenly found themselves stateless shows the scale of the problems and dislocation caused by the changes in eastern Europe.

There is also the view by some historians that the first and second world wars was really a single European civil war, with the interwar years representing a ceasefire in the middle of the war.

This view focuses of the European experience, but could be stretched to also cover Japanese expansionism in the east, in Siberia and Mongolia and Stalin's various manoeuvres in Xianjiang and Mongolia to provide a counter to Japan's expansion, while at the same time trying not to provoke a conflict.

Following this argument one could say that the war ended in 1949 with the founding of the People's Republic of China. By then a measure of stability had been imposed by the division of the Eurasian landmass into two opposing camps. The cold war was exactly that, but detente and mutually assured destruction delivered something like stability, and something that had been lacking in the chaos of the interwar years.

The problem with IT security ...

2011-06-24T12:11:00.002+10:00

The real problem with IT security is exactly that summed up by Gerry Adams when talking about IRA terrorist attacks in the late eighties:

They [the security forces] need to be lucky every day - we only need to be lucky once

in other words, if the miscreants, terrorists or whatever try often enough they'll get lucky sooner or later. Of course in the cyberworld, there are many more miscreants, more cheap computing power available and more tools to try automated attacks.

So, no matter how good your firewall, how strict your patching schedule, sooner or later you are going to get breached.

This doesn't mean you do nothing - you do need to patch and maintain systems to minimize the risks - but you also need to be prepared for a breach, and have a damage control strategy in place - even if your planned engineering response consists of turning everything off and redirecting all traffic to a single web page saying "we've had a problem - back soon", - as sooner or later someone will notice, and given that your web pages are your public face, you need to be prepared to explain what's happened, even before you know fully what's happened.

Despite having quoted Gerry Adams at the start of this I tend on the whole to dislike comparisons between hacking and terrorism - the consequences of a data theft or downing a website are nothing compared to those of blowing up a large public building - but there is one valid comparison - airport security.

Airport security is universally acknowledged to be a pain, laptop out, shoes off, pockets emptied etc etc, and also to be imperfect. I'm sure I'm not the only person to have inadvertantly carried something I shouldn't through security - in my case a forgotten tube of hand sanitiser - and not been detected by the scanners.

Despite all this airport security is also a pretty successful deterrent - people on the whole know not to do certain things, and the detection rate is good enough to deter deliberate attempts to circumvent the system. The same is true about IT security. Most of the time it's good enough and stops most attempts.

The problem is that it's not perfect, and because major breaches are rare, they're immediately hi-profile ...

Capturing knowledge

2011-06-22T13:07:00.003+10:00

Citizen science is one of the great buzz words of the year as is crowdsourcing.

Basically citizen science and crowd sourcing represent initiatives to harness amateur scientists observational work to build datasets, much as the Victorian botany craze helped kick start UK county flora, local field societies and the like.

It could also be said that the Victorian citizen science craze was based on three technologies, basically the penny post, the railway and the bicycle that enabled people to get out into the countryside and report their results efficiently. Increased leisure time and access to education probably also helped as well.

And even though the technologies have changed the Victorian model still works well, as seen by various initiatives such as 'Springwatch' in the UK or the Atlas of Living Australia.

Many of these initiatives tend to be in what we still tend to think of as the 'developed/anglophone' world but that is not always the case - Brazil is about to launch an initiative to crowdsource a botanical flora of the Amazon levaraging off local knowledge to capture undocument information about plants and their properties.

Similarly in Thailand, there is project underway to capture the information held in Thai farmer's family herbals on the medical uses of plants - a body of knowledge likely to be lost with the increasing urbanisation and industrialisation taking place in Thailand, and a very nice example of retrospective crowdsourcing - ie not only digitising content to preserve it but also using the information to provide a valuable dataset on plants and their medicinal uses.

W G Burn-Murdoch

2011-06-22T10:05:00.004+10:00

When I was recently on holiday in Thailand I read WG Burn-Murdoch's from Edinburgh to India and Burma, which is a nice enjoyable piece of Edwardian travel writing.

Now it is very much a product of its time, with its robust enjoyment of field sports, yet also for its descriptions of the landscape and countryside of Upper Burma by the author, who was a prominent artist in his time. It's also interesting historically in the way it reveals a conflict between the author's loyalty to the British Empire and his developing sense of Scottish nationalism.

So, I resolved to find out more about the author. Shouldn't be difficult, there's a wikipedia page on everyone isn't there?

No there isn't. In fact there's very little online about him at all, except for single web page by the RSGS, and a rather arresting image of him playing the bagpipes in the snow.

In fact he was a member of the Scottish Antarctic Expedition, which was one of the few expeditions from the heroic period of Antarctic exploration to concentrate of science rather than public school heroism, to concentrate on sciences and a friend of William Speirs Bruce, the noted and now forgotten Scottish Antarctic explorer, as well as a noted traveller in his own right.

And just as with Peter Fleming and Ella Maillart, by tracing his friendships, we can begin to graph the community and linkages of the Antarctic research community, for example, Speirs Bruce knew Nansen, Burn-Murdoch travelled with Speirs Bruce and was a co-investor in WSB's Spitzbergen venture, from which we could surmise that Burn Murdoch must also met Nansen ...

(The link cited points to a print edition on Amazon, if you have an e-reader you can also get it for free from Gutenberg).

Happy 5519 !

2011-06-21T13:06:00.002+10:00

As is becoming a tradition on this blog. I'd like to wish all my readers, followers and commenters a happy Inca New Year.

This year we had celebration last Saturday with a lump of roast organic lamb - the nearest to llama the organic butcher could provide - and a very decent Pinot noir.

True to the spirit of new year being a time of wildness the weather has joined in today with a howling storm of wind and sleet which hopefully will bring enough snow to ski on!

Happy 5519! Enjoy!

Three mile leg

2011-06-21T12:01:00.002+10:00

While we were on holiday in Thailand, J strained her knee jumping out of a boat, and being a loyal husband, I ended up massaging it using some of the Tiger Balm red ointment we'd picked up en route to stop it stiffening up

The red version contains cinnamon oil and has a distinctive smell. Anyway, during one of these massage episodes J told me an intriguing story she'd been told by her acupuncturist - who had trained in China.

During the Long March, when the Red forces had been slogging across the grasslands of Xianjiang, people would lie down and give up, due to sheer exhaustion and lack of food. And the story goes, one of the doctors cooked up this tingling balm, that when rubbed on the exhausted person's legs would mean that they could march another three miles and finish the day's march.

Obviously there was an element of psychology in this, but given that every asian grocer has various medicines and nostrums like this (for example the unfortunately named Vietnamese 'Family Rubbing Compound'), it all seemed likely.

So I expected to be able to Google for 'three mile leg' and come up with pages and pages about it. But googling doesn't bring up anything at all.

Is 'Three mile leg' a myth - or has it simply not made it into English language accounts of the Long March ?

Evernote three months on ...

2011-05-27T09:54:00.002+10:00

I've been using evernote as my notebook application for about three months and I can say I'm pretty much satisfied with it, even to the extent of tinning up $45 for a premium subscription.

Not that it's perfect, sychronisation can be slow, especially when one machine is catching up, and the Mac client sometimes refuses to exit, but that said it's pretty good. Killer features for me have been

direct forwarding of emails into evernote - ideal for building up folders related to particular conversations, contracts etc, and have them accessible anywhere
being able to submit pdf's directly into evernote and being able view them in a client window
ditto with photographic images
drag 'n' drop reorganisation - life changes and sometimes you need to reorganise your files to make more sense, especially more when you are accumulating material for a project
it is multi platform, I've switched between mac and windows without problems
having a web view is ideal when you're working from a computer or a vm without the client installed

Annoyances have been

no internal preview for word documents - you need to have a suitable external application installed
no way of having an object in two notebooks at once

and it does mean you have to be disciplined about saving and tagging documents. I've found the best thing is to have documents go to a default folder and then to make time twice a day to go through the default folder to categorise and organise content while everything's relatively fresh in your mind.

You can also share notes with non-users by emailing them straight out of the app. Nice to haves would include being able to submit straight into Google or Zoho docs, or being able to post to wordpress or blogger - but these really are nice to haves - ctrl-c/ctrl-v works just fine and given that you're probably going to work on the document before sharing or posting it (and the use case I'm thinking of is creating internal technical or reference documentation such as engineering changes) the lack of a direct post facility is pretty minor.

All the functionality is there in a free account. I ended up paying for a premium account because I (a) found it useful, and strangely enough I'm not averse to paying for useful things and (b) got very close to the maximum usage limits on a couple of occasions.

I've also the nevernote client clone for linux on a couple of occasions, but not really seriously, as I'm no longer a serious desktop linux user. When I have used it, it's been more stable than my initial experiences suggested and seems to have had no problems syncing with evernote, which is a tribute to evernote's robust architecture.

So, it's good, and it's definitely made me more organised and efficient, which can only be a good thing ...

Love and Leicas in the 1930s

2011-05-22T13:12:00.002+10:00

Following on from my recent post about travel writing in the 1930’s, I took to musing on the connections between travel writers and journalists, and by a slightly roundabout way came up with what may be a story of life, love, and relationships among 1930s travel writers.

Most of these writers knew each other – as journalists and members of the upper and middle classes they bumped into each other, or knew of each other, and it would be quite interesting to document these as a social graph.

I also came across a little puzzle. I recently read Peter Fleming’s To Peking, A Forgotten Journey documenting a journey via Moscow and Manchuria to Peking in 1934, Simon Winchester in his introduction mentions how Fleming documented the journey with photographs taken on his trusty Leica III, which is not impossible given that the Leica III first appeared in 1933.

However, in the book Fleming refers to his ‘Kodak’ as his camera. Now Fleming did use a Leica, and says so in his 1937 News from Tartary.

The simplest explanation is that Peter Fleming simply made a mistake and referred to his Leica as a ‘Kodak’ simply out of habit. However, it’s also possible that Fleming was introduced to the advantages of the Leica by his travelling companion Ella Maillart in the latter part of the journey to Peking.

Whatever Ella Maillart’s relationship with Peter Fleming was, she was also close to her fellow Swiss journalist Annemarie Schwarzenbach, and indeed travelled to Afghanistan with her in 1940.

Annemarie Schwarzenbach was also celebrated as the epitome of lesbian chic in the last days of bohemian decadent Weimar Berlin before the Nazis put a stop to that and other such unGerman behaviour. Annemarie later contributed to various antifacist literary magazines and refused to deny her Jewish and leftwing friends.

Annemarie Schwarzenbach had also travelled to Spain in the early 1930’s with the photographer and photojournalist Marianne Breslauer, whose promising career came to a premature end due to her Jewishness meaning that her work was no longer published in the leading German language news magazines of the day.

Marianne Breslauer had learned her craft working as a photojournalist and was an accomplished photographer and one who would undoubtedly been aware of the advantages of the Leica over previous cameras.

So one could imagine a chain something like this:

where Marianne Breslauer introduces Annemarie Schwarzenbach to the virtues of the Leica, who then introduces the Leica to Ella Maillart, and then to Peter Fleming.

[update: it turns out to be more complicated that this - Ella Mailart received her Leica from Dr Leitz of Leica. The official story is that Leitz was impressed by Maillart's photos and gave her a camera. As we know, sponsorship can be a complex thing and it may be that Annemarie Schwarzenbach, who later went on to work as a photojournalist, helped mediate the deal or not]

The other thing to remember is that the Leica was an expensive camera for its time, and would have represented a significant investment. For example, my father had hoped to buy a Leica on a trip to what was then Danzig and is now Gdansk in 1938 to document a journey to Singapore, Shanghai and Japan but found that while they were cheaper and more readily available than at home in Scotland, he still could not afford one and settled for a cheaper 120 format camera.

Due to the needs of a journalist to have something reliable that ‘just worked’ personal recommendation would doubtless have been key.

And love? Annemarie Schwarzenbach was infamous for her many lesbian affairs. Marianne Breslauer was clearly fascinated by her, and its not inconceivable to imagine that their friendship was more than platonic. Likewise with Ella Maillart, and certainly Ella’s early, very close friendship with Hermine de Sassure could be taken as suggesting a tendency to swing that way.

The real puzzle is her relationship, or not, with Peter Fleming.

Ella Maillart was already an accomplished solo traveller by the time she met Fleming, and it would be tempting to dismiss their relationship as one purely of convenience and certainly in his 1937 book Fleming presents the relationship as a platonic relationship of convenience. The interesting thing is that in his account of his 1934 journey he writes rather more warmly of Ella Maillart suggesting that the relationship was more than just one of covenience.

Fleming later went on to marry Celia Johnson (of Brief Encounter fame) and have several children with her.

driving geese ...

2011-05-16T10:49:00.003+10:00

An intriguing post from RogueClassicist about the Romans driving geese from the north of France to Rome, and taking around a 100 days to do this - the time taken seems about right, as for example we know that when Sigeric followed the pilgrim route between northern France and Rome, he took around 80 days to make the journey.

Geese being less disciplined and needing to graze on route would take longer, but equally the goose herds, who would have been experienced at making the journey would probably have had a longer travelling day than Sigeric. It's also a reasonable supposition that the gooseherds who probably camped up with their animals probably followed an established stock route with known campsites and water sources and grass for the geese to graze on between hikes.

I also remember - and this has to be anecdote rather than fact as I can't remember the details - when I was at the UWIST field centre in the mid eighties there was someone looking at the history of goose droving from mid Wales to London in the eighteneth and nineteenth centuries before the advent of the railways. The distance would have been around 200 miles (300km) and if they were making around 10 miles (16km) a day they would not be travelling much more slowly than Sigeric. The distance travelled also quite nicely fits with Pliny's report for 100 days for goose drovers to make it from the north of Gaul to the markets of Rome.

The other nice thing about using Welsh goose droving as a model is that they of course drove them across the Welsh mountains, not quite the Alps perhaps but showing that it is possible to drive geese across mountainous wild country, the key perhaps being the use of dogs to both keep the geese together and protect them.

a second netbook for the stable ...

2011-05-16T09:57:00.003+10:00

I've periodically ranted on about ipads versus netbooks, but this time I've put my money where my mouth is and bought a second netbook.

Not as replacement for the Asus Eee travel computer but as a little laptop for J who needs something small and light for writing and researching and for web related tasks away from home - and Officeworks had this MSI netbook [video]|[wikipedia] for $249 - 1GB RAM, 250GB HDD, Windows 7 starter, 10.1 inch screen and a chiclet style keyboard with spacing between the keys that means you can actually type on it, compared to some of the other cramped netbook keyboards. Add a claimed decent battery life and it seemed fairly irresistable.

Windows 7 starter was a bit of a downer, but apart from the cosmetic irritation of not being able to change the background, it actually does seem to do the job. Add something lightweight like Abiword, the Chrome browser, and a lightweight pdf viewer such as Sumatra, and you have an excellent lightweight writing machine, with web access for email and fact checking. Drafts can be emailed to evernote if required. Add Skype and you're away - all you need to do is ensure that the library you work in has free wi-fi.

I was going to use wubi and install ubuntu 11.04, but given my underwhelming experience so far with Unity I ended up holding off on that, especially as that's a geek indulgence, and this machine is targeted as a lightweight machine for work stuff, and as a lightweight machine it should be fairly effective

Ubuntu 11.04 on a real machine

2011-05-12T14:58:00.000+10:00

Well, having built a VM yesterday I installed 11.04 on a real machine - my test laptop.

I could have run the upgrade tool from 10.10 to 11.04 but instead chose to build a second install side by side. Installation was pretty smooth - no hiccups to speak of, and this time Ubuntu came up with Unity as the default window manager.

What can I say, it's a window manager. On first look it's a bit too Ookygoo-ish with big chunky icons for the big three Libre Office apps and Firefox. Now it's arguable that 90% of people don't need much more than that out of the box, but I feel it simplifies things too much.

Now I've used gnome for years and know where the apps live in the menu system, ie I have certain expectations of the window manager, and as we all know change can be hard. It would be interesting to see how the UX experiences of experienced Ubuntu users and users new to Ubuntu compared.

Let us say I'm reserving judgement ...

ubuntu 11.04 on virtualbox

2011-05-11T15:28:00.003+10:00

To know about things one needs to try them, and as someone who has espoused ubuntu as an alternative desktop system I thought it was about time I should try ubuntu 11.04 (natty narwhal) on myself.

As always I tested out the install on the latest version of virtual box. Download and installation appeared trouble free until I tried running a network app - there was no network connectivity at all.

Cue a flurry of trying alternate networking settings. No joy at all. Then just to ensure the past few months hadn't all been a nightmare, I tried an older virtualbox install of ubuntu (Ubuntu 10.10) This refused to start with a warning that I needed to install the latest Virtualbox extension pack.

Downloading and installing the extension pack fixed my 10.10 vm. I then deleted the natty vm and reinstalled it - just in case I'd broken something else in my hacking about in its config - and it all just worked.

My classic test applications of kwrite and abiword installed correctly. So I then installed nevernote, which has broken installations before now. Installing it caused various whinges from the package manager about it being a poor quality package, but it did install and run.

One problem about running natty on virtual box on OS X is that it claims that the hardware is inadequate to run Unity, the new web interface, leaving me with good old gnome. Which is fine, but I'd have lkied to have a play with Unity ...

Travel writing in the 1930's

2011-05-11T11:22:00.003+10:00

The 1930's are often held up as a golden age of travel writing - Robert Byron, Peter Fleming, Fitzroy Maclean, etc etc.

But why?

Two reasons, technology and access to exotic and remote locations. I'll turn to technology second but access is one of the keys.

Before first world war (actually before the Russo Japanese war) much of the world not part of the French and British colonial empires had been closed to foreigners. Both tsarist Russia and the Ottoman empire were not exactly welcoming and China was definitely closed, meaning people did not have much in the way of opportunity to visit places that were definitely foreign - ie where opportunities to interact with people from a background not unlike your on were limited. I'm having difficulty expressing this succinctly, but if you've ever been to bath house in Morocco where all the signs to customers were in Arabic you'll know exactly what I mean - the slight edginess as to whether you've understood what is going on, and the surprise when something different happens - that's foreign.

And also - post 1919 - there was a great hunger for people to understand what was happening with the new world order - to understand the rise of Japan and the changes in Manchuria, and the great changes and convulsions in Russia, and whether the Soviet Union represented some fundamental change in the way the world worked.

At the same time, travel to these places, while difficult, was not impossible. People could travel around the Soviet Union before the purges and the terror with a degree of freedom, even if they did have to agree travel plans with Intourist, and access to China was relatively easy with substantial foreign communities in Beijing and most notably Shanghai in the international concession.
Also the mechanics of travel were easier. Contrast Peter Fleming's admittedly gruelling journey by truck, train and horse from Peking to Srinagar with the journey of a British official thirty years earlier to the same area who had to walk or be carried by sedan chair such were the state of the roads. Fleming chose to travel part of the journey by horse to both visit reote areas and dodge officialdom. He could have managed most of the journey by truck, as did Joseph Needham a few years later, except for the final stretch across the Kashmir border to Srinagar.

People could travel to these areas by road and by train, and road meant by truck and car. The roads were open and it was possible for people to drive from London or Berlin to Tehran or Kabul. Likewise the remoter parts of central Asia were accessible by train via Moscow across what is now Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.

So the technology of travel was easier. So was photography. The first 35mm Leica cameras revolutionised photography - cameras were no longer clumsy things and crucially no longer used bulky films or plates - a 35mm cassette could hold 36 pictures - more than twice as many as a 120 or 127 film roll and less vulnerable to damage or accidental exposure. I've not used one of the early Leicas but I have used Fed 5b Leica clone dating from the late 1970's.

The results are pretty impressive, the camera is almost indestructable, and while at around 600g it's not light, it's not a great bulky monster either. It also crucially doesn't need batteries. Unlike later 35mm cameras it doesn't need a power source for range finders, light meters or autofocus. It does of course require you to do a bit more work, but with the slow films in use then, say 50 ASA, you had a degree of leeway if you guessed wrong.

The other great key technology was the portable typewriter. Probably about twice the weight of a laptop, but packed up probably no bulkier than a laptop in a travel bag, it allowed writers, who were essentially journalists, to work on material, type up notes and copy just about anywhere. Again crucially they didn't need a power source, and could work in places not connected to the power grid, or on trains etc.

It also meant that they could travel relatively light - always a consideration when having to haul your own luggage part on and off trains, or cram it into tuktuk or similar as I can attest from personal experience travelling through Laos at the end of 2005.

Also, the typewriters and cameras were a good deal tougher than a netbook and a digital camera, and would survive the occasional dunking or exposure to snow and cold.

So, changes in technology and improved opportunities for travel, plus a heightened public interest in what was happening in places previously off the map conspired to provide a combination of circumstances that provided a marvellous opportunity for both photojournalism and travel writing.

Banks, phone calls and security

2011-05-09T11:32:00.001+10:00

[This was originally posted to my "stuff that doesn't fit anywhere else" blog. Probably actually should have gone here ...]

Now I’m probably turning into an old fart, but I get really annoyed by banks when they phone you up about something trivial:

- Hello this is the XYZ bank. Can I speak with Mr Xyzzyy?

- Speaking

- I want to talk to you about some correspondance. Can you please confirm your date of birth and account number?

- No, I am not assured that you are calling from XYZ bank. You are calling from a call centre on an unlisted number. Can you please confirm the last four digits of any of my bank accounts

- I am sorry I cannot release any information unless you confirm your identity

I’m sure you can see what’s wrong about this dialogue. The bank quite properly wants to confirm my identity. Unfortunately they are asking for a something (my birthday) you can find by googling, and something I’d like to keep secure, an account number. Now while I’d be happy to tell them that, I’m alert to social engineering, after all they keep on sending me emails about being secure online and scammers, so not unreasonably I want them to prove that they’re not some sophisticated scam.

They of course can’t do that as they don’t let the phone bunnies give out any information.

Much better would be something like:

- Hello, I’m from the XYZ bank. I’m calling about some recent correspondance. Would you like me to confirm my identity?

- Yes

- Do you have your credit card handy? If you look at the back of it you will see you customer number. The last three digits are a, b, c.

- They are.

- Can you please now confirm that your identity by telling me the last four digits of your savings account number

- m, n, o, p

Now it could be better, we could have agreed some security questions in advance but this system has the advantage that they tell me something unlikely to be public knowledge, but not all of it, and I tell them something that is unlikely to be public knowledge, but not all of it.

We have then established that we are who we say we are, but no one knows something that can be of use. Also, if I’m working in an open plan office I havn’t divulged anything that I’d be unhappy having overheard, accidentally or not.

Dates of birth, full names don’t work as they are scattered everywhere on social networking sites.

bookmarks and persistence

2011-05-05T09:54:00.002+10:00

In the process of importing my delicious bookmarks into evernote, I discovered that around half my bookmarks - mostly the older ones - went to dead links.

The dead links were mostly (but not all) links to magazine and newspaper articles, and the links that persisted mostly to academic papers. No, I didn't keep notes and this is all impressionistic and anecdotal.

Now, all my professional life I've kept notes, notes of presentations, conference papers, and also newspaper clippings (initially), later on printouts of web pages, bookmarks, and now evernote notebooks.

Of all my notes, about 80% are never referred to again, and of the remaining 20%, around half of it is irrelevant after five years.

Guessing which 20% is going to prove some use and of that which is worth keeping is the difficult bit, especially as happenstance can be a wonderful thing. That presentation that you went to many years ago on a long dead product's peer to peer architecture and it's use of a low bandwidth gossiping algorithm suddenly assumes significance when talking about data replication and resilient cloud storage - not because of anything other than the idea picked up on wet Tuesday long ago.

This doesn't come as a surprise - when we moved to Australia from the UK we got rid off, in one way or another, about 75% of our books. We started out the culling process by trying to be rational, but ended up being pretty random in our approach. And while we've had to rebuy a few things, it hasn't worked out too badly. The key point being that while there might be music you want to listen to again or books you want to reread, or material to refer to, you actually don't really need to as far as most of the content is concerned. (One wonders how many people will end up deleting books out of their e-readers to make space, just as people delete pictures out of flickr to stay below the 200 image limit).

Now, personally, I'll continue to keep notes as it helps me remember things, just as writing blogs about stuff helps me clarify my thoughts. And I've always been a sucker for buying books.

But this does have implications for digital preservation. People rightly worry about the sustainability of content, particularly in the current economy. However we can approximate forever to be something between five and ten years. After that time most things are fairly irrelevant, and probably could be let die.

In fact, using my experience as a guide, only about 10% of anything is worth keeping for more than five years. The problem is which 10%.

And the real problem is that the 10% will vary according to audience. For example, J, as an artist, images, ideas, pictures of textures, information about exhibitions, is important.

For someone else it could be book reviews. For my father, as an engineer, it was specifications, engineering change notices, schematics and diagrams. We're all different. Equally, I have the suspicion if we were to genuinely, randomly, delete 80% of all online content after five or so years we'd probably not be too badly off ...

The Social Network ...

2011-05-02T13:44:00.003+10:00

Saturday night we finally got around to watching The Social Network, the film about the origins of Facebook.

We'd meant to go and see it when it came out, didn't get to the cinema at the time for a whole host of reasons, I then slept through most of it on a United flight back from SFO, which at least prompted me to buy the DVD, even if it took us another three months to get around to watching it. Why it took us so long to get around to watching it is one of the imponderables of life, because it was a pretty gripping, and slightly disturbing film.

How true it is, whether undergraduate life at Harvard is anything like it's portrayed (and I hope it isn't) and whether the portrayals of the main protagonists are as deservedly unsympathetic as they are in the film is for others to judge, but the story rings true.

I've seen a couple of failed startups, and the film certainly catches the manic mood, arguments and personality clashes. If you've read Robert Cringley's Accidental Empires, or books like High Stakes, you'll already be aware of the combination of luck, happenstance and hucksterism that accompany the way an IT company starts up, the idea, the product, the growing pains and so on, and the way that most projects start up as just two or three programmers working in their spare time and only once they're successful morph into something else.

However, to succeed you need to be driven and obsessional about your project, because basically until it ships you have nothing. And that definitely does not bring out the best in people. And of course, once it ships, you may still have nothing - the history of computing is littered with good concepts that just never went anywhere ...

Entering books into LibraryThing (and a little pornography)

2011-05-01T09:18:00.003+10:00

Entering books into LibraryThing
Originally uploaded by moncur_d.

Adding books to librarything has proved strangely therapeutic at the end of the working day - come home, make myself some tea, squat on the floor with the netbook and add some books. Takes around 45-50 minutes to do a shelf's worth of books, meaning it fits neatly in to that little gap between getting home, talking to J, running the cat's tummy and the evening news on SBS.

Our bookshelves are fairly prosaic knock down and put them up adjustable wood shelves - they came from the Lundia store in York some fifteen or so years ago, and are chiefly notable for travelling half way round the world with us - possibly the best travelled Netherlands Lundia shelving, although there is another manufacturer of the same shelving system in NZ.

Anyway - pornography. While utterly practical and sensible, our Lundia shelving is woody and boring - basically as sensible and indestructable as an old Volvo wagon and with about the same amount of sex appeal. So following the 'books do furnish a room' meme we've been looking for inspiration for something a bit stylish and architectural to have as a feature bookcase.

And thanks to Poetry News we've come across the Bookshelf Porn - not a naked body in sight, just lots and lots of sexy bookcase shots - and if that doesn't push your buttons there's the slightly more hardcore Bookcase Porn - seriously sexy bits of design. Definitely droolworthy ...

Cats can't count

2011-04-29T10:59:00.002+10:00

If you have a cat you'll know this already - cats can't count. If you feed them on dried cat food, you rapidly come to realise that there are basically three states:

Many - my bowl is full and I cannot see the bottom
Some - the bottom of my bowl is covered with little plastic showing
Few or none - I can see most of the bottom of my bowl, and I don't care if there's some round the rim MeeOW!

State #3 can be tuned into #2 by picking up the bowl to redistribute the contents and perhaps judiciously adding a few to give the illusion of the bowl being refilled.

This of course is good enough for a cat - it knows if it has enough in its bowl and can go and do cat things or if it has to find a human and annoy the hell out of them by scratching the fridge, study chairs, walking on keyboards while you're working, and the like, to get them to add content to the foodbowl.

Fine, enough cat stories, why are you writing about this?

Simple answer - user interface design and changing user expectations of the interface.

Looking at less technical users using applications such as Skype I've noticed a similar phenomenon to the cat and its bowl. They see the nice pane in the middle of the screen and can happily use it to call people, use the dialpad etc. What they can't do is navigate the pull down menus to add a new user - they need someone to help them.

Interestingly they seem to focus on the pane and (on a Mac at least) don't perceive the menu bar along the top of the screen, ie they focus on the application pane. Not a problem for full screen applications, but a problem for other applications.

Now this is purely anecdotal, and I havn't seen it in Windows or Linux (Gnome or KDE) users, but I wonder if we're seeing an iPhone/iPad one app/one screen type of effect here on user expectations ...

Nectar Cloud workshop presentations now online

2011-04-29T10:42:00.002+10:00

back at the end of March, I went to the Nectar cloud workshop in Melbourne.

The presentations of the event are now online at http://www.nectar.unimelb.edu.au/about_nectar/background_documents under Research Cloud Technical Workshop March 2011

Leonardo and Vegetius

2011-04-27T10:54:00.002+10:00

Leonardo da Vinci was a great artist and clearly a crazy man - dreaming up lots of wierd ideas, and even trying some of them out, including persuading one of assistants to try out his design for a glider one afternoon in Fiesole.

Leonardo was of course well read, and as a designer of military machines for Ludovico Sforza, must have read Vegetius's Epitome. As one of the first books printed, he might even have owned his own copy.

And this leads me to wonder, were his designs for armoured personnel carriers doodles inspired by some of Vegetius's more fantatsical suggestions for military machines?

Doing less with more ...

2011-04-27T09:59:00.003+10:00

No, the title of this post isn't a typo, it's quite deliberate. I could have called it 'Whither University Information Services part 96' but didn't. Catchy is better.

However it is about the future format of Computing Services in universities.

Just about everything can be outsourced. Google Apps, Office 365, Wikis, blog services, notebook services etc. Classroom environments can be replaced with virtual environments and you can people to to build and maintain them for you. Likewise if you still want to provide pc's you can get companies to look after them for you and maintain the disk images.

And, while a lot of people are a little uncomfortable with this, a lot of the MIS functions, paying people, counting leave applications etc can be outsourced

And on the whole these companies are better at the individual activities than you are because each activity is what they focus on.

Which kind of leaves your average university computing service looking distinctly surplus. While you do need some in house expertise, in the end a lot of what they end up with is service portfolio management. And the thing that changed this is having decent high speed internet links meaning that for a large number of operations, they don't need to be on site anymore.

Ignoring the recent Amazon outage, basically if you need a service, storage or compute power, you can rent it. I havn't done a cost analysis so I don't know how costs compare, but I have this gut feel that some outsourced services provide a better and more cost effective service than can be provided in house.

So, all we are left with is a few local experts, some people to manage the service portfolios and look after those few services that can't be outsourced. In other word the computing service does less and less and becomes more and more narrow in its expertiese and capability, and more and more is outsourced.

This could be taken as a dystopian view, but in fact it's an opportunity.

Years ago, before PC's were either common or powerful, most universities had some reasonably beefy machines to provide business services, general purpose computing and some specialist facilities such as text processing. And because of the roots of computing in the numerical and engineering sciences it tended to mean that almost all the general purpose stuff was very numerical.

At the same time the programmers and developers who looked after the computers knew the academic researchers and often helped them with coding, complex statistical analyses and the like - they essentially worked part of the time as research facilitators, helping researchers do what they wanted to do more efficiently.

One example I remember from then was a guy who had recorded the orientations of every neolithic long barrow tomb in northern Scotland and who had a simple question:

Did the long axes of these tombs point to where the sun would be on either solstice in 4000BC?

Basically a very simple bit of statistical analysis - work out where the sun would be, work out the standard deviation of the orientations (plus or minus a bit of fiddling to deal with date variation) and see if there was a statistically significant effect.

The archaeologist concerned was ecstatic - a problem could be answered in a day rather than having to carry out weeks of tedious manual analysis, and all because he'd had the wit to come and talk to the computing people

Today it could be done with Excel, and probably more quickly than it was then.

And then when I listen to some PhD students describing their research analysis methodology for handling and analysing large datasets, I suddenly realise not much as changed. While everyone can use simple spreadsheets, text processing, email and the like, most people lack computing skills. They need someone to suggest a solution, help them with a little bit of code to upload their results, suggest more efficient ways of manipulating data etc.

In other words they need technical facilitators - just as the tomb man did - people who know what's possible, who're used to working out how to translate research problems into computing problems, and who are interested and engaged. The only problem is that these people were, on the whole exactly those who were either let go or moved on to other things ...

Getting bookmarks out of Delicious and Diigo and into Evernote

2011-04-27T09:22:00.005+10:00

I have pretty much settled on Evernote as my electronic notebook tool, allowing me to build up a collection of useful notes and web clippings that's both searchable and accessible.

However in my search for solutions to make me more efficient I've stuff in Mendeley and Zotero, not to mention bookmarks in Diigo and Delicious.

Mendeley and Zotero I can dismiss - I never really took to them, in the end they didn't work for me. Delicious and Diigo are something else, with about three hundred bookmarks between them, some of which are relevant, and some of which are probably crap, dead links or whatever, and some of which date back to the days of Furl.

So how to get them into Evernote?

The first step is easy - consolidating them into one place - both Diigo and Delicious provide tools to export bookmarks for import.

Googling for 'export delicious to evernote' produced more results than 'export diigo to evernote', probably as a result of last year's stoush over Yahoo's rumoured closure of Delicious, so I decided to consolidate on Delicious, reckoning if there were more google results someone else must have cracked the problem.

Well, while the consolidation went well, it became clear that most people hadn't solved the 'import to evernote' problem, suggesting instead that you export your bookmarks as an html file and import that into Evernote. Now that creates a searchable document, but isn't really what I wanted, which was to import each bookmark into a separate note with tags and to work through them to kill the dead and unwanted bookmarks, and capture the text of the bookmarks I want to keep. (Yes, possibly I don't get out enough, but that's me)

Evernote uses an XML based data format for import and export so it should be possible to parse the bookmarks export file, and then rewrite it as an Evernote XML file, with one note per database.

I ended not having to do this - I found this truly awsome recipe that uses deliciousxml.com to download your bookmarks in an xml based format and then execute some code on jsdo.it to transform it into a Evernote enex format archive, which imports as a new notebook, making it easy to work through the imported links.

And the recipe just worked. My thanks to Dr.Palaniraja for making this available.

I now need to do the anal retentive thing of working through the notes, but given I'm anal enough to find librarything fun I don't think that's going to be a problem for me ... although one problem is the sheer number of dead links uncovered in tracing back posts anytime much before 2009.

Update

Today's Guardian reports that Yahoo has finally sold Delicious to the original owners of YouTube - If you've been thinking about moving your data across, this might be the moment ...

ISBN's as persistent identifiers

2011-04-14T10:36:00.002+10:00

Ever since I discovered LibraryThing, evenings chez Moncur have involved a hour or so sqautting on the floor with our Asus netbook adding our books into our LibraryThing collection. And it's a strangely therapeutic activity.

Basically, the routine is something like this:

make pot of tea
fire up netbook and connect to librarything
decide which shelf to enter
pull books off shelf
find and enter each book's isbn in turn, while drinking tea
return books to shelf
logout and help cook dinner

and the reason why it's so mindlessly enjoyable is the power of the isbn. ISBN's uniquely identify each book (sometimes each edition) published after sometime round about 1970. And because of this they're in all the major public catalogues meaning that adding a book simply involves getting librarything to look up the isbn against a reference source (in my case usually Amazon's UK catalogue), and there's the data.

I've only, so far, found one mistake in the Amazon database, and have only had to use an alternative catalogue source, the National Library of Australia, on three or four occasions. I've been quietly amazed at what's in there - things that you would think difficult such as book published in Thailand (with a Thai ISBN) about Laos are just there. I've only had to do serious detective work on one book - an English translation of a German art book on Egon Schiele.

So ISBN's are the poster child of the persistent identifier world, but when we look at institutional repositories, the use of persistent identifiers is spotty to say the least, and governed by the choice of repository software. Archives of research data are pretty spotty as well, and some registries - the catalogues of the dataset world are not that great either.

ISBN's have been a success because they filled a need for the book trade and libraries, to ensure that books are correctly described and thus when someone orders a book they get what they ordered, rather than something with a similar sounding tittle or author ...

In the data archiving world, ideally one would like to link datasets to publications and also to researchers, but we lack unambiguous primary keys, which is what decent persistent identifiers would give us. We also currently seem to lack a clear driver to introduce such a scheme to enable unambiguous dataset citation ...

Sustaining content

2011-04-13T10:18:00.005+10:00

The threatened closure of AIATSIS's digitisation programme has made explicit the long term problem of all digitisation/ digital content programs - sustainability.

Sustainability can be more accurately described as the problem of how do we keep the curation process going after the initial funding has expired - the curation process meaning that we check to ensure that the data is accessible and has not gone corrupt in some way.

And this is a process that takes money.

The usual output of a digitsation program is a website that gives access to the content, a database server that allows you to query the content, or more accurately the content's metadata, plus the content itself, which needs to be backed up, sanity checked and the rest. I don't have figures for the cost of replicated filestore so I'm going to assume that its 2.5 times the cost of straight filestore.

Ignoring the costs of software licences, 2 reasonable virtual machines - one for the front end, one for the database backend. Each server would cost a little less than $1000 in terms of hardware resource to provide for a 5 year term, but running costs are probably around $1500 per annum for power and cooling, plus $2500 per annum for operating system maintenance and patching - if the cost of the server is minimal compared to the cost of running them for five years - $20000.

Storage is quite cheap to provide as well - say around $4000 for a terabyte of slow SAN based SATA storage over a 5 year term - using NAS would be a bit cheaper.

So let's say $10000 for storage if you add in replication/sanity checking.

So we could say that a project that needs to be maintained costs around $30000 for five years after the end of funding, or $6000 per annum.

Not a great sum.

However there is a problem. Few digitisation or data hosting projects include a coherent costed sustainability plan, the default seeming to be 'oh my institution will look after it', which they might well for a few years if it was only $6000 a year, but if it was 10 projects, each at $6k a year, that's getting on for the cost of a grade 4 library person, trainee network support guy , or whatever.

Projects need better exit and sustainability plans, ones with real costs. And while some might be sustainable by selling subscriptions not all will be - in fact most of them won't be.

The simplest solution is probably to require projects to pay into a ringfenced fund, something akin to an annuity, that will provide for the sustainability of the data for a fixed term. Given that the half life of scientific publications is around five years (ie 50% are never referenced five years after publication) we can probably assume the same is true of data, and can say that a dataset or digitsation project is only of value on the level of access it attracts.

This is an approach which we used to take at the UK Mirror Service when deciding which data sets to cease hosting - and while we also had special pleading it had the advantage of transparency.

The costs cited are from internal estimates from my day job of what it costs to provide these things. They're not necessarily accurate, however the server costs are not too far from the costs charged by large hosting company here in Australia. The storage costs are slightly higher than Amazon's for hosting on redundant storage in their Singapore facility, but remember that Amazon will charge for data transfer costs (essentially website accesses and database lookups) However, these are all back of the envelope prices, and you may find your technology and hosting costs differ significantly. The point remains though that even using serious hardware (virtual machines, high quality blade servers, high performance SAN hardware), the costs of maintaining the resource 'as is' is comparatively low on an annualised basis. However in aggregate they can amount to a reasonable degree of expense - meaning that the host institution probably should care about sustainability even if the individual projects do not ...

Librarything

2011-04-10T12:50:00.004+10:00

I’ve discovered a new source of distraction – Librarything – which is a website to allow you to catalogue what’s on your shelves, as well as all the usual social networky stuff de nos jours.

Now this sounds incredibly geeky, but I have a serious purpose here. We have a lot of books, some of which would be quite hard to replace. We used to have a lot more, but when we moved from York to Canberra we gave about three quarters of them away, including my science fiction collection, as there just wasn’t room in the shipping container for them all.

When we gave the books away we intended to be rational and give away the mass market paperbacks, the stuff that didn’t do it for us any more and keep the literature and the good factual stuff that might come in useful.

We weren’t that rational in the end. Somehow all of George Orwell got given away, along with Lindsey Davis, and some things that shouldn’t have come did, some things just got lost, like my copy of Ae Satyre of the Thrie Estatis.

So, as well as buying new books, we’ve replaced some of the missing books, though for some reason Lindsey Davis seems to have taken precedent over George Orwell.

The upshot is, we don’t know what we’ve got, and Librarything seems the perfect solution to let us catalogue our collection. Also at the back of our minds is the problem we had when we had a break in in York and some miscreant stole all our CD’s (as well as the stereo, a Mac, and the rest).

We of course didn’t have a list of what we had but we did have a couple of hundred CD’s. The insurers were happy to agree we had had that many – we could point to the empty CD racks and show them some photos we’d taken that showed the racks to be fairly full.

What they didn’t of course do was deal with the fact we had a pile of classical and medieval music and a pile of world music exotica, some bought on our travels, and offered us the average price for a cd bought from a discount music store.

We argued, at one point I sarcsatically suggested they fly us to Johannesburg to replace the world music cd’s as it would probably work out cheaper than buying the individual imports, and eventually they upped the amount a bit, and we compromised.

And even today, we have less than half the number we used to have.

Now, while no miscreant is going to steal a paperback of Aristophanes’ collected plays, we’re always aware that there’s a nature reserve on top of the hill, and in the event of a serious bushfire it would be ‘grab the cat, the passports, grab a laptop, grab the cd’s with the scanned essentials and get the hell out’.

And afterwards, we’d need to get a valuation on the books we’d inevitably lose – so Librarything seems the ideal solution to show what we had - and of course since the data lives elsewhere, we don't need to make sure that one of the essential CD's was an uptodate booklist.

But how to get the data in?

Well Librarything is part owned by AbeBooks who are themselves part owned by Amazon. Most of our books come from Abe, Amazon in either the States or the UK, or Bookdepository. And we’ve been buying from Amazon for as long as they’ve been going so getting that data in seemed like a start.

Now because of the ownership chain we thought that at least AbeBooks and the Amazon’s would have purchase history import/export filters to LibraryThing. Not a bit of it.

They didn’t even have an option to download your purchase history to a csv file. Neither did Bookdepository.

I was quite prepared to write a little bit of perl if necessary to transform the data (actually, being a sad anorak I was looking forward to it), but no, not a bit of it. Nothing to do but spend an evening with a tab open on your purchase history and another tab open on Librarything doing the data entry by hand.

And that’s probably given us 50% of the books. For the rest, we’re probably up for a few evenings manual data entry.

While Librarything will sell you a cheap barcode scanner for $15, itwould mean waiting for a couple of weeks minimum for one to come from the states, and with no guarantees as none of our computers use any of the operating systems listed on the librarything cuecat webpage.

And, a barcode scanner wouldn't solve all of our problems, given Borders' and Dymocks' habit of sticking their own SKU labels over the publisher's barcode which of course renders them unscannable with no alternative other than manual entry.

And the obvious machine to use for data entry is the OokyGoo, our linux travelling netbook, given its lightness and portability, but cuecats with linux seems a bridge too far. Googling suggests that using the Cuecat with linux is finger in the ear at best, so I think it’s going to be autumn evenings sat on the floor with the Asus netbook typing in ISBN’s by hand …

Capturing what scholars use ...

2011-04-07T14:29:00.002+10:00

Building on my recent post on what collaboration tools researchers actually use I thought I'd set about documenting this. To this we need to both collect and publish information. So, to this end:

There is a wiki page summarising information so far. This is a crowdsourced document, if you want to comment please follow the link on the page
A survey on collaboration tool use in academia Click here to take survey

I'll post a summary of the results in due course ....