Daniel Swan

At least if you’re Gordon Brown eh?

So what - it’s likely to get bounced in the Lords, and it was only achieved by apparent bribery of the DUP.  It still annoys me intensely.  Even China charges people in under 40 days.

I wonder what people would think if when the BBC reports:

“Terrorist suspects can now be detained for 42 days without charge”

what they actually said was:

“YOU can now be detained for 42 days without charge”

As Simon pointed out anyway, if you’re a real suspect, they wont bother detaining you, they will just shoot you dead on the Tube.

I guess deep down that I actually quite like statistics, which is useful as I tend to have to deal with them daily.  A number of podcasts crossed my radar recently that all coincided on the topics of statistics, and more specifically the topics of randomness, probability and their relation to statistics.

The first one is Melvyn Bragg’s “In Our Time” (actually as I write this I realise that these are more radio show than podcast but.. nevermind.  Media convergence etc. etc.).  The programme focuses on ‘the history of ideas’ and the recent Probability - heads or tails? was an excellent introduction to the show for me.  Followed up with a subsequent episode about Lysenko, this has already established itself firmly in my listening schedule.

I was also surprised recently to come across More or Less, a programme which delves into the numbers behind the statistics that we come across every day.  It’s lighthearted and easy going (and unfortunately not currently on air) and is kind of a Freakonomics style look at things.  Very interesting though.

The most recent discovery however was Material World presented by Quentin Cooper.  I’d kind of veered away from pop-sci podcasts (well podcasts in general - I no longer follow the Science, Nature and New Scientist ones), but a section on probability in the most recent episode (largely following the same themes as the Bragg piece) did feature the most amazingly clear explanation of the Monty Hall Problem that I have ever heard, and if the quality is maintained in future episodes as I listen I will be very happy indeed.

So we took delivery this morning of a shiny new HP 2710p (not for us, but for Matt). Matt couldn’t contain his excitement (or let us deliver it to him at lunch) so came up to the office.  At this point we plugged it in and turned it on.  Time on the clock was 11am.

Now, I don’t know if it was a problem with Vista, the tablet, or what.  HP’s ‘first boot’ setup makes Dell’s look streamlined.  The machine, after deciding which OS to install (64bit or 32bit), created a rescue partition, populated the rescue partition, asked us for some passwords, installed some software.  It rebooted maybe 7 times in all.

It finally booted into a workable Vista desktop at 1.15pm.   2 hours and 15 minutes for a new machine to boot into a useable configuration is apalling.  After 20 minutes we were already joking that we could have installed Ubuntu and configured it AND downloaded enough development tools to keep Matt happy in that time.  We had no idea that it would finally boot in front of us over 2 hours later during lunch.

I feel for any consumer that has to go through this process.  It’s not impressive.  By 3pm Matt was already prepping to wipe it in favour of an XP/Ubuntu dual boot.  Oh the complete install package?  Over 20GB disk was gone by the time it had finished.

As my little diet badge has dropped off the front page I thought I’d reinstate it.  Current progress is that I’m 12 stone or just under depending on when I weigh in (woo!) and no longer ‘overweight’ using my BMI as a guide.  About 12 pounds to go I think until I come off the diet :) Steady loss of 1lb/week at the moment which is a daily deficit of 500 cals (3500cals/lb fat!).

After the bitter disappointment of the various parties allowing MPs a free vote on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill amendments/updates it was genuinely gratifying yesterday to see all the handwringing, religious polemic and general misunderstanding about the ‘hybrid embryos’ parts of the bill put to rest with a resounding defeat of the attempt to ban their creation by 336 to 176.

Whilst I’m slightly more ambiguous about the ’saviour siblings’ (a ban on creating them also heavily defeated) I see no real reason to deny people IVF for these kind of medical reasons if you’re going to allow IVF and embryo screening for other people.  I’m just largely against IVF as a means of conception because I am not convinced that couples have any ‘right’ to have children in the first place.

These 2 results however give me great hope that the attempt to lower the abortion time limit from 24 to 20 weeks will also fail.  This particular piece of attempted legislative stupidity (and actually the above 2 as well) flies in the face of all scientific thought, evidence and advice that has been offered.

It still disturbs me greatly that gut feelings, moral panic and general ignorance are allowed to stand against rigorous medical advice and evidence.  I suspect those people who find these things unethical, unacceptable or morally repugnant still consider themselves to be ‘the moral majority’.  I wonder how they feel on days like this when the people they elected to represent them vote in these kind of numbers, and clearly demonstrate that, for now, the moral majority is in favour of allowing science, research and medical breakthroughs to continue.

It’s become quite trendy recently to talk about ‘cloud computing‘.  This is largely due to the fact that the Amazon EC2 system has been apparently well hyped recently, despite the fact other vendors (notably Sun and IBM) have been selling compute for years.  Whilst this excites the blogging masses quite a lot, I suspect cloud computing is still going to take a while to be useful to the bioinformatician who still values a tight link between his terabytes of data and the compute they’re meant to be crunched on.

Various European countries and the academic institutions that make them up already offer compute to scientists at the Grid level - everything from compute clusters for research groups, to the ‘campus grids’.  A step up from this are the NGI (National Grid Initiatives) of which the National Grid Service is the UK’s contribution.  It always surprises me when people get excited about paying for access to commercial services, when free services exist on the doorstep.   Complete with free training.

Now I see that the various European NGIs are looking at ways to support European wide research by coordinating and combining their efforts.  The European Grid Initiative Design Study is currently running and according to its project director looking to make the infrastructure ‘available seamlessly’.  I wonder how much of the ‘cloud computing’ ideal the EGI will take on board.  Anyone who has been on a training course to use these resources currently will know that ease of access probably hasn’t been the watchword in the past, but more of an effort to understand how the various parts of the middleware sit together in order that it can be used at all.

For some reason using the academic infrastructure in place for scientific computing makes more sense to me than going to a commercial concern.  The chances are the NGS et al. are going to be far  more familiar with the challenges of deploying scientific software in Grid environments than Amazon ever will.

I don’t often feel compelled to post links to columns, but even as (as described in the article) a casual coder at best, this is a really fascinating insight into the fall and fall of Windows as an attractive development platform.

From ars technica, a site I often forget exists, but perhaps should visit more often

Did you know you could shoot RAW with your Canon point and click? Extend the available time you can record video for? Script up events and actions? Play games?

Lifehacker to the rescue.

This was promptly bookmarked under ‘Things to do when I’m bored’ - my default bookmarks folder for neat things I want to try :)

Mario Kart Wii UK release date: 11 April

Date dispatched to me via Royal Mail: 9th April

Date delivered: 10th April

First day back at work after illness: 10th April

Time of Mario Karts delivery: 11.50am

Chances that my letterbox were big enough to recieve it with stupid Wii Wheel in: 0

ARGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Well at least that’s the quote I’ve seen kicking around. In a fit of ‘new things technical’ over the weekend, I erased 10.5 from my G4 PowerBook (I’m sorry Apple, but if you think Leopards performance on the G4 is acceptable, there are at least 2 owners here who would heartily disagree) and decided to stick the Hardy Heron Ubuntu beta on it instead, having been superficially impressed with it in a quick show and tell with Frank on Friday afternoon.

So this quickly turned into a bit of a frustration. Having erased Kubuntu from my now Windows XP SP3(!) Dell laptop (oh so much happiness after Vista), I still feel I need a Linux platform to play on and I have issues with VMware Server (version 1 doesn’t seem to be able to bridge my WLAN connection and version 2 beta is .. dire quite frankly to the point of non-functionality).

The actual installation on to the PowerBook was fine, although booting from the LiveCD it was obvious that my wireless card was not supported ‘out of the box’. Ploughing ahead anyway, I wiped the system and booted back into a very refined Gnome interface (I never thought I would end up back in Gnome, but KDE is turning into a train wreck of a window manager). It certainly looked pretty, but the differences between well supported x86 architechture and Apple’s former PowerPC favourites quickly became clear.

There is *no* out of the box support for the PowerBook wireless. In fact getting it to work was quite the exercise in frustration. The procedure is mildly different from Gutsy (and in fact better) but nevertheless not that easy to find. I managed to get it working for, hmm, about 1 boot. Since then it has refused to work. It can’t even see half the wireless networks that my Dell can - and has great difficulty authenticating with my Linksys router (mind you my PDA also struggles with this). However this leaves me at the mercy of a wired connection, and I’m sorry - I have laptops precisely because they’re portable and it annoys Harriet less to have me in the room with her nerding rather than in the spare room nerding.

Then the other problem start to become appparent. The keyboard backlighting functions are broken, not just the fancy dimming functions - but the caps lock key. The single mouse button is a hindrance beyond belief (which it just isn’t in OS X despite a large number of context sensitive right click operations available). The screen dimming buttons make X extremely unstable. It’s impossible to install OpenOffice.Org currently from the repositories. The machine itself is running hot - and believe me this machine got hot under OS X but it’s managed to iron a nice flat depression into my sofa cushion with Ubuntu on it. Oh and there’s absolutely no support for the ATI Radeon Mobile chipset in it - so no compiz-fusion for me, or at least no way I could see to make it all hang together.

I appreciate that some of these issues might be related to the fact it’s a beta release, but it seems that PPC owners (especially laptop owners) are getting short changed. I’m sure this would work great on a desktop with an NVIDIA card in, but for me having this installed without using any of the joyful, full functionality of the laptop is just plain wrong to me.

It’s a shame, because as a distribution I still think Ubuntu is by far and away the best desktop Linux for those of us for whom compiling systems is just not fun anymore (yes I did used to do it.. 13 years ago!). It’s been rock solid as a server platform for us on x86 and x86-64 (mind you I can happily say that about RHEL4 as well, I just dont like it as much).

10.4 goes back on the PowerBook tomorrow as a) I no longer have 10.5 media and b) it’s faster. Strange how downgrading from the latest OS releases has suddenly become a necessity for me! A shame I lack a dedicated Linux platform to play with though. Maybe I should just get another laptop…..