For those of you who haven't been talking to me on Faceblerg, the blog is back, after a small technical hiccup. I still don't have time to write anything - but at least you can read the old stuff again!

For the past couple of weeks, I've been avoiding writing Word documents or opening up Excel spreadsheets as my installation of Office had mysteriously died. I took the time out on the weekend to prepare my laptop for a full reinstall, since I figured the machine was getting massively hosed from all the different things I've been trying out on it.

I ended up not doing the reinstall, as I kind of wanted to put an encrypted home directory (I fear the Government) on the machine, which would mean archiving off my iPhoto library, which would mean spending US$25 on a tool to do that. All of which was a bit much for a Sunday afternoon. So, I stuck with the suboptimal install on the machine.

It's lucky I actually did that, since I finally got sick of the problem, and googled myself a solution. It turns out, the problem lies with updating the prebinding. Basically, prebinding is a performance hack used to make dynamic libraries not so dynamic, and is generally a very good thing. Unfortunately, a number of Java dynamic libraries (from older versions it seems) were breaking the prebinding, so the whole prebinding operation was failing, resulting in our lovely Rosetta applications failing too.

The fact that I can actually go in to the console, play around with prebindings, and fix my computer when it stops working optimally is one of the reasons I love using Mac OS X. It's like the best Linux ever.

Like some kind of zombie, I'm back if only just to let my dear RSS enabled readers know that I'm still alive. It's summer, and I've been pretty busy. I went to Barcelona last month, which was a massive hoot. Last week, I was in the slightly colder Dublin (no pictures I'm afraid). Those of you waiting for an overly long blog post or essay, I'm afraid you're going to have to wait a bit longer. The abundance of summer BBQs and other outdoors activities (coupled with an increased workload) mean that I don't have time to write my usual drivel. If you're after poorly formulated drivel, you can always hit me up on Facebook, where you'll find craftily crafted status messages written in the third person. I'm considering the implications of taking Facebookisms into the real world - talking in the third person, running around with a spray can tagging people. Following these people around for hours, only to get bored, and then to start following their (good looking) friends around, until you finally find yourself amongst a group of people banding together to try and get someone's child named Batman.

Last week I didn't spend much time hooked up to the digital sewer pipe that is the internet. Instead, I spent a week in the Netherlands, ostensibly for the EUROCarbDB annual meeting, but in reality it was yet another excuse to meet up with the Glyco-cabal that I've been getting to know over the past 5 years, and chat over a few tasty Belgian beverages.

We had our group meeting in a place called WageningenNetherlands. This place is known as the Life sciences city - a surprisingly accurate tag-line, since it's a largely drab city with a tiny social and entertainment district, and often smells of chicken and cow manure. On the upside, at least I didn't have to pay for being there. It was of course, good to meet up with the old crowd again - I keep running into Niclas all over the place, Tina was around, and I got some good time in with the other team members in EUROCarbDB. We had a pretty successful meeting, and in an uncharacteristic wellspring of optimism, I left thinking that the whole thing could actually work.

A quick note about drugs in the Netherlands. For a country that's meant to be all liberal about drug usage, I saw hardly any people smoking in the country. It's not that smoking was banned in all these places - there were ashtrays at every single table I sat down at - but it just seems like people don't particularly like smoking. I'd like to say that's a clear message that prohibition and control doesn't work, but I think it's more of a sign that the Dutch care about their health too much. It must be all that bike riding that they do.

After spending time in Wageningen, Alessio and I stuck around in the Netherlands to hit Utrecht and Amsterdam. Joining us on our little adventure was Anita and Sarah - from HeidelbergDeutschland. Getting out from Wageningen, I found the rest of the Netherlands to be a much cooler place. I've been singing the praises of UtrechtNetherlands to anyone who will listen. Like my fawning over Gothenburg, Utrecht is a city with a really good atmosphere. It's primarily a student city, so walking around you see so much street art all over the place, it's a real feast for the eyes. Also - as Anita mentioned to me - although Heidelberg is a pretty town, it's more of a panoramic pretty town. All the good pictures of Heidelberg really need the castle or the old bridge in them. However, with Utrecht, you get the feeling that it's a bunch of really interesting smaller spaces. Spaces that reminded me of LondonUnited Kingdom 20 years ago. Walking around on the streets, amongst the buildings, I could have imagined myself riding my bike there.

AmsterdamNetherlands is another city altogether. It's cool, and it's bizarre, and it's big. It's not my favourite place though. I didn't feel as immediately comfortable in Amsterdam as I did in Utrecht. The big issue was that I fell into a bit of a tourist trap there. You go and do all the touristy things, and you end up missing out on the real value in Amsterdam, which is their great subcultures and street art scenes. To get into that you really need to know someone who is not only living in the city, but also is into the scenes themselves. I guess Amsterdam is like Radiohead. Both are great, but you really need to spend a lot of time with them to fully appreciate their character.

What you don't need time to get into is the Koninginnendag celebrations which were going on in the country on the 30th. The streets were filled with people, parties blasting out of every open window, and every second person with a turntable, massive speakers and stacks of wax. We spent a fair amount of time wandering the town, getting a feel for the whole thing. It's certainly an experience. The flea-markets during the day were pretty interesting, although I think you're better off going to Etsy to get your handcrafted goods. I ended up picking up a mid-century gas mask bag, along with a real life working gas mask to go with it. You never know, it might be useful some time in the future.

I've been a little hidden for the past few weeks - as some people correctly surmised, I'm in the process of doing a spot of writing and coding. That, and I've been trying to take advantage of the great outdoors. It's actually been an unusually warm spring so far (if you discount the light snow that we had on the first day of spring), and bodes very well for the upcoming summer. The weather here is just about perfect.

This post takes the nerd all the way to 11. I'm in the midst of writing up a big report, and naturally, I'm using LaTeX and OpenOffice to make up the documents, so that in the event of catastrophic machine failure, I can go back into the stone age and use Linux if I get desperate. Contingency plans are where it's all at. Anyway, my boss likes reading stuff in Word format, so he can make changes to the document there, so I just really need to export from LaTeX to Word. That part isn't so much of a problem - but I'd also like to keep track of changes I'm making to the documents and the diagrams. Each word document I make for my boss should live on a branch, and then I can merge in changes from the trunk back onto the branch and so on. Thing is, I can't figure out how to get any OpenOffice document to play nicely with version control. First of all, OpenOffice uses a binary format for its data, so there is no way I can add svn keywords to the document. The second problem is that there's a long standing bug in OpenOffice draw which means that I can't insert arbitrary fields into OpenOffice.org draw documents. This means that my drawings can't have a versioning watermark on them - which is useful if I've got lots of hard copies flying around. Does anyone have any ideas how to deal with this?

21^st March, and it's snowing here. Someone needs to do something about this. Now.

Sleep - when not being used as a verb - can often be used as a noun. Being a greedy little human, I try to get as much of this noun as possible. This endeavour is becoming increasingly hard nowadays. In the evenings, you're either working late, in the gym, down the pub, or doing all the domestic things that you haven't had a chance to do (such as late night shopping at Rewe or the Penny - 10 O'Clock shopping!). Looking over my average day, I used to wonder exactly how I managed to maintain any kind of chemical balance in my body. I don't eat particularly healthily, exercise happens in bursts - three times a week, the pub is all about the alcohol and copious second-hand nicotine (damn you and your lax laws Germany), and I spend my day at work downing cups of coffee to cover the lack of sleep I get.

I've learned to stop worrying about it now, and just to embrace the dream of better living through chemistry. To that end, I ordered a massive pack of Penguin mints. My trips on the bus in the mornings usually are pretty short - or at the very least they feel short as I fall asleep when I get on the bus, and then wake up at work. I tried my first bus trip this morning with the caffeine mints, and the mints work absolute wonders. I can now cut out coffee as a drink and go back to tea, since coffee was only really a drug delivery mechanism for me.

This whole practical usage of chemicals thing got me thinking about which other chemicals I could use to improve my health. The benefits, of course, need to outweigh the detrimental effects to my health (both long and short term), but I'm sure there's a whole world of chemical hacks you can make to get the best performance out of your body. In that spirit, I happened to come across this quote from bash:

<PhoenixBourne> Ok, so a friend of mine had an AWESOME idea at school <PhoenixBourne> You know rohyphonol? (whatever the spelling is) <linforcer> Is he gontna make a trebuchet <linforcer> no <PhoenixBourne> You know date rape drugs? <linforcer> Sure <PhoenixBourne> Right, rhyphonol is one of these. It knocks you asleep after an hour or two. <PhoenixBourne> I should also mention, a side affect of rhyphonol is amnesia of events whilst under influence of the drug. <PhoenixBourne> Now, a friend of mine had this idea: 1) Prepare ingredients 2) Take rhyphonol 3) Bake cake 4) Fall asleep 5) ?????? 6) Wake up 7) CAKE?! CAKE! Where did this come from?! <linforcer> SURPRISE CAKE!!!!!!

In the comment section I'll add any new ideas I have for practical usages for controlled substances as I come up with them, with an aim to have a list of 20(ish) innovative drug hacks. I welcome any suggestions on the comments.

I wasn't the only person who thought the ban of an ad where a toddler is driving an SUV was stupid. Boy, do I have egg on my face.

.. even though what they should really have done, if there was any justice in the world, is smash the desk to pieces, select the longest wooden splinters they could find, then drive them firmly into their imbecilic, atrophied, world-wrecking rodent brains.

This man, he is my hero.

I've spent a few hours spiffing up the photos section. It's now pulling data directly from my Flickr account, and making up a set of purty looking flash slideshows. You know it's cool.

I had large plans for Australia day. Involving a BBQ and a case of VB. These plans had their genesis in my trip to Gothenburg, and witnessing the insanity that was the Dancing Dingo. The plan (basically) was to get a BBQ, trundle it out to the middle of Marktplatz, cook up food and drink beer in a safari suit, possibly wearing an Aussie flag cape. Like all my really good plans, it was wholly idiotic, and I had to give up after I realised I didn't have a BBQ, any VB, or a safari suit.

I tried to make up for it - I made a special trip to the Australian Juice store near my place, and had a chat to Steve, the guy running it. I felt kind of stupid just going in there to say hi, so I ended up buying a smoothie. For future reference, if anyone asks you if you want a cold drink in -2 weather, the correct answer is no.

Later that evening, I met up with Geoff and the fabled Amanda - two Australians who I had recently met. It was a good evening - thankfully no Waltzing Matilda being sung, and a decent number of brews imbibed. It didn't really compare to say sitting around in the sun with the Js in the background, but the weather turned out quite nicely - with the snow falling as we left the pub.

To be honest, I don't have much to write about in terms of funny stories, or pointless debate. I just wanted an excuse to post up a picture of the snow. It's the only snow we're getting this year.

Di, let me know if you get this in the mail. Take a note.

Update 10/03/07 - Di actually got the letter. Unfortunately, they missed out on one wheel.

I'm just completely missing out on all the big ticket blog posts. No Christmas post, no New Years post. Heck, nothing to even acknowledge that I'm back in Germany. Like a real PhD student, my catch-cry is that I'm just far too busy to write stuff in a timely manner. I'll make an exception just this once.

I learnt things at uni. Maybe not a lot - in fact certainly not enough to fill up 5 years, but I do recall knowing more stuff than when I came in to uni. Beyond learning some very interesting stuff about biology, a very important lesson I learnt while at uni was the power of the written word.

To deliver a stunning revelation, universities are known to have bureaucracies (I didn't learn how to spell that word in uni), and quite often, they get in the way of you doing things like going to classes. During my tenure at UNSW I developed a love-hate relationship with the bureaucracy. I loved the school of Biomedical Engineering, and I hated Computer Science and Engineering. I walked the tightrope of these two relationships, yinning the GSBME against the yangning of CSE. However, around the time of re-enrollment, my carefully nurtured inner balance was thrown off into a desperate pool of Yang. Since I was doing a special degree, information about what we actually had to do to graduate was scarce, and that which we did have was blatantly incorrect. The way the system did in fact work was that each student had to go to the school offices and conduct a proxy argument between the two of them. In order to make things easier, I'd put up an informational page up on my website (this was before blog was even a word), and quoted several important people involved with the discussion. I should really put the word quote in quote marks, since it was for one of these statements that I got into a little bit of trouble.

For future reference, when implying that someone called some other people a bunch of idiots - you need to make sure that you've got a verbatim quote. I had, inadvertently started a large argument between the two heads of schools, which I thankfully was not fully drawn into. From that little event I learnt that I'm not completely anonymous in the internet, and that if you write something down, you better be prepared to take responsibility for whatever you wrote. And if you want to say something controversial, be as obtuse as possible about it.

Another lesson from university - regarding copying. I'll be the first to admit that I may have plagiarised work during uni. Not all of the work I did was original to me. However, there was a certain mentality at uni which my group of friends fostered. We were (are) all smart kids back then, and so to get through assignments, we'd work together. I'd try doing the assignment early, and then distribute it to other people to review. They'd take good ideas from my assignment, and then do it in their own way. They'd provide feedback to me, and we'd all come up with solutions that are the best. It wasn't unequal in any way - everyone helped each other out. So, that's why I don't like straight copyright infringement in academia. The painful thing is, they often get away with it. Somehow, when you're a postgrad/postdoc/professor it's all ok to do such a thing. I know for a fact, that if someone had infringed my copyright, well I would have a personal interest in making sure that they didn't get away with it.

The last point I want to make is about where my loyalties lie. Generally speaking, I'm pretty damn loyal to people I've been through lots of stuff with. Hard and challenging times especially - parts of school, all of uni, my time at PSL, and now my PhD. Even in cases where I've got no formal association with the people I've worked with, I do tend to try to do my best on their behalf. This extends to work I've done before too - even if I got paid for working on it, if I've put months of work into it, not even counting the work other people have put into it too, I still feel like it's my crusade.

Finally, I'd like to say hello to the visitors to this site from two days ago, accessing the internet via Software Technology Parks of India in Indore! I don't know if this is a habit, but you missed reading the research section. I look forward to the communities response!