Thesis and experiment progress

After setting up my experiment a week or so ago, I’ve now moved into thesis writing mode. At forty pages, it seems to be taking shape quite well. My abstract is more or less finalised (after only two revisions with my supervisor, so I think I must have done a good job the first time […]

Help push forward the frontiers of science

As part of the research for my MPhil, I’m running a simple experiment to try and find out the keywords which people associate with news stories on the Web. The survey comes in two parts – first of all you’ll be asked to look at some existing web pages and enter some keywords which you […]

OpenTech 2008 – a reflection

I spent last Saturday in London at OpenTech 2008, an event organised by UKUUG “and friends”. There were lots of interesting talks—allowing fifteen minutes per speaker ensured a variety and that no one got bored listening to one voice for too long—across a range of subjects from green IT to accessing “freely available” government data. […]

Perhaps I should move to London

As all the important meetings etc. seem to be there, including in the next month: 30th June: UKUUG Council meeting and venue viewing 2nd July: Association of History and Computing committee meeting and book proposal 5th July: OpenTech 2008 19th July: Campaign Against Climate Change steering group meeting Plus a possible interview at some time […]

Dropping down to MPhil

For those people who don’t know already, I’ve decided to drop down from my PhD and just do an MPhil this year. I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and there are numerous reasons behind it—though mainly it’s a case of not wanting to do research full time (I enjoy it, but I’m not […]

Good old USA

It’s not often that I praise the United States of America, but one thing which I do like about them is their policy towards making data created by government agencies free of copyright (in most cases) and available for download over the Web. As a result, I can obtain a complete list of geographical names […]

Restaurants in London

Following on my previous post, I’m currently looking for restaurants (or other catering venues) near the centre of London (defined as ‘within walking/short tube distance of Euston’) which can offer a three course meal and wine for over ninety people on a weekday evening. I know there are some Londoners who read my blog, so […]

Richard Stallman talk

Last Thursday, in an event organised with Manchester Free Software and sponsored by the BCS and the IET, we had Richard Stallman give a talk on free software at the University of Manchester. Initially, we hadn’t expected many people to attend the talk, perhaps a hundred or so, and as a result a small room […]

OpenVPN at ManLUG

I gave my “Adventures with OpenVPN” talk at ManLUG today, after a re-jigging of the timetable and several rewrites of my slides in S5. I’d been meaning to give a talk at some point because we haven’t had many speakers recently and I felt it was about time that I chipped in having been a […]