My friend and colleague Lynne Cox is chairing the organising committee of a meeting to be held at Oriel College, Oxford, in July 2008. This meeting promises to be an excellent opportunity for networking and establishing collaborations in this field. Lynne asked me to join the committee and design a website.

Click on the meeting logo to visit the conference website.

 

I have occasionally linked to news items relating to Microsoft's dubious tactics aimed at getting ISO ratification of its 6000 page OOXML file format as an international standard. Now the European Union has waded in with an investigation into Microsoft's actions. Reports from CNN and The Wall Street Journal. See also Groklaw's chronology page on office file formats, which provides a huge set of links to provide background to the situation

 

After buying a Squeezebox music player, I have recently been considering various formats I have music in, their relative merits (both sonically and aesthetically), and their convenience. Over the years, I've acquired a fair sized collection of vinyl records. To be honest, I rather like them - there's a sense of having to look after them, and the artwork of the sleeves has the capacity to be far superior in most cases to that of CD covers. Currently I use a Rega Planar 3 turntable for playback through a Naim Nait 3 integrated amplifier. They sound pretty damned good, too.

Of course convenience leads us all to CD. I have a good number of these now, and a Naim CD3 CD player.

What's prompted this discourse has been my purchase of a Squeezebox. This is a smart device, that runs an embedded Linux and hooks up through the wireless network to a fileserver holding audio files. The Squeezebox is in turn connected to the amplifier. It can play a wide variety of file formats, including mp3, ogg and flac. So. I've been ripping CDs to disk, and using the Squeezebox for playback. Is the quality good? Well, I guess not as good as CD, but that's countered by the sheer convenience!

XO Laptop: It's the Software, Stupid! - A nice post about how the OLPC empowers kids creatively. A riposte to a number of rather scurrilously negative posts circulating on the web.

Timetriallists spend rather an undue amount of time worrying about the aerodynamics of their bikes and of their body position on said bikes. I guess at least it's easier than training! Wheel aerodynamics are a frequent topic on discussion fora, but often the data are either non-existent or are derived from wheel manufacturers and are therefore unlikely to be impartial. As part of an ongoing review of bicycle wheels, www.rouesartisanales.com have put a detailed study of the aerodynamics of a variety of bicycle wheels online. The study has previously been published by the magazines Tour and L'Acheteur Cycliste.

The test setup

As with most such tests, the basis here is that the wheels are placed in a wind tunnel (the web page has some detailed images of various elements of the setup). The wheel under test appears to be fixed to an inverted fork, on which there are electrical strain gauges - effectively, these are what assesses the aerodynamic drag. The wheels are said to spin in air air flowing along the wind tunnel: it's not clear whether the wheels are driven, whether they spin due to the air flow, or whether this refers to a pivot that allows the wheel to experience air flow at different angles of attack. Drag was measured at wind angles 0 to 35 degrees. Because the more extreme win angles are infrequently experienced on the road, it seems that an average drag value is computed by giving less weight to the more extreme angles, and greater weight to smaller angles. This is indicated by the Gaussian curve in the graph.

My Pocket PC (an HP iPaq) broke recently, and while I was scanning various online emporia for a replacement, came across the OQO O+ UMPC, which was a clearance item at Expansys. Since one of the main reasons for using the Pocket PC was as a means of tracking my cycle training, I thought a miniature PC running WinXP might be useful. The other significant use would be for delivering presentations. So, how does the device stack up? And given this is the old model, now replaced by a slightly more powerful device running Vista, are these comments valuable?

Hardware specs:

I don't read a lot of fiction, but this novel was quite appealing in its subject matter. Written by "Anonymous" (the author would appear to be auniversity academic), the novel is an accurately targeted satire on modern university politics and life. It was lent to me by a colleague, who'd bought it for holiday reading over Christmas.

The principal character is a well to do Professor of Christian Ethics. He's married to lower aristocracy and is successful in academic, if not in modern RAE terms. He is a few years short of retirement, and clearly doesn't fit the bill in terms of academic style. In response to an accusation of sexual harassment, he's hauled over the coals by university officials, many with unhelpful (to the main character) relationships with each other - accusations of bullying and libel fly.

It was a quick and quite entertaining read, though I found the writing style rather unexceptional. nd finally, how does it work as holiday reading? Unfortunately, it is so close to the truth of University politics and devious machinations that at times it really isn't pleasant to read! This hasn't stopped me from borrowing the sequel "Degrees'r'Us".

The GNU General Public Licence (GPL) is one of the most (if not the most) widely used licence under which open source software is released. There's a Wikipedia page on the GPL (but be cautious as with all Wikipedia pages on contentious topics). Recently the author of two software packages (atscap and pchdtvr) has announced that he has revoked their licensing under the GPL. This has predictably released a storm of comment on the internet. As usual, the best coverage is over at Groklaw, where PJ has provided a clear analysis of whether the software author can indeed take such an act, and many of the regular contributors add observations.

It's not clear whether the author of the software and the author of the announcement are indeed one and the same, and on the basis of PJ's article it doesn't look as though he can actually revoke the GPL. It is possible that some attempt to challenge the GPL is being made (but this has been tried before in several jurisdictions, without success).

It isn't clear why the software author is taking this step. A change of heart regarding FOSS? Patent infringement (in which case the problems lie only in those jurisdictions where software patents are permitted)? Perhaps over the next few days, these issues will be clarified.

Envisioning Information by Edward R. Tufte

I got a copy of this book over the Christmas period (I now have all four of Tufte's books). This follows the pattern of the other three - beautiful production values, and an authoritative view (some might say didactic!) of design as applied to the graphical display of information. The book was originally published in 1990; the copy I have is the 10th printing from 2005.

The book has six chapters: Escaping Flatland, Micro/Macro Readings, Layering and Separation, Small Multiples, Color and Information, Narratives of Space and Time, and finally a brief Epilogue.

A neat spoof of the (ab)use of physics terminology for explaining homeopathic effects.

Picked this one up from this week's Swift (18/1/08).