Multcloud

I recently happened across an application called Multcloud.

To be honest, the manufacturers asked me if I was interested in reviewing it.

I declined, because, as a matter of policy I don’t write reviews on things I havn’t tested on myself by using them for real work, or for which payment (or some other inducement) is offered. I’ve always believed in eating my own dogfood, and I find that way I sleep better at night.

However, I was sufficiently curious to take a look.

The idea is quite simple - we all have multiple cloud based accounts, OneDrive, GoogleDrive, Box, and the rest and we all end up with files scattered across all of them, and if you’re like me have different machines that mount different subsets of these drives.

The idea is to provide you with a browser window into which you connect all your accounts, and then which allows you to search across them just as you would search the disks attached to your pc, and to copy files between them.

No a stupid idea - in fact quite a good idea. Obviously there’s a raft of security concerns but the vendors claim on their website that all authentication is by OAauth, and that no data is cached on their servers.

Now as I said, I havn’t tested this tool, and have no idea how well it performs. It’s also not the only such application out there - a little googling comes up with a list of alternatives. However this is a product that might well fill a need for some people. Remember that your mileage may vary …

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Zotero, RefMan and Jabref

Zotero is a rather nice bibliography manager which can export references in a number of formats, including BibTex.

I was playing with reference managers last week trying to work out a set of workflows to get the information exported for reloading into a different solution - it’s the old problem of tracking people’s publication history and loading it into a research management system.

There’s a good little BibTex exporter for Zotero known as autozotbib that works as a plugin for both the desktop client and firefox that pushes the records out in BibTex as they are updated.

If you use dropbox for filesharing you can of course output the export file directly to Dropbox, which makes it readily accessible to a number of other reference management products, including JabRef.

In the course of playing about with this I also tried installing RefMan on my Android tablet, and telling it to read the Zotero output file - which it did.

Now I’m by no means a power Zotero user, but one thing I do sometimes need to do is check references and information, and something that increasingly I find myself going to a tablet to do so because of their extreme portability rather than using either a Chromebook or one of my aging netbooks. While I’ve only got one way synchronization - ie all the changes have to be made to the Zotero end of things, this little trick makes it comparatively easy to search reference lists with a native (and free) android app …

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So what do you use?

I've been a bit remiss posting on this topic - it's actually quite difficult given that I flit between platforms and devices, but I've managed to come up with the following table based on my principle activities:

	Windows	OS X	Linux (Ubuntu)	ChromeOS	Android
WordProcessing	LibreOffice	LibreOffice	LibreOffice	GoogleDocs	n/a
				LibreOffice via Roll.app
Lightweight document creation (MarkDown)	Texts.io	Texts.io	Retext	StackEdit	MarkDrop
				Retext via Roll.app
Spreadsheets	Libre Office	Libre Office	Libre Office	GoogleDocs	n/a
				Excel via OneDrive
Email	Web client	Web client	Web client	Web Client	Application
Twitter	Web client	Web client	Web client	Web Client	Application
RSS Reader	Web client	Web client	Web client	Web Client	n/a
Document Management	Evernote	Evernote	Web client	Web Client	Evernote
PDF Viewer	Acrobat	Preview	Evince	Google viewer	Acrobat
Epub Reader	Calibre	Calibre	Calibre	n/a	n/a

This of course doesn't cover the devices used - for example I'me still using my old Cool-er ereader to read epubs offline, while my Kindle is used for recreational reading, and I still use my old noname 7inch tablet for notetaking.

I also find I use my full size windows laptop at weekends for more serious writing but prefer my Chromebook during the week for email, web and rss reading, plus writing the odd snippet. My newer Samsung tablet is used for email, online newspaper reading and online banking, but strangely I still like my original 10" Zpad for viewing images, even if it's a little slow these days ...

Travelling with a 3G router

As I’ve written elsewhere, we’ve been on holidays, riding the train up to Cairns and driving back south through the edge of the western emptiness. During that trip we of course faced the great question of the twenty first century - how to get internet access.

Some of the places we stayed at provided complimentary internet, some did not, and some were simply out of range where there’s no coverage.

We couldn’t do a lot about a lack of coverge, but to combat the problem of small motels and rental cabins without the internet, we took our own, in the form of a little D-link 3G router I bought off of ebay for $18, an unlocked Huawei USB modem and one of these cheap data sim packages.

In the small towns of the bush it worked reasonably well allowing us to surf the web from an android tablet, check our email, and use internet banking and newspaper apps. In bigger, coastal places, such as Port Douglas, which was swamped with tourists, it didn’t do so well, probably because the 3G network was overloaded, meaning we suffered from dropped connections and timeouts.

Where we had good connection we even managed to have two tablets running at once - which was pretty neat.

It was fortunate though we’d taken tablets with us at the last moment, I’d originally planned to simply take the Chromebook and rely on phones for the rest.

Previously at home I’d successfully used applications on Roll.app over a 3G link from my chromebook so I reckoned we’d get good enough performance.

In practice I didn’t. The Chromebook was tempremental - I’m guessing just too much back and fro to big G and time outs. Where we had a fast connection it was usable, where we didn’t it wasn’t, even though our tablets were. We’d have probably done better with the Windows netbook I took to Sri Lanka last year, and using postbox for email despite my various whinges about the netbook’s overall performance.

Spending blocks of time - four or five days off the net at a time also just revealed how dependent we’d become on the net for news and weather information - in the old days we’d have taken an AM/FM radio with us and listened religiously to the news and weather forecast on Radio National - well we still have the radio we used to take with us, but didn’t think to take it.

We also became extremely adept at spotting where there was working internet in a restuarant or a stop on the highway - where the internet worked people, starved of electronic interaction, sat and looked at their phones or tablets - where it didn’t they talked to each other, and there were payphones and people using them …

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25 years of the internet in Australia

Australia’s been connected to the internet for twentyfive years now.
I of course don’t remember this, as I wasn’t here - I was working in a university computer centre in the UK, and in 1989 it was still all DECNet and Coloured books protocols.

(The UK had invented its own set of networking protocols, and connection to the rest of the world was either via complex email address translations or strange non interactive ftp incantations - something that I was a dab hand at - sending files to India via usenet etc…)

A couple of years later (I’ll say 1991, but actually I can’t remember) there was Project Shoestring which was a pilot migration to TCP/IP which recognised that Coloured Books was not going to make it globally and we’d better all move to TCP/IP - something that made the Unix people very happy (and Macintosh users - they could use Eudora for email and send each other BinHex encoded attachments).

Now we still used to run a student advisory service - this was a hangover from the days of batch programming but essentially what it was that one of the programming team sat in a booth and answered user queries as to why their batch job had gone stupid.

I was officially an analyst programmer which meant I had to do advisory even though I was singularly useless at it - rather than Fortran coding I knew about network transfers, document formats and these pesky new things called desktop computers. My principal contribution to human happiness at the time was explaining to US exchange students was how to email their girlfriend/boyfriend at somewhere.edu or their mum or dad who had a compuserve account.

Anyway, one day shortly after we started a TCP/IP service, a visiting Australian academic turned up asking if we could help her access her email - she had thought to bring the numeric address of the mail server, so I fired up a VT100 emulator, connected to a terminal server, typed c tcp {server ip address}, and after a few seconds a login banner appeared, typed out at what looked like 300baud, she logged in and fired up elm to read her mail.

Clumsy for sure, but there it was, a connection across the planet …

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E-readers are (probably) dying

E-readers, as in dedicated devices for reading content are on the way out.

How do I know this - well, just by looking about. I’ve occassionally blogged about people’s reading habits on public transport in Canberra and even Singapore, but yesterday I was in Sydney for a meeting, and did something I hardly ever do these days - caught a peak hour train. The train was one from the CBD out past the airport to whereever the train goes once it’s past the airport, and being peak hour it was pretty full.

In between gawking at the sunset over the the Harbour Bridge (tip: try Circular Quay station at sunset for an excellent view) I looked around at my fellow passengers. The train car was pretty full and around three quarters of the people were reading something. A few oldies with paperbacks, but everyone else was using a tablet or a smartphone. Interestingly, young people of Asian experience seemed to mostly read on smartphones, while their western counterparts seemed to prefer 7” tablet. (I agree, they could be doing something else, but of those I could see clearly, what ever they were doing involved screenfuls of characters - which kind of looks like reading to me)

No one I could see was reading using kindle or other like e-ink grey screen device.

Now, e-readers have many virtues - especially Kindles - buy your book and it lands on your reader as soon as you have a wireless connection - long battery life and the rest - in fact they are very good at what they do. Proof of the pudding is that as well as my kindle I still use my Cool-er for reading public domain books from gutenberg as part of my unarticulated informal research into the nineteenth century colonial experience. Yes, of course I could use my kindle for this, but having two readers on the go means I can separate reading for interest from reading for fun - a bit like having two books on the go at once.

And I’m sure that a great many people will carry on using their readers, but if you’re carrying one device round with you, you’re more likely to carry a tablet, because of its versatility …

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Curating Legacy Data

Data is the new black, everything seems to be about data at the moment and it’s desperately trendy. At the same time there is an entirely laudable movement towards researchers making the data that underlies their research available, for all sorts of reasons, including substantiation and reuse and recombination with other data sources.
This sometimes gets conflated with Big Data, but it should’t - outside of a few disciplines, most experimental data is pretty small, and even quite large sets of results will fit comfortably on a twenty dollar usb stick.
It’s important to remember that this is a recent phenomenon - only in the last five years or so has cloud storage become widely available, or commodity hard disks become large and cheap.
Before then data would be stored on zip drives (remember those) CD’s, DVD’s, or DAT tapes - all formats which are either dead or dying, and all of which are subject to maintainance issues. Basically bitrot due to media degradation.
Even if you’ve stored you data on an older external hard disk you can have problems - my wife did just that, and then lost the cable to a four year old external disk - it of course turned out to be a slightly non standard variant on USB, and it took us a lot of searching of documentation and cable vendors (including a couple of false starts) to find a suitable cable - when is a standard not a standard ? - when it’s a proprietary one.
Recovering this legacy data is labour intensive. It can be in formats that are difficult to read, and it can require conversion (with all that implies) to a newer format to be accessible - which can be a special kind of fun when it’s not a well known or well documented format (nineteen nineties multi channel data loggers come to mind).
So, what data should we convert?
Well most scientific publications are rarely read or cited, so we could take a guess and say that it’s probably not cost effective to convert the data underlying those - though someone did once ask me if I still had the data from an experiment I did back in the nineteen eighties - turns out they were having difficulty getting regulatory approval for their physiology study and thought that reanalysing my data might give them something to help their case. And I’m afraid I couldn’t help them, the data was all on five and quarter inch Cromemco Z2D disks, or else punch cards, and long gone.
So, what probably a legacy data curation strategy should do is focus on the data underlying highly cited papers - it’s probably of greater value, and there’s a chance it might have been stored in a more accessible format.
However even recovering data that’s been looked after still has costs associated with it - costs to cover the labour of getting it off the original source media and making it useful. And these are real dollar costs.
From experience, getting a half dozen nine track tapes read costs around fifteen hundred bucks if it’s done by a specialist media conversion company, and the administration, shipping, and making useful phase probably another fifteen hundred, less if some poor graduate student can be persuaded to do the work, but still is a reasonable chunk of money, and money that need to come from somewhere.
So, who pays, and is it worth it?

[Update 26/06/2014 : Notes of a meeting in Sydney on this very subject ...] 

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