Complete List of Blog Entries
(Actually it's a nearly complete list, there is still a bug in my summary code ... sorry)
Quotation of the day
Hankin et al at OceanObs09:
...
(Contribution 523, 2010-03-16)
The rise and rise of browse metadata
If you look carefully at ESA's gmes portal, you see a wee
"browse datasets widget". Looks like this:
...
(Contribution 522, 2010-03-15)
hollow world and svngate revisited
For a number of projects I'm having to revisit some domain modelling, exploiting both HollowWorld and the upcoming ISO19156 Observations and Measurements standard.
...
(Contribution 521, 2010-03-15)
The end of the drought might be nigh
And so the longest drought on my blog since I started blogging ends. Not because the workload is any less, but because the things I'm doing having subtly changed into things for which blogging about is both easier to do and positively contributes towards the success thereof.
...
(Contribution 520, 2010-03-15)
Oh no I can't keep up ..
As you have all noticed, I'm a tad busy at the moment, and blogging has been the obvious thing missing out. The other thing missing out is new technology:
...
(Contribution 519, 2009-12-16)
Clouds Revisited
I've just been reading "How well do we understand and evaluate climate change feedback processes", by Bony et.al. (2006) which appears in the Journal of Climate.)
While I've delved into GCM cloud physics in the past, I've never really taken the trouble (beyond this) to get into cloud feedbacks in ...
(Contribution 518, 2009-12-14)
The Back of the Envelope and the Removal of Guilt
Some of the most important things one learns in a physics degree are:
...
(Contribution 517, 2009-12-13)
Drawn into climategate
It's a long time since I bothered to write a letter to the editor, but the cru email controversy pushed me over the edge. Or to be more precise, Anne McElvoy's opinion piece did. Of course I would never have known anything about it, not normally having access to London Evening Standard , but their ...
(Contribution 516, 2009-11-29)
erase to transparency
The easy way (with The GIMP): somehow select an area (choose by fuzzy selector contiguous colour is one good option), then, if your image hasn't got an alpha channel, add one (right click, choose transparency, add an alpha channel) ... then color to alpha (right click, choose transparency, color to ...
(Contribution 515, 2009-11-09)
Still here
I'm still here ... but my day job is all consuming at the moment. Blame CMIP5.
...
(Contribution 514, 2009-11-09)
emacs and kubuntu
Emacs. For some reason my apt-get install couldn't find emacs, even though it turned out it was in main. It seems that doing an
...
(Contribution 513, 2009-11-02)
my hero
Everyone needs to understand this:
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(Contribution 512, 2009-09-29)
Reading in 2009, 15-18: Teenage action fodder for summer
Even the unobservant readers of this blog will have noticed the silence by now. It's workload folks ... something has to give. I'll be back ...
...
(Contribution 511, 2009-09-17)
The relationship between collecting metadata, and the optimum size of a child's plate of food
I've said it before, and no doubt I'll have to keep saying it, but the word metadata is understood by nearly every individual differently. This has a number of consequences, starting with defining (in any given) case, what comprises metadata. The problem is nicely encapsulated a recent email ...
(Contribution 510, 2009-08-26)
contrails
Silence is golden, so this must be a golden blog ... the last month I've either been head down over the keyboard slaving on the development of a tool to collect descriptions of the models used and simulations produced for CMIP5, or on holiday. More of the latter soon.
...
(Contribution 509, 2009-08-25)
Bryan's Fishy Example
I've had a few days lately where I've trotted out my favourite "easy to understand example" as to why some scientific datasets need to be preserved, and some do not. In the final analysis, we find that it's easy to identify some datasets as "must preserve" and then we enter "value judgement" ...
(Contribution 508, 2009-07-16)
Reading in 2009, 14: Canadian Wildish West
Anne picked up The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney somewhere, but I snaffled it out of her book queue while she wasn't looking.
...
(Contribution 507, 2009-07-16)
UM Crack Cocaine
One of the items of discussion at yesterday's NCAS advisory group was whether or not NCAS should be working with more than one mesocale model (currently we do, with significant efforts invested in both the Met Office Unified Model and the U.S. WRF model).
...
(Contribution 506, 2009-07-08)
cf standard names growth
Adequate descriptions of scientific data depend on precise descriptions of what the data actually are. At the heart of that are what we call "phenomenon descriptions", which at BADC and in much of the climate community, we handle using "CF standard names".
...
(Contribution 505, 2009-07-08)
Reading in 2009, 13: Songs of Earth and Power
I suspect I bought Songs of
Earth and Power by Greg Bear more than
ten years ago - the price tag on the back is in NZD ... and obviously I've read
it at least once before ...
...
(Contribution 504, 2009-07-03)
ukcp09
One of the things that happened while I was away as the release of the latest UK climate predictions. This was (and is) a relatively big deal! While some have griped about the apparently unrealistic level of detail, the reality is that we do have to provide our very best predictions of climate over ...
(Contribution 503, 2009-07-02)
holidays
So, I've been quiet. That's what happens when you go on holiday, where the electrons don't go ...
camping in the "Doone Valley" for three nights, followed by six nights "on the beach" in Hayle.
...
(Contribution 502, 2009-07-01)
Reading in 2009, 12: Roman capers
Fire in the East by Harry Sidebottom was another airport purchase (the second of the two I took to Vienna).
Unlike the last one this one came home, partly because I hadn't
finished it, and partly because it's a rollicking good read if you're
into "late classical period military romps" ... (when the ...
(Contribution 501, 2009-06-17)
Interoperability, Data Fusion and Mashups
I'm involved in the development and implementation of a new NERC information strategy, and it's quite clear that amongst those of us developing the strategy, and amongst those making decisions in response to the strategy, there is a clear lack of agreement and/or understanding what the following ...
(Contribution 500, 2009-06-17)
Aral sea dessication
Back in January I "reviewed" Fred Pearce's "When the River's Run Dry", and in that I mentioned in passing the fate of the Aral Sea. Tonight I came across the Nasa Earth Observatory's feature on the changes in the Aral Sea using Modis images. Just as I said back in January, I vaguely knew about ...
(Contribution 499, 2009-06-16)
A controlled vocabulary for advection schemes
Anyone who collects metadata for a living knows the problem. We ask a bunch of folk to give us metadata, and the results are variable, and not much use for searching and comparison.
...
(Contribution 498, 2009-06-16)
Reading in 2009, 11; One to miss
The Genesis Secret
by Tom Knox
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(Contribution 497, 2009-06-15)
confidence and competence
Last night I read an article in New Scientist, the general gist of which is that we all prefer advice from a confident source, even to the point that we are willing to ignore a poor track record.
...
(Contribution 496, 2009-06-12)
Peak Everything revisited
Despite appearances to the contrary, I'm not planning on disappearing down a computing geek hole, and forgetting about climate and the environment, it's just that the day-to-day problems on the top of the list at the moment are "informatics" related.
...
(Contribution 495, 2009-06-09)
the doi saga continued
Chris made a fairly ascerbic (and fair) comment when I complained about the disappearance of the digital identity of one of my papers. Amongst other things, he found the current(!) doi for it ...
...
(Contribution 494, 2009-06-09)
unhinged doi: who ya gonna call?
My publications list has
...
(Contribution 493, 2009-06-04)
Reading in 2009, 10: Careless in Red
There can't be many readers of crime novels who don't eagerly await new Elizabeth George novels. For obvious reasons I wasn't paying attention last year, so we missed the arrival of
Careless in Red. However, on my March/April US trip, I clearly passed through an
airport bookshop or two, and was ...
(Contribution 492, 2009-06-03)
Catalogues, Shopping Carts and Portals
The NDG (and INSPIRE) vision is that data providers stand up
services to expose their data and metadata. We imagine that catalogue
services harvest our metadata, and expose it in via catalogue
service interfaces. We imagine that portals exploit the catalogue service
interfaces to allow users to ...
(Contribution 491, 2009-06-03)
Journals and Data Curation
I'm hopelessly behind on my blog reading, otherwise I would have spotted
this new Nature policy sooner:
...
(Contribution 490, 2009-06-02)
EA and Subversion, Resolved
The good folks at CodeWeavers have resolved my problems with the subversion client under Wine (which I needed to get working for use from within Enterprise Architect). All kudos to Jeremy White!
...
(Contribution 489, 2009-06-02)
i had to laugh, part 2
Maybe I should now have a category on programming language humour. Meanwhile, Chris responded to this by digging out an email from 1994 on ...
(Contribution 488, 2009-05-28)
Resource Reality
Why is it then we talk to the private sector, they're always impressed with what we can do with the resources available (money, people), yet, when we talk to our scientific colleagues, many of them think we must be amazingly inefficient to cost what we do (in terms of, yep, money and people)?
...
(Contribution 487, 2009-05-28)
i had to laugh
and so should you! Read this (unless of course your only exposure to computing languages has been the one true language that you use today, and have always used). Hat tip Ned Batchelder. ...
(Contribution 486, 2009-05-27)
kubuntu frustration ... again
Late last year, I wanted to upgrade my kubuntu to 8.10 (intrepid)... but I couldn't because bluetooth was broken in the release.
...
(Contribution 485, 2009-05-23)
Reading in 2009, 9: Under Enemy Colours
Well, I've read them all (I think), from C.S. Forrester to Alexander Kent, via Patrick O'Brian, Dudley Pope and Richard Woodman, even Julian Stockwin - others too. My shelves groan with "wooden walls" fiction; blame
my dad for introducing me to Hornblower at an impressionable age.
...
(Contribution 484, 2009-05-16)
Busy Week
Just in case you're wondering why the blogging has dried up yet again (from its already droughty state): I'm
half way through a seriously silly week. Monday: Brussels, Tuesday, Wednesday: Lancaster, Thursday, Friday: Paris. I seem to be in a maelstrom of meetings and deadlines that never quite ...
(Contribution 483, 2009-05-13)
lowering my co2 emissions one step more
Our blue 1987 Megane catastrophically failed an MOT a few weeks ago (which means that it's hors de combat, we can't drive it on public roads, not get it insured). So it's off to the knackers yard ... (yes, we really did have two Renault Meganes, albeit very different models, and yes, we do need ...
(Contribution 482, 2009-04-30)
Reading in 2009, 6,7,8: The Language of the Stones Trilogy
The Language of the Stones, The Giant's Dance, and Whitemantle, by Robert Carter.
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(Contribution 481, 2009-04-29)
WCS is dead, long live WFS
For many years Steve Hankin has been asking me why we want WCS when OPeNDAP
has similar functionality, and many, many, working implementations. For just
as many years I've argued that OPeNDAP has/had three major flaws:
...
(Contribution 480, 2009-04-23)
sun_oracle
These are strange times we live in ...
...
(Contribution 479, 2009-04-23)
Tales from the EGU
Vignettes from EGU
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(Contribution 478, 2009-04-22)
Scientific Method
There are loads of depictions of the scientific method out there ...
...
(Contribution 477, 2009-04-16)
Newark Liberty International Airport
Avoid it if you're travelling internationally.
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(Contribution 476, 2009-04-07)
Reading 2009, 5: Pillars need shortening
Well, it's some time since I caught up with my reading reports. Many weeks ago
I waded through Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth.
I say wade in both a positive and negative sense: it's a long shallow book, with lots of good bits
and a fair bit of meandering, rather like wading through a river ...
(Contribution 475, 2009-03-13)
the publication ecosystem
Cameron Neylon drew my attention to an absolutely fascinating set of figures that appeared in a Research Information network paper last year (pdf). You should read Cameron's post, it's interesting in it's own right for anyone interested in the place of peer review in the firmament. However, what I ...
(Contribution 474, 2009-03-08)
ukrds
Last Thursday I attended an event to discuss
the UK Research Data Service feasibility Study. Chris has blogged the details (sessions
1,
2,
3,
4
respectively).
...
(Contribution 473, 2009-03-04)
irony
Does anyone else think that it's ironic that Peter Suber, open access guru, appears to have written an article on open access in toll barred Nature Geoscience?
...
(Contribution 472, 2009-03-03)
Strongly Defend Weakly Held Positions
I've just been at a NERC data management workshop. I may well blog some more
about it, but one thing I spent a lot of time repeating to lots of people
was one of Bob Sutton's mantras: "Strongly Defend Weakly Held Positions".
...
(Contribution 471, 2009-02-19)
obscurity
For some reason both bloglines and technorati seem to have turned up their noses at my blog. I wouldn't mind, but I kind of rely on them to find if there are any inbound links to my blog (and thus anything worth pursuing). There aint much point asking the lazy web a question if I can't find any ...
(Contribution 470, 2009-02-03)
NDG papers appear in Phil Trans
I'm really glad to see that our papers on
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(Contribution 469, 2009-02-03)
Reading in 2009, 4: Engleby not for me
I have a t-shirt that reads "too many books, too little time".
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(Contribution 468, 2009-01-31)
when the paparazzi are ok
I stumbled across this a week or two ago, and have had it sitting tabbed waiting for a response since, because it really got my goat!
...
(Contribution 467, 2009-01-30)
bbc goes to rdf
RDF goes big at the BBC!
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(Contribution 466, 2009-01-30)
Reading in 2009, 2: Water Supply
And so to "When the Rivers Run Dry" by Fred Pearce. Which is about what it says on the tin ...
...
(Contribution 465, 2009-01-28)
Reading in 2009, 3: Miss Smilla
We've just spent a week on holiday in Cornwall, where, apart from the IPCC tomes (mostly unopened) and Obama souvenier edition newspapers (mostly disguarded unread), my holiday reading was a reread of Peter Hoeg's Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow.
...
(Contribution 464, 2009-01-25)
SD cards to the rescue
Next generation storage (press release pdf):
...
(Contribution 463, 2009-01-13)
EGU 2009
Well, I haven't been to a major conference for a while, and I received a raft of invitations to give talks at EGU this year.
...
(Contribution 462, 2009-01-13)
Heat not Drought
Just as my night time reading is all about drought (I'll tell you about that another day), I find this fascinating paper in this weeks Science:
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(Contribution 461, 2009-01-13)
Two degrees of Warming
William asked what ML thought would happen with two degrees. I suspect the reason he asked that is that most of us believe that two degrees is in the pipeline, and pretty much inescapable now. Indeed, I reckon we'll see it (wrt 1960) within a few decades (wrt now).
...
(Contribution 460, 2009-01-09)
curation and specification
Chris Rusbridge has a couple of interesting posts (original and
followup) about specification and curation. The gist is that he's reporting some conversations, which I might baldly summarise as saying something like:
...
(Contribution 459, 2009-01-08)
Reading in 2009, 1: Six Degrees
So clearly in the last few weeks I've not been working and I've had half as many kids to look after ... so in between tears I've been dealing with fears .... the sort that abound if you make it much past the first chapter of Mark Lynas' book:
Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet.
...
(Contribution 458, 2009-01-06)
european summer drying
OK, I confess, I'm clearly reading my abstract summaries this morning ...
...
(Contribution 457, 2009-01-06)
blimey! solar wind and tropical cyclones
Here are a couple of papers that I'm going to have to find time to read properly:
...
(Contribution 456, 2009-01-06)
Kia Kaha My Boy
...
(Contribution 455, 2008-12-24)
CMIP5 - The Federation
Next week there is a meeting which I hope will finalise the data requirements to participate in CMIP5. I can't go, but there are a number of issues on the table which I care about, I'll try and write about each in it's own blog post, which you'll be able to find by looking at my (new) CMIP5 ...
(Contribution 454, 2008-12-11)
Nearest Book
...
(Contribution 453, 2008-11-14)
exist memory and stability
...
(Contribution 452, 2008-11-14)
tales from the sleep deprived
Milk chocolate is like low-alcohol beer. Pointless!
...
(Contribution 451, 2008-11-13)
lack of service
We've had a hell of a day today.
...
(Contribution 450, 2008-11-10)
peak everything
My blogging has almost dried up. It will be back, but maybe not yet.
...
(Contribution 449, 2008-11-05)
delicious on konqueror
I've just spent three weeks without my laptop. That's a story in itself. (IBM worldwide warranty for Lenovo might well work, but glacially, and their ability to communicate sucks beyond belief ... but I'll tell that story another day, if I can be bothered).
...
(Contribution 448, 2008-10-15)
Virtual Conferencing
For various reasons I'm unable to travel much at the moment, yet the last few weeks has seen two of the most important events of the year for me: one in Seattle and one in Toulouse. I was there, but not there, for both.
...
(Contribution 447, 2008-10-06)
Reading Time and Reading Speed - both adrift
When I was a lad, I thought nothing of reading a book a day. Now a book takes literally weeks to read, that's a combination of a lack of time to read (when I was a lad, hours of reading per day was fine, now it's minutes), and I suspect I read slower as well now too. Maybe I take more in now ...
(Contribution 446, 2008-09-21)
the code is just the code
I've just spent a bit of time working through how we document the models which produce the climate predictions we hold at BADC. Then this lunch time I read this:
...
(Contribution 445, 2008-09-11)
Suffering with unicode
Our discovery portal needs to handle discovery documents why may not include
xml with the correct encoding declarations.
...
(Contribution 444, 2008-09-10)
why global warming is too slow
Another video to add to my collection: This one (by Dan Gilbert) is on why global warming hasn't resulted in (much) action: it turns out it's not PAINful (Personal, Abrupt, Immoral, Now).
...
(Contribution 443, 2008-09-01)
More Comment Spam
Some sad git has coded around my comment captcha ... I wouldn't have thought it worth his/her time ... but perhaps it's a generic problem. In any case, as a consequence, I've coded around them ... and removed some (but definitely not all) of the recent comment spam. I may have inadvertently removed ...
(Contribution 442, 2008-08-29)
Defining a Metamodel - Part One
I've just introduced the concept of a metamodel as being a key component of the conceptual formalism required to come up with a conceptual model of the world expressed in a conceptual schema.
...
(Contribution 441, 2008-08-19)
Balancing Harmonisation
Of course all this nattering about formalising information model development is precisely the process that both GEOSS and INSPIRE are going through. The difference for us is that we're a small domain, a lot of what we want to model (in the information sense) is not geospatial, and our user ...
(Contribution 440, 2008-08-14)
Formalising Information Model Development
Our metafor project is trying to establish a formal methodology for constructing UML, working with that UML in a team, and building multiple implementations using combinations of RDF and XML-Schema.
...
(Contribution 439, 2008-08-13)
Oil Demand
Some interesting numbers:
...
(Contribution 438, 2008-08-13)
Model Intercomparison, Resolution, Ensembles
We've talked about the trade off between these things, but the reality is whichever way we go we get more data, and more data means more problems.
This is what's on my mind:
...
(Contribution 437, 2008-07-28)
The Rising Storm
I've been on holiday ... more of that anon. When I catch up on email and administrivia enough to return to things of interest to others, blogging will return too ...
...
(Contribution 436, 2008-07-18)
Review of the ESA HMA project
Recently, the British National Space Centre asked me to undertake a review of the European Space Agency's Heterogenous Mission Accessability project. The full review is here, the key result is that:
...
(Contribution 435, 2008-07-17)
anatomy of a mip - part2
My recent description of the key components of model intercomparison projects was done both as input to metafor deliberations and as preparation for a visit by Simon Cox. We spent a bit of that visit time discussing the UML describing such projects (which appeared in the previous post). In doing ...
(Contribution 434, 2008-06-18)
exposing mips in moles
In my previous posting, I should have pointed out that the MIP of interest is the
RAPID thermohaline circulation model intercomparison project (THCMIP).
...
(Contribution 433, 2008-06-17)
In a maze of twisty little standards, all alike
I'm in the process of revisiting MOLES and putting it into an atom context, with a touch of GML and ORE on the side. I thought I'd take five minutes to add a proper external specification for people and organisations.
...
(Contribution 432, 2008-06-17)
The anatomy of a mip
We're in the process of documenting a specific model intercomparison project (MIP) for the purposes of the Rapid programme. It's the same issue we have for CCMVAL ...
(Contribution 431, 2008-06-12)
Having our granule cake and eating it too
Over on import cartography, Sean is convinced he's not sabotaging the fight for a sustainable climate. He's right.
...
(Contribution 430, 2008-06-10)
moles basic concepts
Another ...
(Contribution 429, 2008-06-04)
Simple Thinking
I'm quite surprised this hasn't appeared on more of the blogs I read! (Simple thinking about the choices and risks about taking action on climate change!) ...
(Contribution 428, 2008-06-03)
Citation and Claddier
For some time now, we've been narrowing down how best to do scientific data citations. Last week we had a workshop where we concentrated on a number of issues associated with data publication.
...
(Contribution 427, 2008-05-29)
Identifiers, Persistence and Citation
Identifiers are pretty important things when you care about curation and citation, and they'll be pretty important for metafor too.
...
(Contribution 426, 2008-05-29)
Introducing Metafor
The EU has recently seen fit to fund a new project called METAFOR.
...
(Contribution 425, 2008-05-23)
Metadata, Effort and Scope
I keep on harping on about how metadata management is time intensive, and the importance of standards.
...
(Contribution 424, 2008-05-21)
Cost Models
Sam and I had a good chat about cost models today - he's in the process of honing the model we use for charging NERC for programme data management support.
...
(Contribution 423, 2008-05-20)
On Moores Law
Last week I was involved in a conversation where I was explaining how the BADC deals with storage costs. It's not a complicated scheme, we basically work on the assumption that as long as we can store the next four years data, we can probably store the entire previous archive as a marginal ...
(Contribution 422, 2008-05-19)
Beginning to get a grip on ORE
This Friday afternoon I was trying to get to the bottom of ORE. ORE is pretty much defined in RDF and lots of accompanying text. I've been trying to find a way of boiling down the essence of it. UML (at least as I use it) doesn't quite do the job, so this is the best I could do:
...
(Contribution 421, 2008-05-16)
Ignorance is xhtml bliss
Wow, I was mucking with some validation for this site (in passing), and
I thought "while I'm here, I might as well change this site to deliver
application/xhtml+xml rather than text/html".
What a blunder.
...
(Contribution 420, 2008-05-16)
From ORE to DublinCore
Standards really are like buses, there's another along every minute, exactly which one should you choose? I'm deep
in a little "standards review" as part of our MOLES upgrade. I plan to muse on the role of standards another day, this post is really about Dublin Core!
...
(Contribution 419, 2008-05-09)
RDF software stacks.
So we want an RDF triple store with all the trimmings!
...
(Contribution 418, 2008-05-08)
Big Java
Tim Bray:
...
(Contribution 417, 2008-05-07)
chaiten
There's nothing like a big volcano to remind one of our precarious hold on planet earth. Thanks to James for drawing my attention to Chaiten, and the fabulous pictures, via: Alan Sullivan, nuestroclima and the NASA earth observatory.
...
(Contribution 416, 2008-05-07)
atom for moles
As we progress with our MOLES updating, the issue of how best to serialise the MOLES content becomes rather crucial, as it impacts storage, presentation, and yes, semantic content: some buckets are better than other buckets!
...
(Contribution 415, 2008-05-07)
Implementing my RDFa wiki code
I claimed it would be straightforward to add the RDFa syntax to my wiki.
...
(Contribution 414, 2008-04-25)
creating RDFa
Let's just assume for a moment that I want to create RDFa in XHTML. Just how should I go about it? It appears that there are no html authoring tools that are "RDFa aware"!
...
(Contribution 413, 2008-04-23)
More on the windows subversion client under wine.
I reported my problems earlier.
...
(Contribution 412, 2008-04-21)
First time grant holder experience
Buried in a Wall Street Journal article (thanks Michael) about the lack of involvement of the US presidential candidates in science issues is an interesting statistic:
...
(Contribution 411, 2008-04-21)
other folks data models
Kill the cat!
...
(Contribution 410, 2008-04-16)
On typed links.
...
(Contribution 409, 2008-04-10)
Semis here we come
At last some sporting good news. Semi-Finals here we come.
...
(Contribution 408, 2008-04-06)
Notes on brief service descriptions and bindings
I'm coming late ...
(Contribution 407, 2008-04-03)
Subversion under WINE
...
(Contribution 406, 2008-04-01)
more MOLES version two thinking
We've made some more progress with our thinking since last week ... but there is more to come.
...
(Contribution 405, 2008-04-01)
early MOLES version two thinking
Today's task was going through MOLES V1 and trying to capture the key semantics in UML.
...
(Contribution 404, 2008-03-20)
The Scope of ISO19115
We're taking the first steps towards refactoring our Metadata Objects for Linking Environmental Sciences (MOLES) schema to be more
easily understood and implementable and to support (if not conform with) the new Observations and Measurements OGC specification. In doing so it became obvious to me ...
(Contribution 403, 2008-03-19)
Online Resources in ISO19115 and MOLES
ISO19115 is a brave attempt to classify metadata. I think some aspects of it are fatally flawed in an RDF world, but some are not,
and we're likely to support it for some time to come. But, let's face it, ISO19115 isn't all inclusive, so
how do we reference external information? This posting is ...
(Contribution 402, 2008-03-19)
What to do about comment spam?
After a bit of trolling round the web, it turns out that the low down on the issues was in a Mark Pilgrim article which was on diveintomark.org (and appears to be only viewable via a google cache). It doesn't make pleasant reading.
...
(Contribution 401, 2008-03-07)
More quotations - Static Maps, Public Trusts, and Bad Processes
I'm so limited to time at the moment that I'm limited to quoting, but the three snippets
I've got today resonate as much as the last ones ...
...
(Contribution 400, 2008-02-22)
authkit and pylons don't quite fit
Background - I'm using genshi as my templating engine in pylons 0.9.6.1 and I want to authkit to do access control
and authentication. This is in the context of pyleo.
...
(Contribution 399, 2008-02-17)
Finding is not enough
It seems to be my day for wanting to quote folk:
...
(Contribution 398, 2008-02-15)
on global warming urgency
Steven Sherwood (in a Science letter), with respect the urgency for action in response to global warming:
...
(Contribution 397, 2008-02-15)
Data Publication
As part of the claddier project, we have been working on a number of issues associated with how one publishes data (as opposed to journal articles which may or may not describe data).
...
(Contribution 396, 2008-02-01)
Moving Modelling Forward ... in small steps
I'm in the midst of a series of "interesting" meetings about technology, modelling, computing, and collaboration ... Confucian times indeed.
...
(Contribution 395, 2008-01-29)
Using more computer power, revisited.
In the comments to my post on why climate modelling is so hard, Michael Tobis made a few points that need a more elaborate response (in time and text) then was appropriate for the comments section, so this is my attempt to deal with them. But before, I do, let me reiterate that I don't disagree ...
(Contribution 394, 2008-01-23)
Whither service descriptions
(Warning, this is long ...)
...
(Contribution 393, 2008-01-22)
from every direction it's mitigation and acknowledgement
Most mornings now I get between half and an hour of time to myself: between feeding my baby boy who wakes up around 5.30 to 6 am and getting my daughter up around 7 to 7.30 am ... I mostly spend the time reading, coding (for pleasure ... I have made some significant progress on the new leonardo ...
(Contribution 392, 2008-01-21)
Why is climate modelling stuck?
Why is climate modelling stuck? Well, I would argue it's not stuck, so a better question might be: "Why is
climate modelling so hard?". Michael Tobis is arguing that a modern
programming language and new tools will make a big difference. Me, I'm
not so sure. I'm with Gavin.
So here is my ...
(Contribution 391, 2008-01-16)
Walking the Leonardo File System in Pylons
Now that we have access to the filesystem, the next step to porting is
to get a pylons controller set up that can walk the filesystem ...
...
(Contribution 390, 2008-01-05)
virtualenv
One more thing to remember. I'm going to be building pyleo using pylons 0.9.6.1, but the ndg stuff (also on my laptop) is using pylons 0.9.5. Library incompatibility is scary. Fortunately, we have virtualenv to the rescue.
...
(Contribution 389, 2008-01-02)
the leonardo file system
The most difficult thing about porting leonardo is interfacing with the leonardo file system (lfs). The lfs was designed to allow multiple backends through a relatively simple interface ... of course it's not properly documented anywhere, so remembering how it works was a bit difficult.
The ...
(Contribution 388, 2008-01-02)
Playing with pylons and leonardo
I've suddenly been granted a couple of hours I didn't expect, so I thought I'd take the first steps towards forking leonardo (sorry James), so that we have
a pylons version. I know James has a Django version, but I want pylons for a number of reasons:
...
(Contribution 387, 2008-01-02)
Have ubuntu gone mad?
Apparently Gutsy Gibbon is great. Great that is as long as you don't have an ATI graphics card on a laptop and want to use suspend and/or hibernate. What is the point have having beta releases if you ignore what the punters say? Is
an obscure kernel change that makes a few percent performance ...
(Contribution 386, 2007-12-21)
discovery and google
Bill de hOra ...
(Contribution 385, 2007-12-19)
raw and refereed data
I'm still chasing up peer review of data. My it's hard to find anything useful in the peer reviewed literature on the subject, or indeed on the wider Internet ...
...
(Contribution 384, 2007-12-17)
A definition of intelligence
This quote is apparently from Piaget, but I got it from Calvin via a comment on Jeff Fleck's blog:
...
(Contribution 383, 2007-12-04)
google good
I've been less than positive about Google in the past, but this via Joe Gregorio, is enough to impress me back onto their side of the fence ...
...
(Contribution 382, 2007-12-03)
Advice from Boden for FAB
Boden (see my last post) also had some things to say for some issues bedeviling my time:
...
(Contribution 381, 2007-11-20)
On peer review (of grants)
Peer review comes in for its fair share of brickbats, but not too many academics are seriously against it! Indeed we rely on it. Peer review comes in many guises, and is applied in many ways, in many places, for many tasks. However, for all the experience we all have of peer review, there are few ...
(Contribution 380, 2007-11-20)
More on citation - part one, ashoe
We've just been having an interesting conversation about the citation of datasets in the context of claddier. I think I've got the use of we and I correct in what follows to indicate what I think as opposed to what we discussed and agreed ...
...
(Contribution 379, 2007-10-26)
context tokens, attribute certificates and proxy certificates
My colleague Steven Pascoe has joined the blogosphere, and his initial post is about security tokens, following my drivel about single sign on.
...
(Contribution 378, 2007-10-22)
Why not dinosaurs?
One of the talks at the data conference was given by Lee-Anne Coleman the head of Science, Technology and Medicine at the British Library.
...
(Contribution 377, 2007-10-12)
All for one and one for all
On Wednesday and Thursday I attended the first ever NERC-wide data management workshop ...
(Contribution 376, 2007-10-12)
Bugger
(That's not a profanity down under!)
...
(Contribution 375, 2007-10-08)
playing with grape
One of my major scientific interests is the grape project. We hold the data here. Today, I wanted a quick look at the data, so I thought I'd use our archive as a naive user (it's sadly easy to be naive nowadays :-( ).
...
(Contribution 374, 2007-10-02)
On SQL and XML
I'm going to write about CouchDB sometime, there seems to be enough hype for me to record something for my own benefit (no, not you dear readers, some of this blog writing is mainly for me :-) But before I do, in some of the current furore is interesting in it's own right, not just because of Assaf ...
(Contribution 373, 2007-09-18)
On Measuring Research Outputs
Our department (Space Science and Technology) within the STFC is undergoing an exercise aimed at measuring our research quality. The mechanism involves bringing together a small panel of folk who go over some metrics, listen to some presentations, and make some recommendations.
...
(Contribution 372, 2007-09-07)
Crystal Ball Gazing
There are lots of things happening at the moment that I would like to have time to dabble with enough to get a feeling for the best strategic path for my group. They fall into a number of categories (in no particular order):
...
(Contribution 371, 2007-09-07)
the missing two months.
Two months to the day since I got " that phone call" and rushed off home from work, I've had my first "lunch time feed read". Of course I've been watching stuff go by, but not paying as much attention as I'd like.
...
(Contribution 370, 2007-09-05)
one plus one equals more than two
Well, it's been more than a few weeks of near silence on my blog ... however at this point our newborn is no longer newborn. I've had an interesting eight weeks: the first two on paternity leave, then another week of annual leave, then I used up a couple more weeks of annual leave over a month so ...
(Contribution 369, 2007-08-28)
Book Buying Frustration
My two year old daughter can't get enough of the adventures of Kapai the kiwi, and I've promised to get her "orange Kapai" (she names them by the colours on the front).
...
(Contribution 368, 2007-08-16)
Final Version of the CF Paper
After much delay ...
(Contribution 367, 2007-08-07)
bt broadband technical support sucks
No surprises there ...
...
(Contribution 366, 2007-07-23)
Yet More Digital Silence
I'm afraid this blog will be quiet for a few weeks now, unlike my house:
...
(Contribution 365, 2007-07-10)
Top 100 Supercomputer meets the Canterbury Crusaders
(i.e. a top 100 supercomputer in the same town as the best rugby team in the world).
...
(Contribution 364, 2007-07-03)
A standard Vocabulary is more than just a name.
One of the reasons why CF is so important
to me is that it provides the methodology for ensuring that our data
buckets are consumable by software and humans alike.
...
(Contribution 363, 2007-06-19)
US policy on climate change. What the left hand gives, the right takes.
Just when it seems like the US (federal government, don't blame the rest of them) is making progress (progress in the sense that the first steps are to admit you have a problem and need to do something about it) ...
... we find that the juggernaut of federal crankiness is grinding exceedingly ...
(Contribution 362, 2007-06-08)
Another feisty gotcha - java
I use oxygen, and so I need java. OK, I think,
...
(Contribution 361, 2007-06-01)
building python on feisty
So now I have to build myself a new python on feisty kubuntu since /usr/local isn't safe.
...
(Contribution 360, 2007-06-01)
I still believe in Fortran
I've never believed in religious wars over programming languages, but the latest
O'Reilly survey on the state of programming languages makes interesting reading, if only for the assumption that book purchase measures the health of a programming langauge.
...
(Contribution 359, 2007-05-29)
debian python and easy_install aren't a perfect match
It turns out that on a debian system, if you
...
(Contribution 358, 2007-05-18)
overheard on the email
Overheard on the email lately (I think both Andrew and Stefano will forgive me for publicising excerpts from recent emails especially since they're relevant to the whole what place does OGC and GML have in the world chat):
...
(Contribution 357, 2007-05-09)
It's not how big the tool is, it's what you do with it
I really ought not get involved in long discussions when I don't have time to finish what I start ... but anyway. Charlie didn't start the conversation by writing this, I did that by responding :-), but now it is a conversation :-). So this is an open letter to Charlie.
...
(Contribution 356, 2007-05-08)
feisty kubuntu
On Friday I upgraded from dapper ubuntu to feisty kubuntu on my laptop. I needed to do it because:
...
(Contribution 355, 2007-05-08)
Channel Four Shame
I didn't see the C4 programme, and hadn't planned on commenting on it here, but last night while I was watching the kiwis take another step towards the World Cup, my wife was on the phone to a teaching colleague: Apparently this colleague had seen the programme and had found it "pretty ...
(Contribution 354, 2007-05-02)
Interoperability is just over the horizon ... always
I'm not a GIS person, yet I've invested quite a lot of my own time, and quite a lot of public money, into building tools based around the Geographic Markup Language (GML). GML is essentially a toolkit designed to improve interoperability, but it's getting a bit of bad press right now, both in ...
(Contribution 353, 2007-05-02)
Spring
No photos can do justice to this time of the year in the Chilterns,
but we try:
...
(Contribution 352, 2007-04-23)
NDG Access Control
I've wittered on about access control here for a while. Despite being frantic
with various funding proposals (hence the silence), I've found time (with help) to knock out a description of NDG security. It wont make fun reading for those who like simplicity, but that's life, it's as simple as we can ...
(Contribution 351, 2007-04-20)
go-essp 2007
The call for abstracts for the GO-ESSP 2007 meeting is out (and has been for a while). This year we're limiting numbers to 60, so there is an abstract winnowing phase. I've just submitted mine:
...
(Contribution 350, 2007-04-17)
US National Weather Service is ahead of the game
Over two years ago, I was pleased to note that the US National Weather Service provided forecast data in XML via a SOAP interface. In the intervening period they've moved on considerably: they now have a WSDL interface to their SOAP service, and now a new WFS interface (hat tip: John Caron).
...
(Contribution 349, 2007-04-06)
Data Journals or whither the Earth System Atlas
I attended day three of the QUEST open science meeting yesterday, and listened to the presentation from the Earth System Atlas (ESA) folk.
...
(Contribution 348, 2007-03-29)
planes, trains, and automobiles.
I'm sitting in a hotel in Paris, communicating by virtue of the hotel next door who has an open wireless network. Well done France, none of the British effort to make money from absolutely everything ...
...
(Contribution 347, 2007-03-25)
Management Technique - Or Lack of It
Over the last six months I've been pretty poor at keeping track of my blogroll - my akgregator tells me I have 4020 unread articles. What I tend to do is simply ignore entire blogs for long periods of time, and then have a purge. On the train back from Manchester yesterday I finally got to having a ...
(Contribution 346, 2007-03-17)
wsgi, unicode and paste
I woke up this morning with a sore head ... no not from the daemon drink, but because I had a unicode problem. Everytime I have a unicode problem I get a sore head. Nearly every time the solution is obvious, but usually I can't frame the question well enough ...
...
(Contribution 345, 2007-03-14)
Roundtripping openoffice and msword - bullets
I'm gradually moving to using openoffice more and more (yes, I think I'd admitted to using msoffice before, but I'm finding it more and more unreliable - especially since my combination of crossover office and ubuntu has stuffed up the font support so pdf output from msoffice is broken). However, ...
(Contribution 344, 2007-03-13)
Another Nail in the Cosmic Ray Conspiracy Coffin
A number of folk (Nexus via Rabett Run) have picked up on the recent paper by Evan et.al. (2007,GRL, 34, L04701) on the inappropriate use of ISCCP data for long term trend analysis.
...
(Contribution 343, 2007-03-06)
python soap library proliferation
Implementations of python soap libraries appear to be like buses. There are none along for a while, and then suddenly there are two in a row. In the beginning there was soapy and zsi, and they became one. Soapy is old and no longer being supported, and the soapy and zsi communities are coalescing ...
(Contribution 342, 2007-03-06)
service orchestration needs data models
Service description languages need to address three classes of identifiers:
...
(Contribution 341, 2007-02-28)
My personal event horizon is receding too quickly
I feel obliged to know about the various technical things that could impact both on our services and our service developments, which means I live within a little black hole into which I want to aggregate information. (It's a black hole because I don't have enough time to communicate much back out ...
(Contribution 340, 2007-02-25)
I don't care about the flops, I care about the PB
It's good to see the UK has commissioned a new supercomputer: HECToR. The press release is all excited about how fast it will go (theoretically, initially 60 Tflop/s, going to 250 Tflop/s in 2009, with another upgrade in 2011). You have to go to the new hector site itself, to discover the important ...
(Contribution 339, 2007-02-25)
Patent Stupidity
Regular readers will know that I haven't much time for software patents. The stupidity of them is all to clear to see, and we've another example this last week. IBM have apparently provided a blanket IPR disclosure on their involvement in the development of the Atom specs. Well done them! Atom is ...
(Contribution 338, 2007-02-19)
ippc-data.org
The BADC has recently won a contract from Defra to deliver some services in support of distributing climate data to the UK and global community. One of those services is the IPCC data distribution centre. The contract was formally signed for a start date of February the 1st, and the eagle eyed in ...
(Contribution 337, 2007-02-19)
Contemplating a move from Leonardo at home
You might think this blog has been quiet lately, but it's nothing compared to my home blog, which has been in stasis for a year or so: mainly lack of time, plus problems running Leonardo in a simple hosting environment (too hard to configure to be the way I want it, cruftless URLs etc). So:
...
(Contribution 336, 2007-02-13)
Desktop Search
If only Beagle, or Google Desktop search or any of them, could find a document on my desktop ... no, I mean the wooden thing on which my keyboard resides ... ...
(Contribution 335, 2007-02-07)
Software Design, or, why Chandler is going nowhere
Joel has
an interesting review of a book about the Chandler design and
philosophy (I came across this via Joe Gregorio. The whole review is ...
(Contribution 334, 2007-01-25)
The Big Storm
Last weeks big wind took its toll too: not only did I nearly get stuck in Liverpool (all trains stopped, all motorways bar the one to Manchester closed), my back fence blew over, as did a bunch of trees. So I've got fence building to do ... more wasted time ...
...
(Contribution 333, 2007-01-23)
Quiet Times buying an LCD TV
This is heading to be my quietest blogging month since I started ... mainly because of a hectic workload, and the fact that we need a new TV, and I can't bring myself to pay the going rate for an LCD TV ...
...
(Contribution 332, 2007-01-23)
ubuntu sound
Yes, I'm still here, but it's just been hectic since the holidays ...
...
(Contribution 331, 2007-01-14)
bye bye Google
Our role in the web ecosystem is to make it easy for scientists to do science, which means making it easy for them to find data, to manipulate it, and to do new things. Making it easy to find things, means giving them as many tools as possible!
...
(Contribution 330, 2006-12-19)
Access Control
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. If you have high volume or high value real resources on the web, you need access control!
...
(Contribution 329, 2006-12-19)
Service Orientated Architecture - Two Years On!
I've been blogging for slightly over two years. After I wrote my SOA
article earlier today, I realised that my second ever blog post was on SOA. Then, as now, I had been reading Savas's blog.
...
(Contribution 328, 2006-12-07)
Service Descriptions
A little over six months ago, I introduced the thorny problem of service binding to my blog. Of course it hasn't gone away. Last week I gave a talk (see my the SEEGRID talk on my talks page) about "Grid-OGC collision" in which I made some specific statements, amongst which were:
...
(Contribution 327, 2006-12-07)
status of OGC specs
At a recent internal meeting we found the following little table helpful:
...
(Contribution 326, 2006-12-07)
Swivel Data
I've just found out about swivel.com (via Savas).
...
(Contribution 325, 2006-12-07)
who pays the watcher?
The observer/guardian reports that the Met Office budget for climate change "has been slashed".
...
(Contribution 324, 2006-12-04)
No Silver Bullet Exists
Another bout of web services "religious war" has broken out again. We've been here before! This time it's based on one funny and accurate diatribe about SOAP. The resulting frenzy in the blogosphere has yielded some quality
comments, and even some declarations of victory by those who think REST is ...
(Contribution 323, 2006-12-04)
A proposal for profiling ISO19139
I've been flagging issues with profiling ISO19139 for some time - see Oct 19 and
Aug 15 and especially the comments in the latter.
...
(Contribution 322, 2006-11-30)
Wireless Internet Blackspot - Australia
I've spent most of the week in Canberra, Australia, attending three different
events - a standards workshop, AUKEGGS and the SEEGRID III conference (programme pdf).
...
(Contribution 321, 2006-11-30)
Common search terms at badc
Here are the top twenty search terms recently requested on the badc site.
...
(Contribution 320, 2006-11-21)
browser crap
As is fairly obvious from the range of dribble that appears on this website, I dabble in many of the technologies my team work with. One of the things I've been doing is developing the interface to the new NDG discovery service (this is the sort of thing I find I can do on the train home from ...
(Contribution 319, 2006-11-15)
taking OGSA DAI seriously again
Early on in the evolution of the NERC DataGrid we investigated OGSA/DAI, which is a "data access and integration" component of the Globus stable. We rejected it for a number of reasons, chief of which were that the software was immature, and it didn't seem to offer much more than what has recently ...
(Contribution 318, 2006-11-12)
Answers.Yahoo.Com to the rescue
Once upon a time I mentioned that we now have a megane estate car. I raved about it's fuel economy.
...
(Contribution 317, 2006-11-12)
climate change speed
Climate change is one of those (many) phrases that every reader/listener interprets in their own way. James Annan has interpretted it in one way in a discussion which I'll summarise as "the a priori ...
(Contribution 316, 2006-11-12)
Goodbye Korea
I'm sitting typing this in Incheon airport (which is unbelievably quiet, nearly everything is closed, and while it's now 10 pm, stuff was closed when I got here around 8.30 pm).
...
(Contribution 315, 2006-11-07)
The Future of Physics and Science
These things are not unconnected! Deja vu. As a former physics academic, I've seen it all before ... (in another country :-).
...
(Contribution 314, 2006-11-07)
Sanity from Hulme
Todays posts may be giving some the wrong impression about what I think about climate change. I've been decrying attacks on foundations, not supporting what Mike Hulme terms "The Discourse of Catastrophe", that is, the whipping up of a "State Of Fear" (ouch, could it be that Crichton at least got ...
(Contribution 313, 2006-11-05)
Jetlagged thoughts on amateurism
I knew that I might come into some criticism for using words like "Pretentious" and "dribble" and "drivel" about Monckton's "article" in the Sunday Telegraph. It has started already (see the comments). One of the problems about my using this sort of language is that it opens the door to others ...
(Contribution 312, 2006-11-05)
Another thing I would do if I had time ...
... would be to take this load of pretentious dribble apart. I can't actually bring myself to read it through. It's introduced by a equally drivellacious article in the Sunday Telegraph. That article included this gem:
...
(Contribution 311, 2006-11-05)
Not getting to see Seoul
I'm in Seoul for two days, and will have spent nearly as long getting here and going home as I've got here. When I was younger I used to want a jetset lifestyle, it sounded so glamorous. The truth is far more mundane: long distance air travel is uncomfortable, of dubious morality ...
(Contribution 310, 2006-11-05)
Stern Facts
Like William Connolley
I doubt I'll ever read the whole thing, but it's intriguing to wade through the 27 page executive summary at least.
...
(Contribution 309, 2006-10-31)
The Stern Way Forward
Yesterday I waded through the first two thirds of the Executive Summary ... I thought it best to finish it today, otherwise I would be at risk of not only not reading the whole thing, but not making it through the executive summary :-)
...
(Contribution 308, 2006-10-31)
Exploring Web Server Backends - installing fastcgi and lighttpd
A few months ago, I was investigating web server options (one, two,
three). I finished that series saying I needed to investigate wsgi. Well that time has come, there are a number of reasons why wsgi and fastcgi (or scgi) may be important to us.
However I'm a little bit wary about Apache and ...
(Contribution 307, 2006-10-27)
More Stupid Patent Litigation
I'm with Tim Bray on this. Why isn't the internet in an uproar?
IBM is litigating Amazon on patent violations, it's all pretty incredible,
but the two most silly are:
...
(Contribution 306, 2006-10-26)
Subtle Discipline Drift
Recently Oxford University advertised for a Lectureship in Atmospheric Physics, and Imperial College is currently advertising for a raft of positions, from lectureships to professorships. In some ways I was and am tempted (despite having supped at the font of "proper" academia before, and having ...
(Contribution 305, 2006-10-26)
Wierd unicodeness
For some reason my blog has suddenly developed some sort of unicode problem, which is making a large number of pages core dump. I don't know why. I'm investigating ... meanwhile, I'm trapping the error, but you may assume strange things will happen today!
...
(Contribution 304, 2006-10-25)
Two completely unconnected things
I've just had a burst of rather intensive work over the last couple of weeks (hence the silence), and this lunch time I've rather ground to a halt. So, by way of light entertainment, I clicked on my akregator and started reading from
the enormous number of unread things from the various feeds I ...
(Contribution 303, 2006-10-25)
Citing data with ISO19139
I thought I might try and work out exactly what tags I might use for my previous citation example, if I was using ISO19139 (i.e. in the metadata of another dataset).
...
(Contribution 302, 2006-10-25)
Persistence
Just after I wrote my last post on data citation, I found Joseph Reagle's blog entry on bibliography and citation. He's making a number of points, one of which was about transience. In the comments to his post, and in Joseph's comment on my post, two solutions to deal with internet transience are ...
(Contribution 301, 2006-10-23)
The Economist Goes Green
I'm a bit slow to find out about this (which is down to not enough time reading my feeds): Anyway, ...
(Contribution 300, 2006-10-20)
Citation, Hosting and Publication
Returning to my series on citation (parts one, two, and three).
...
(Contribution 299, 2006-10-20)
On substitution groups and ISO19139
I have bleated already about the difficulties of using ISO19139 with
restrictions which introduce new tag names.
...
(Contribution 298, 2006-10-20)
Programmers should be miserable
Steve Yegge (via Tim Bray):
...
(Contribution 297, 2006-09-27)
Hiding the Heat - Solar Dimming.
First we had global dimming. Now we have Solar Dimming. I've blogged before about the relationship between sunspot numbers and global mean temperature.
...
(Contribution 296, 2006-09-26)
More on citation - part three, delving
Following on ...
...
(Contribution 295, 2006-09-26)
Academic Citation of Blogs
I know I sort of predicted this, but New Scientist ...
(Contribution 294, 2006-09-25)
More on citation - part two, MST
Yesterday I started talking about how I think one should cite data we hold on behalf of someone else. That discussion isn't yet finished, issues of citing within datasets, and other "standards" for citation still need to be discussed (including how we parse and store them electronically), and I ...
(Contribution 293, 2006-09-22)
Diesel v Petrol
Over the summer we upgraded our petrol engine renault megane hatchback and replaced it with a diesel megane estate (the dCi-100 version). We've gone from 40 miles per gallon (sorry about the imperial units) to between 55 and 60 miles per gallon. (Our first full tank did 59.5 mpg.)
...
(Contribution 292, 2006-09-13)
Normal Service Will Be Resumed
Yes, I'm here, had a wonderful two weeks in Wales (well, wonderful except for the weather), and arrived back to work to a major panic trying to get a proposal ready. Expect that to be over next week, and me to restart blogging. I have much to talk about (including my new toucan T60P from emperor ...
(Contribution 291, 2006-09-09)
On Access Control
As part of the dews project, we need to deliver access control for OGC Web Services. In particular, we're planning on limiting access to resources delivered by geoserver. The current concept for dealing with this is displayed in some simple UML:
...
(Contribution 290, 2006-08-15)
On printing this blog
I had a read of this and implemented a simple print.css so it should be nicer to print things out from this blog now ... ...
(Contribution 289, 2006-08-15)
to extend or not to extend ...
A few months ago I wrote a few words about practicalities with ISO1939. The key reason for using ISO19139 is that it is a standard for metadata ...
(Contribution 288, 2006-08-15)
Granule Concepts
We've been struggling with a few concepts in mapping how we want variables and datasets to be related. The struggle, as in most technical discussions is that one needs to be very exact about what one is saying. To try and simplify our discussions (and maybe yours), I've tried to produce some UML ...
(Contribution 287, 2006-08-11)
what is bt up to this time?
For the last three nights (including tonight), konqueror has been misbehaving on both my home linux systems (one running Suse, one kubuntu). Neither O/S has been modified for a long time ...
...
(Contribution 286, 2006-08-11)
New Plans for Leonardo
One of the things that came out of today's meeting about campaign support within BADC, was a requirement to provide a "campaign diary", which would
...
(Contribution 285, 2006-08-09)
dilettante
A long time ago I was given some good advice which I have consistently ignored: ...
(Contribution 284, 2006-08-09)
Affording Interfaces
... and I don't mean how much it costs :-)
...
(Contribution 283, 2006-07-28)
What does zero emission mean?
physorg is reporting that Texas and Illinois will compete for the worlds first near-zero-emissions coal
plant.
...
(Contribution 282, 2006-07-27)
On Processing Affordance
When we produced the Exeter Communique, we spent a lot of time talking about something that Simon Cox has termed "processing affordance". A processing affordance is a property of a feature ...
(Contribution 281, 2006-07-27)
NASA earth exploration
A couple of days ago, I reported that NASA was killing off earth observation. Chris, in comments to that post, pointed out that despite the overall change in emphasis the current strategic plan (pdf) in section 3a listed eight new missions. Given I'm supposed to know a bit about this stuff, I ...
(Contribution 280, 2006-07-27)
America sliding towards Australia
More evidence of convergence can be found in the fact that the U.S. is trying to
kill off
earth observation ... yet again.
...
(Contribution 279, 2006-07-24)
Oreskes responds
Very early in my blogging career, I reported the clear consensus in the climate community over the realism and causes of global warming. Recently a smart famous man refuted the Science paper I quoted in a crappy article in a crappy paper (well, any paper that let such a poor piece get published is ...
(Contribution 278, 2006-07-24)
lurking in Exeter ... in the cool
It's my month for lengthy train journeys: last week to Plymouth for a couple of days, and this week to Exeter for a couple of days. So far (three out of the four I will have completed by tomorrow) the train journeys have been pretty much on time, and good value (in terms of time spent working and ...
(Contribution 277, 2006-07-24)
Laptop Purchase
My laptop is nearing the end of it's life. Switches are breaking. Applicatinos run slow and the fan seems to be perpetually on what with beagle and all the other stuff I seem to depend on (expensive memory hogs like the java versions of freemind and the oxygen xml editor along with a cross over ...
(Contribution 276, 2006-07-20)
openlayers
I think the advent of openlayers might potentially be more important than Google Earth ... it's certainly
something we'll have to implement for ndg. ...
(Contribution 275, 2006-07-18)
Curious as to how this forecast goes.
The met office via the BBC is forecasting another hot week:
...
(Contribution 274, 2006-07-18)
Whither Our Web Servers - Part III
In which we return to performance ... having been discussing web server technology from first principles to proxy servers.
...
(Contribution 273, 2006-07-18)
the scope of blogging
Allan Doyle pointed me to a provoking piece asking why the GIS community don't have blog conversations? Well, I'm not really a GIS person but as is obvious from the direction that ndg is taking, I'm heading in that direction. Dave Bouwman's piece essentially posits two explanations:
...
(Contribution 272, 2006-07-18)
Trac Macro Hacking
I make a lot of use of freemind, and because ndg uses trac, I wanted to be able to put
my notes straight up on the wiki.
...
(Contribution 271, 2006-07-17)
hapless bt strike again
Some of you may remember my bt broadband saga ...
Last week my voyager 2091 modem died ... all the lights flash properly
but there was no one home inside ... and it no longer reacted to the
reset button (or anything actually, dhcp from ethernet and wireless
got a great big nothing back) ...
...
(Contribution 270, 2006-07-13)
Whither Our Web Servers - Part II
Last week I introduced our problem (how to move from python-cgi to python-"something faster", but in a framework with other stuff), and some things I've learned. This weeks episode covers mod_proxy and a bit more ...
...
(Contribution 269, 2006-07-10)
Microsoft goes open document
Finally, microsoft have come out and admitted they're being forced to play in the open document sandpit. Tim Bray has a roundup of relevant links. Bob Sutor has a of history links that define how we got here. I've been quiet on this issue for a long time, from pressure of work. But you can see that ...
(Contribution 268, 2006-07-10)
Whither Our Web Servers - Part I
BADC currently deploys a bunch of web services (in the loosest definition), most of which are cgi's, and nearly all of which are served up by apache (except some specific ZSI web services which for the moment run inside the firewall on their own ports). We also have some tomcat (for sure) and ...
(Contribution 267, 2006-07-05)
What does a forecast icon mean?
Well, the forecast is beginning to go pear-shaped, although not
through lack of heat ... or perhaps not. Here are four MetOffice via BBC weather forecast snapshots, but I'm not really sure what they mean ...
...
(Contribution 266, 2006-07-05)
The Great British Summer
The great British summer gets a pretty bad press from folks who come from my part of the world, but in my experience it's pretty unjustified. I think British weather gets its crap reputation (deservedly) from the other seasons, when it's not to unusual to go weeks without seeing even a glimpse of ...
(Contribution 265, 2006-07-03)
Useful TCDL papers
I've just discovered the bulletin of the IEEE Technical Committee on Digital Libraries. The current issue has a number of interesting papers from my perspective:
...
(Contribution 264, 2006-06-28)
Good Standards Development - Whither web services
Well, I'm back from the go-essp meeting at Livermore (where the temperatures
hovered around 40C) ... and hopefully back to some blogging. At the meeting,
Russ Rew drew my attention to Michi Henning's article on the rise and fall of CORBA. I didn't get time to read it then, but Tim Bray also linked ...
(Contribution 263, 2006-06-26)
Atmospheric Science will return
I'm conscious that most of my blog entries lately have been about computing/metadata type issues ... which I think reflects the huge effort I and my ndg team have been putting into trying to reach our alpha milestone in time for next week's Global Organisation for Earth System Science Portals ...
(Contribution 262, 2006-06-15)
ructions in the ogc periphery
There have been some interesting issues around georss lately (via Allan Doyle). The wrap ups are here and here.
...
(Contribution 261, 2006-06-15)
Australia drifts even closer to America
Being a kiwi, who has lived a long time in the UK, with lots of close ties with (continental) Europeans, Americans, and Australians, I believe I can say something about the "closeness" of the relative cultures.
...
(Contribution 260, 2006-06-12)
Back from Greece
I'm getting withdrawl symptoms from blogging - both reading feeds, and writing something of my own - but I guess that's the result of trying to keep too many balls in the air. It's also the result of having a wonderful week on holiday in Greece - Antiparos to be precise. We (wife and thirteen-month ...
(Contribution 259, 2006-06-06)
ndg security and ubuntu
The current version of NDG security has a number of python dependencies, including m2crypto and pyxmlsec ... the good news is that it's relatively easy to get the things in place under ubuntu, the bad news is that it's a pain working out what packages you need, hence this list (which is mainly for ...
(Contribution 258, 2006-05-22)
Functional Trackback
I reckon I've got a functional trackback working now. If anyone fancies trying a trackback to this post I'd be grateful ...
...
(Contribution 257, 2006-05-22)
Service Binding
One of the things we have grappled with rather unsatisfactorily in the NDG is how to declare in discovery and browse metadata
...
(Contribution 256, 2006-05-19)
Evaluating Climate Cloud
Jonathan Flowerdew at the University of Oxford has been working with
me for the last two and a half years on methods of evaluating clouds
in climate models. We've recently submitted a paper on this work to Climate Dynamics. If you want a copy of a preprint, contact him (or contact me to get his ...
(Contribution 255, 2006-05-16)
ISO 21127 aka CIDOC CRM - more metadata dejavu
Most of my colleagues in the environmental sciences wont have come across
ISO 21227 (to be fair, it may not yet exist, but heck, most of my colleagues in environmental science haven't come across ...
(Contribution 254, 2006-05-14)
kubuntu dapper beta broken
I really wanted beagle, and the breezy beagle was broken (or to be precise it seemed to be progressively corrupting my kde directories), so I upgraded
to the new dapper beta ...
...
(Contribution 253, 2006-05-02)
times higher education pays attention
claddier in the news ... ...
(Contribution 252, 2006-05-01)
More on Data Citation
There was a lot interest at the e-science meeting about a throw away comment I made about our claddier project.
...
(Contribution 251, 2006-04-28)
Another Missed Anniversary
As of last Tuesday I have been running the BADC for six years! I can't believe it's been that long! My first tour of duty in the UK (1990-1996) was just under six years, and my return to Godzone (1996-2000) was only four years. Yet the last six years have gone by incredibly quickly, and seem to ...
(Contribution 250, 2006-04-27)
NDG Status Talk
As yesterday's last blog intimated, I'm in the middle of a two-day meeting of the NERC e-science community. Yesterday I gave a talk on the status of the NERC DataGrid project:
...
(Contribution 249, 2006-04-27)
I'm still naive
I've just read the real climate post on how not to write a press release. I was staggered to read the actual press release that caused all the fuss (predictions of 11C climate sensitivity etc). The bottom line is that had I read that press release without any prior knowledge I too might have ...
(Contribution 248, 2006-04-26)
Data Storage Strategy
Recently I was asked to come up with a vision of where the UK research sector needed to be in terms of handling large datasets in ten years time. This is being fed into the deliberations of various committees who will come up with a bid for infrastructure in the next government comprehensive ...
(Contribution 247, 2006-04-26)
Baker Report
Treasury via the Office of Science and Innovation ...
(Contribution 246, 2006-04-26)
Government Policy on Open Source Software
All this strategy stuff is making my head hurt. But meanwhile, I think I'll have to start a series of blog entries to provide me with relevant notes. To start with, here is a verbatim quote from the UK government policy on open source software (pdf, October 2004):
...
(Contribution 245, 2006-04-26)
Orthogonal Achievement
Well, I may not have done much blogging this month, but I've achieved a bunch of other stuff:
...
(Contribution 244, 2006-04-25)
ISO19115 extensions
I keep having to look up the iso document for this list of allowable extensions to iso19115:
...
(Contribution 243, 2006-04-18)
Some practicalities with ISO19139
A number of us in the met community are rushing towards implementing a
number of standards that should improve interoperability across the environmental
sciences. One of those is ISO19139 which (we hope) will soon be standard xml
implementation of ISO19115 (the content standard for ...
(Contribution 242, 2006-04-18)
More Meteorological Time
My first post at describing the time issues for meteorological metadata led to some confusion, so I'm trying again. I think it helps to consider a diagram:
...
(Contribution 241, 2006-04-13)
Schedule Chicken
I found Jim Carson's write up on ...
(Contribution 240, 2006-04-06)
Curating metadata aka XML documents
Andy Roberts (via Sam Ruby) has defined a markup language for describing changes to xml documents.
...
(Contribution 239, 2006-04-06)
Standard Invention
Allan Doyle's blog introduced me to the SurveyOS project. These guys purport to be
...
(Contribution 238, 2006-04-06)
Moving Office
Today I'm moving office - only about 50 yards along a corridor, but it's the usual trauma: do I need to keep this? Can I throw it away?
...
(Contribution 237, 2006-04-03)
konqueror, safari, and xslt
Can it really be true that neither konqueror
nor safari can render xml files with xslt as the stylesheet? (Yes it can!) Can it really be true that only IE and mozilla can do this?
(Not even opera. Apparently!) Does anyone know a timescale for the kde or apple folks to sort this out? Do they care? ...
(Contribution 236, 2006-03-28)
Novel Escapism
James Aaach in an off topic comment on my
recent post about journals and blogging introduced me to www.LabLit.com. I suspect I'll waste a lot of time there on quiet evenings.
...
(Contribution 235, 2006-03-22)
New Word - Bliki
I've just learnt a new word. Apparently this blog (a leonardo instance) is a bliki. Having learnt it I propose to forget it. It seems like an unnecessary distinction to make and some more geek jargon ... but it does have a ring to it :-) ...
(Contribution 234, 2006-03-22)
Parameterisation of Orographic Cloud Dynamics in a GCM
Sam Dean, Jon Flowerdew, Steve Eckermann and I have just submitted a paper to Climate Dynamics:
...
(Contribution 233, 2006-03-21)
The Lockin results in the Exeter Communique
A few weeks ago I went quiet for a week while I attended a workshop at the Met Office. We called our workshop "the lock-in", as the original proposal was that we would be fed pizzas through a locked door until we came out with a GML application schema for operational meteorology. Well, we were ...
(Contribution 232, 2006-03-20)
tim bray wrong for the first time
Regular readers of this blog will know that Tim Bray's blog is reliable source
of inspiration for me ... however, for for the first time, I think he's got it wrong
(ok, a bit of a tongue in cheek here, but anyway), he said, quoting Linda Stone:
...
(Contribution 231, 2006-03-20)
Journals and Blogging
On Thursday I gave my seminar at Oxford. Of course I wrote the abstract months before the talk, so I didn't cover half the things I said I would in any detail, but for the record, the presentation itself is on my Talks page.
...
(Contribution 230, 2006-03-20)
Back end or front end searching?
Searching is one of those things that keeps bumping into my frontbrain, but not getting much attention. I have a hierarchy of things grabbing at me:
...
(Contribution 229, 2006-03-16)
Using the python logging module
I've been upgrading the support for trackback in leonardo (the only things
left to do are to get the trackback return errors working correctly and deal with spam blocking) ... and in the process I found it useful to put to use the python logging module.
...
(Contribution 228, 2006-03-15)
Some Trackback code
So I've joined up to the trackback working group, and I decided I'd better have a proper trackback implementation to play with ... given this is all very important for claddier the time investment was worth it.
...
(Contribution 227, 2006-03-15)
Declining Earth Observation
Allan Doyle has highlighted a recent CNN article which reports the poor future that EO has in the American space programme. This is something that has been brewing for a while now, but seems to be getting more and more real.
...
(Contribution 226, 2006-03-15)
Meteorological Time
...
(Contribution 225, 2006-03-07)
openid part one, why I might have to roll my own
(One day I'll blog about my day job again ... sometimes it's hard to remember that I'm an atmospheric scientist first and a computer geek second).
...
(Contribution 224, 2006-03-07)
Climate Sensitivity and Politics
James Annan has a post about his recent paper with J. C. Hargreaves ...
(Contribution 223, 2006-03-07)
mapreduce and pyro
I just had an interesting visit with Jon Blower - technical director at Reading's Environmental E-science centre (RESC). He introduced me to Google's mapreduce algorithm (pdf). Google's implementation of MapReduce
...
(Contribution 222, 2006-03-03)
Predictability and Risk
Nearly a year ago, I thought I might write something down about how predictability works in the climate sense, as opposed to, say weather forecasts. Suffice to say, I never got around to it. When I saw Roger Pielke's blog I started reading it because I agree with his basic premise about the this ...
(Contribution 221, 2006-03-02)
serendipity and identity management
Two seemingly unrelated threads of activity have come together: on the one hand I want to use an identity to login to the trackback protocol wiki; on the other hand, we're talking about the
difficulties of single sign on for ndg.
...
(Contribution 220, 2006-03-02)
Might trackback grow up?
I've been interested in trackback since before I started blogging. I have mused about it in the past, and still think it has significant potential. Our claddier project will exploit a modified version of trackback to explicitly make citation links between repositories.
...
(Contribution 219, 2006-02-24)
web service wars
The web-service wars have broken out again. Tim Bray has a nice summary. The bottom line is well captured by Dare Obasanjo thus:
...
(Contribution 218, 2006-02-24)
Rights and Disclaimers
Some of you will have noted that I replaced my copyright statement with a disclaimer, and added a creative commons license to my menu bar. I wanted to do two things:
...
(Contribution 217, 2006-02-23)
Two papers published
Can't remember the last time I had two academic papers published in the same month (if ever), but meanwhile:
...
(Contribution 216, 2006-02-21)
What is single sign on? Done properly - it's a grid!
In the NDG our access control system (aka security) is designed to allow us single sign in across a number of different domains. It's important I think that it really is single sign on ... see for example the torturous explanations of Trevin Chow of the MS Passport team via Dare Obasanjo.
...
(Contribution 215, 2006-02-20)
information overload
So I've just had a week off, following a week out of the office. Tomorrow I'm back to work, and the information overload fear is building. Of course, despite being out of the office and on leave, I've been reading my email, so I only have 169 unread email messages and approximately 600 read, but ...
(Contribution 214, 2006-02-19)
I can't ignore javascript any longer
Well, actually I can ... Anyway, some will remember that I'm trying to ignore javascript because I don't have enough time to pay attention (and in truth, nowadays, I probably have no good reason to play with it).
...
(Contribution 213, 2006-02-15)
Another quiet time
I'm in the middle of an intensive period of activity, ranging from (a couple of weeks ago) trying to reorganise the structure of the group I'm responsible for to a barrage of meetings, and now chairing a weeks workshop in Exeter working on GML application schema for meteorological data. Despite all ...
(Contribution 212, 2006-02-07)
schema
Sometimes you just don't want to use a word because it carries too much baggage for some audiences:
...
(Contribution 211, 2006-01-27)
Merging Metadata Always Lowers Quality
I just found Stefano Mazzocchi's Blog via Dare Obasanjo. It looks like Stefano doesn't blog very frequently, but what he does write is well worth reading. His latest, entitled
"On the quality of Metadata" makes the assertion that
...
(Contribution 210, 2006-01-22)
Bibliographic References, ISO19115 and NumSim
One of the things one can imagine our NumSim discovery metadata to support is the ability for someone to identify that a particular model component (say the atmosphere) has a bibliographic reference associated with it that describes some part of the system. Having done that, to find all other ...
(Contribution 209, 2006-01-20)
One more person taking climate seriously
Would you believe following a chain of thought about a computer science issue led me to David Ignatious in The Washington Post:
...
(Contribution 208, 2006-01-18)
Feedback on the Future of CF
On November the 9th I publicised the
first public draft of the Future of CF white paper both on my blog and the cf mailing list.
...
(Contribution 207, 2006-01-18)
Trends in Data Analysis
I finally got around to looking at ...
(Contribution 206, 2006-01-17)
Real Climate Science
This is what I call real climate science: Jones, et.al. (2005). While I haven't got access to the full text, the abstract sounds fascinating, Firstly:
...
(Contribution 205, 2006-01-15)
New version of NumSim available
A new version of the NumSim metadata schema, along with documentation is now available. NumSim has been designed as a package module to add to standard metadata discovery records to discriminate between data sets which have resulted from simulations.
...
(Contribution 204, 2006-01-13)
End-to-End System Design
I've just skimmed through Salzer et.al. (pdf) on end-to-end arguments on system design via Dave Orchard.
The paper has had an interesting history, apparently being so timeless that it was published four times in different places in the decade between 1981 and 1991, and now rearing up in Dave's ...
(Contribution 203, 2006-01-12)
''Some'' Scientists are Baffled.
There is some hot air floating around (e.g. RealClimate via Stoat) about a recent Nature paper which identifies a potentially important source of the important greenhouse gas, methane. Apparently the bottom line is that they showed that a thus far unrecognised process causes living plant material ...
(Contribution 202, 2006-01-12)
On DRM and curation.
Shelly Powers (via Dare Obasanjo) has an excellent blog entry on DRM. It's all good stuff, as are the comments ... but there is rather a lot of it. So this is by way of a summary of some of the key points, leading to the crunch point on curation.
...
(Contribution 201, 2006-01-11)
Next Steps for CF
I have yet to work on the revised version of the CF whitepaper, and summarise all the feedback received, but meanwhile, the BADC is taking a few steps forward.
...
(Contribution 200, 2006-01-10)
Python Projects I should investigate some more
Many (Most?) of my python posts are about things which have caught my attention fleetingly, and I wanted to mark for later consumption ... not that I seem to do much
later consumption ... but I might!
...
(Contribution 199, 2006-01-09)
Old Media - Antibiotics and GE go green
Sometime over the Christmas holidays I contemplated a world without (print) newspapers. I get newspapers delivered on Saturday and Sunday mornings, and my weekend days usually begin by digesting the sports pages followed by the other pages. However, because the Christmas break was essentially a ...
(Contribution 198, 2006-01-08)
bt billing
Today I got my BT bill. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that the "free" home highway termination move I was promised turned up as a ?55 charge.
...
(Contribution 197, 2006-01-07)
More on comment spam
Well, yesterday I modified leonardo's code so
...
(Contribution 196, 2006-01-06)
Enough to make you cry
And I used to like Coldplay ... sigh. ...
(Contribution 195, 2006-01-05)
Oxford Seminar in March
I've been invited back to Oxford AOPP to give a seminar in March. The seminar coordinator tells me it'll be over ten years since I last gave a seminar there. Last time it was on gravity waves (no, not gravitational waves!).
This time it wont be directly about atmospheric science research, but about ...
(Contribution 194, 2006-01-05)
Whither parameters in metadata
Last year, there was considerable chatter on the metadata mailing list about where the right place was to put ...
(Contribution 193, 2006-01-03)
Lunchtime Usage
Today's task: find out whether this blog actually gets any readership (given most of my comments are spam, and there are very few inbound refers). Mind you,
I like writing my blog, because it's cathartic, and it's useful as a notekeeper, so readership's not entirely what it's all about, but ...
(Contribution 192, 2006-01-03)
Why turn down satellite?
In my "penultimate post" on broadband, I said I'd explain why I was turning down satellite broadband for terrestrial ADSL. The answers come down to:
...
(Contribution 191, 2006-01-01)
From Software Patents to Silly Trademarks
Many will know that I'm against software patents - I still like the claim (can't remember the source) that every few lines of java probably infringes someone's patent. The thing that most annoys me is that patent armouries would appear to be acquired for use by the big players to out bluff the ...
(Contribution 190, 2005-12-31)
Home Wireless Interference
Some frustration at home. Having moved our ISDN access point, we now have the 802.11g access point further from our home computer. Annoyingly, the network is remarkably unstable, working fine sometimes, and not others. The obvious candidate for interference is cordless phones, but our cordless ...
(Contribution 189, 2005-12-31)
The Penultimate Broadband Post
Finally, just over three years after I started trying to get ASDL broadband home, it has happened ... this last saga has taken six weeks from inception, including two actual engineer visits and two that didn't happen. I can see why they want a one year contract!
...
(Contribution 188, 2005-12-31)
Life in blog world
Dammit. This means I have to spend some time upgrading leonardo to try and avoid comment spam. I was planning on doing some useful things, like more thinking about a decent search provider in the backend, or version control. Oh well. That's life. ...
(Contribution 187, 2005-12-22)
Data Citation
One of the aims of CLADDIER is to establish methodologies for data citation. There are a lot of issues, some of which have been addressed before, by projects, like for example a German pilot experiment. The way I see it, things we have
to address include:
...
(Contribution 186, 2005-12-22)
BT comedy continues
Well you have to laugh. Just over a month ago, I ordered bt broadband. Finally, last week, they rang up and booked the home highway conversion for today.
...
(Contribution 185, 2005-12-21)
Not enough time for blogging either ...
Tim Bray:
...
(Contribution 184, 2005-12-17)
carbon tax
stuff is reporting a Dominion-Post article which reports an economist as in part debunking a self-serving analysis a bunch of kiwi companies have done on the impacts of a carbon tax on their bottom lines.
...
(Contribution 183, 2005-12-17)
Too many meetings. Not enough time.
One of my colleagues (thanks Ag) has drawn my attention to this meeting (the 5th ECSN Data Management Workshop). It looks like there were some excellent and interesting presentations.
...
(Contribution 182, 2005-12-15)
generateDS
I've just discovered generateDS (via Uche Ogbuj's column).
...
(Contribution 181, 2005-12-15)
elementtree is in python2.5
See Fredrik Lundh's effbot here and here for very good news for us in terms of being able to more easily deploy xml technologies ... ...
(Contribution 180, 2005-12-14)
leonardo 0.7 beta and categories
This afternoon I upgraded to leonardo-0.7beta, and for fun, went back and categorised most of my posts back to the beginning of May (see categories). Next time I feel
too slow to do any real work, I'll go back and categorise the first six months of my blogging history. ...
(Contribution 179, 2005-12-14)
Service Chaining
Having spent the last four years as part of the UK e-science community, and buying into the wonders of what "the grid" can do for me, I've just spent a bit of time looking into exactly what is in the ISO19119 standard for geographic information services. Despite my colleague Andrew Woolf telling me ...
(Contribution 178, 2005-12-14)
Understanding NERC Funding
The group I am responsible for includes both the British Atmospheric Data Centre and the NERC Earth Observation Data Centre. These are both NERC Designated Data Centres, which means they are responsible for archiving the data products of all NERC atmospheric and EO research. One of our problems is ...
(Contribution 177, 2005-12-14)
Hemel Hempstead Fire
Here is a low resolution copy of an AATSR image of southern England for sunday morning ...
...
(Contribution 176, 2005-12-13)
Stratosphere to Troposphere Coupling and the Solar Cycle
I've just seen Hameed and Lee's paper on a mechanism for sun climate connections. Their results
...
(Contribution 175, 2005-12-13)
UN economic development and child mortality
As I scoffed my sandwich this lunch time, I was following up some clues about GIS, python and OGC protocols, and happened on Allan Doyles' blog. It's full of interesting snippets, but this one led me to an absolutely
fascinating site at the UN where there is a flash animation which shows the ...
(Contribution 174, 2005-12-12)
Metaclasses in Python
This blog entry is about ignorance. My profound ignorance of some computing fundamentals. I keep reading about metaprogramming and metaclasses, and I keep thinking it has relevance for our GML parser (perhaps not the current version, but perhaps a future one). What we want to be able to do ...
(Contribution 173, 2005-12-11)
Solar Irradiance and Sunspot Cycles
For once I'm reading some real scientific literature. I've been pretty appalling lately, with my RSS aggregator telling me there are about 1400 items from Science and Nature alone that I should have a quick look at (As well as telling me that I'm not spending enough time keeping abreast of ...
(Contribution 172, 2005-12-08)
Self Contradiction
Here are two five day forecasts for Oxford issued by the Met Office - both were downloaded this afternoon. The first is via the BBC, the second from the Met Office site itself: ...
(Contribution 171, 2005-12-07)
Fighting off sleep
A friend of mine bought me ...
(Contribution 170, 2005-12-05)
Starting to consider python eggs for real.
Back in March I discovered the python eggs project. Back then, it was a vision. Today, I went back to see the status of the project, and see if eggs are now actually practically usable.
...
(Contribution 169, 2005-11-29)
BT still have dreadful customer service
Well, it was time for my regular attempt to get my ISDN line converted to broadband (I try every 18 months or so as BT always seem to think they can supply the service).
...
(Contribution 168, 2005-11-25)
First matplotlib, now the GNU Data Language
A colleague (thanks Kevin) has drawn my attention to the GNU Data Language. This is a GPL application that essentially provides complete compatibility with code written for RSI's Interactive Data Language (IDL). What's especially exciting about this is that GDL has an interface to python (and it ...
(Contribution 167, 2005-11-24)
Trajectory Support for campaigns
The BADC provides support for field campaigns in a number of ways. One of those is to provide information about the history of air parcels, and information about their future trajectories. We do this using a code we developed ourselves based on code from John Methven at the University of Reading. ...
(Contribution 166, 2005-11-24)
Accuracy, Curation and the Newspaper
The Guardian has an article on curation today: "Digital curators wage war on terabytes". They interviewed Chris Rusbridge (of the national digital curation centre, the DCC), Kevin Schurer (of the UK Data Archive) and myself. I can't speak for the others, but my interview consisted of a phone call ...
(Contribution 165, 2005-11-15)
t-i-db
I spent today at (one day of the) 10th ECMWF workshop on operational meteorological systems. I gave a talk on our CSML work ...
but the thing I want to blog about is a presentation by J. Sim?es from Portugal on his work developing the t-i-db temporal extensions to the relational database model.
...
(Contribution 164, 2005-11-15)
Archival of data from numerical simulations.
The BADC (and other NERC designated data centres) need to archive simulated data, but there is a real question as to what data should be archived (and what archival should mean for simulation data).
...
(Contribution 163, 2005-11-10)
The Future of CF
The Climate Forecast conventions for netCDF have significant impact on a number of activities at the BADC, and in the wider academic community. Earlier this year we held a meeting where we got as many of the original CF authors together as was practical. The main issue was how we move forward from ...
(Contribution 162, 2005-11-09)
bdbxml and xquery
Currently NDG uses the eXist database for our native XML database. There are three main reasons for this:
...
(Contribution 161, 2005-11-07)
The Status of Jython
I recently attended a meeting where a colleague stated that his group were building a lot around jython. He also stated that jython development had taken off since ibm had started to use it internally. That got me wondering about what I could find out about jython status as the NDG project is about ...
(Contribution 160, 2005-11-04)
The Big Picture on Climate
I've been wittering on about scientific consensus on the big picture on climate change for a long time. There is major consensus. We have a problem. William Connelly has it exactly right: : From the point of view of climate change, the top level is "The world is getting warmer, we're causing it, ...
(Contribution 159, 2005-11-04)
Quiet October
Well haven't I been quiet? I guess that's what happens when you spend two weeks on leave in a month, one week away in China, and one day in each of Liverpool and Leeds ... plus sundry meetings away from the lab. The bottom line was that I have spent six days in the office in October, most of which ...
(Contribution 158, 2005-10-31)
Disgusted
Among the many things I've caught up on was reading a disgusting article on Real Climate. You can guess my feelings when I read the article which begins with:
...
(Contribution 157, 2005-10-10)
Beijing Beauty
I've had a week in Beijing attending a WMO metadata workshop, and a week off, during which my only use of a computer was to play with photographs!
...
(Contribution 156, 2005-10-10)
python xml frustration
While I really love python as a programming language, and I'm committed to using XML, every now and again I come across something that doesn't work as easily as one might want.
...
(Contribution 155, 2005-09-22)
Understanding networks
Now that we're trying to take data from the Earth Simulator, we're starting to have to understand our international network connectivity a bit better.
...
(Contribution 154, 2005-09-16)
Certification of Repositories
The RLG and (US) National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) have come up with a draft guide (pdf) for determining whether a digital repository can be certified as a trusted location for digital collections. Comments are requested by January 2006, more details here. ...
(Contribution 153, 2005-09-16)
The Microsoft XML saga.
A colleague of mine has asked for me to more fully explain my concerns with Microsoft XML, which currently have me forbidding MS docs to be in the long term BADC archive. So here goes.
...
(Contribution 152, 2005-09-14)
Katrina and global warming: who knows?
People have been asking me whether I think hurricane Katrina is linked to global warming. My response is and was: nobody knows!
...
(Contribution 151, 2005-09-06)
Summer is not for blogging
I've been aware that my blog has been getting little attention of late. One might ask why it should get any? If so, the answer is that in some cases it helps me think about something long enough to write something about it, and in other cases, I simply use my blog to record some thoughts for later ...
(Contribution 150, 2005-09-02)
Iraq
In general I plan to stay out of politics on my blog, or at least politics that are unrelated to the environment ...
...
(Contribution 149, 2005-09-01)
op cit
For years I've been using the term " ...
(Contribution 148, 2005-08-25)
Windpower: Local Solutions to avoiding burning carbon
I've mentioned in the past that I'm interested in small scale wind power generation. It strikes me as crazy that many of those advocating the importance of windpower seem to think that it can only be done with massive wind farms. There are many of us who live in windy locations who could generate a ...
(Contribution 147, 2005-08-24)
When will the oil run out?
A few days ago I reported articles in Science on the rate at which oil might run out. Today I found this which states that the Saudi's are saying that OPEC wont be able to support demand in a mere ten to fifteen years. (I haven't read the entire article as I don't have access to an FT ...
(Contribution 146, 2005-08-15)
Metadata, XML and Deja Vu
It's funny how some concepts and issues are repeated in multiple communities.
Recently I attended a meeting called "Activating Metadata" (agenda,talks) held at NIEeS. The sharp eyed amongst you will have noted that the link for the talks is .../metadata2 ... talks from an earlier event are here ...
(Contribution 145, 2005-08-11)
Broadband from Satellite
I'm still a satellite broadband user, and although things have been better since I last reported. I regularly get 512 kb/s and sometimes 2 Mb/s, although nearly as often the system appears overloaded and completely unresponsive.
...
(Contribution 144, 2005-08-11)
More on the Plextor
Some more things I've learned. Firstly, that Suse 9.2 and Suse 9.3 use exactly the same versions of growisofs and makeisofs. So the difference in the errors
reported earlier under Suse 9.2 and Suse 9.3 is probably about permissions, given
cdrecord showed something rather different between root and ...
(Contribution 143, 2005-08-11)
Readership
Given that I have no comments and no trackback enabled, I wondered how many readers I actually have ... so for the first time, I had a wee look at my server log.
...
(Contribution 142, 2005-08-11)
Nature DOI Failure
I don't know what it is with Nature, but yet again, when I use their RSS feed to browse the table of contents of the current issue, not one of the doi links to the complete story resolves!
...
(Contribution 141, 2005-08-11)
plextor PX-716UF Woes Under Suse 9.2 and 9.3
I do all my computing on my laptop, and have about 10 GB of user files on board (including about 2.3 GB of mail files). Obviously I care very much about backup, and I usually backup via rsync to a badc server. My backup server broke last week and is still not up. For that, and other reasons (I want ...
(Contribution 140, 2005-08-09)
Business Models and Curation
While up in Edinburgh, I visited the National Digital Curation Centre. Amongst the many interesting things we talked about was the pesky difficulty of applying business models to curation. Chris Rusbridge at the DCC differentiates between curation and preservation as:
...
(Contribution 139, 2005-08-02)
Catching up on Real Climate
I've been remisss in my reading of RealClimate which is simply one of the best "blogs" around ... although I have to say it's less a web log than an interactive nearly peer reviewed journal full of great articles and comments. (Why do I say it's peer reviewed - because the articles get solid review ...
(Contribution 138, 2005-08-02)
Apache release WS-Security Implementation.
Davanum Sriniva has pointed out that Apache have released their WS-Security implementation (thanks Marta).
...
(Contribution 137, 2005-08-02)
El Nino or La Nina in the Pliocene?
Apparently (Wara et.al., 2005) the Pliocene should give us a good idea of what our climate could be like in a few decades, as many of the boundary conditions forcing the climate were similar then to what we see (or will see) today:
...
(Contribution 136, 2005-08-01)
Solar Influence on Recent Climate
There is a tiny war of words in Nature this week about reconstructions of solar influences on climate. Muscheler et.al. (2005) claim that current solar activity is not particularly unusual in a criticism of Solanki et.al. (2004) (who themselves claim that the last few decades are unusual with reply ...
(Contribution 135, 2005-08-01)
The Linux Desktop and the Network
I've just been up to Edinburgh for a couple of days of meetings, but while up there, I tried to drop Linux onto a machine for a mate who is sick of spyware and other Windows-acious problems.
...
(Contribution 134, 2005-07-28)
RSS and Atom
Now that Atom 1.0 is pretty much out, it's useful to point to the comparison between RSS and Atom. I'm doing that here so I can easily find it again.
...
(Contribution 133, 2005-07-22)
flpsed
Quite often I have to make tiny modifications to existing pdf files.
...
(Contribution 132, 2005-07-21)
Icehouse and Greenhouse Worlds
I've been ignoring paleoclimatology for a long time as being yet another interesting field, that I haven't time to pay attention to. However, today's lunch time reading was Kump's letter to Nature which introduced me to the concept that in the Eocene (55-34 million years ago), the earth was thought ...
(Contribution 131, 2005-07-21)
Oil Supplies
Science also ...
(Contribution 130, 2005-07-20)
Atlantic Ocean Oscillations and European Climate
Rowan Sutton and Daniel Hodson have an intriguing paper in Science on the influence of the Atlantic Ocean on summer climate in Europe (and North America).
...
(Contribution 129, 2005-07-20)
elementtree
Joseph Reagle has been using elementtree, and that link points to a useful set of notes on how to use it.
...
(Contribution 128, 2005-07-20)
Microsoft Please Save Paper
I refuse to believe that the world needs default margins of one inch (or 2.54 cm) ... imagine how much paper could be saved if the default margin was 1.5 cm? The first thing I do with a new Office installation is change the default template ... but couldn't it be better from the beginning (those ...
(Contribution 127, 2005-07-19)
Patent Status of XML-Signature etc
I found out yesterday that WS-Security has patent/license problems which make it difficult to use in a GPL environment. That got me worried about NDG security. We depend on (or will depend on) three pieces of technology
...
(Contribution 126, 2005-07-19)
ECMWF to increase their operational model resolution
I have had my attention drawn to the planned increase in the resolution of the European Centre for Medium Range Weatherforecasting operational model from (in the case of the atmosphere) T511N256L60 to T799N400L91.
...
(Contribution 125, 2005-07-18)
More Good Ideas about Blogging
I've blogged in the past about good reasons for blogging (well, strictly, I didn't blog, I linked to Tim Bray as usual). Here from
Randy Hollaway is another one:
...
(Contribution 124, 2005-07-18)
WS-Security Licensing Problems
Oh how I hate Intellectual Property wars ...
...
(Contribution 123, 2005-07-18)
Linux drivers for HP Color LaserJet 2820
I'm considering buying a color (sic) laserjet 2820 (an all-in-one printer) to replace my aging deskjet G55 ...
...
(Contribution 122, 2005-07-14)
Norwegian Government Says Yes to Open Standards
This says it all (via Ongoing). The bottom line is that:
...
(Contribution 121, 2005-07-05)
Aerosol Climate Forcing
There is an excellent paper in ...
(Contribution 120, 2005-07-05)
ERA40 Precipitation and Antarctic Ice
There is a fascinating article by Davis ...
(Contribution 119, 2005-07-01)
Copyright, Blogs and Fair Use
One of the things I want to do with my blog is often cite research articles, and I often want to include a figure or text from those articles. There is obviously then an issue of copyright that I need to address.
...
(Contribution 118, 2005-07-01)
Upgrade
I'm pleased to say that after a silence due to
...
(Contribution 117, 2005-07-01)
Terms and Conditions
eliterate librarian has drawn my attention to the LexisNexis website and their terms and conditions, which are a joke.
...
(Contribution 116, 2005-06-30)
Hurricanes and Climate Change
It has been an interesting six months for followers of the issue of whether hurricane intensities and frequencies are changing in response to changes in the background climate.
...
(Contribution 115, 2005-06-17)
kubuntu 5.04 wins over Suse 9.3
Well, I think I'll give up on Suse. I tried to install it in another partition on my laptop today (so I could follow the advice from the support guy), but this time it didn't even install the software onto disk properly ... (but it installs fine onto my desktop at home). It got 20 minutes into ...
(Contribution 114, 2005-06-16)
Laptop OS Woes
Well, my dicky stomach has lasted pretty much all week. While one major side affect has been the inability to concentrate on anything, that has allowed me to set the computer off doing things in the corner while I watched the clouds (or yesterday, the patches of blue on the clouds) ...
...
(Contribution 113, 2005-06-16)
Subversion and Roundup
A while ago I was investigating choices for issue tracking and code maintenance, and was bemoaning the difficulties of trac (which sounded good, but was just ...
(Contribution 112, 2005-06-12)
More on Software Patents
A couple of key happenings:
...
(Contribution 111, 2005-06-05)
Playing with Kubuntu and Korganiser
As regular readers will know, I'm a disappointed Suse Linux bloke at the moment. I've had a support ticket running for a fortnight now, but haven't made much progress (to be fair to Suse, i've been slow in replying to a couple of emails, but to be fair to me, they never read properly what I write, ...
(Contribution 110, 2005-06-03)
MS Office Licensing
I think it's great to see the new blog from Brian Jones at Microsoft (via Sam Ruby). Brian has a specific entry on the licensing question for Office documents, but as he says, he's not an expert on that area. Some of the comments to that entry hit the buttton though:
...
(Contribution 109, 2005-06-03)
Adobe slightly better than Microsoft
I'm on record with my complaints about how Microsoft license
their document formats. Imagine how aghast I was when I read
this - apparently the Adobe Acrobat license conditions are stupid. Go read it for yourself ...
...
(Contribution 108, 2005-06-01)
Search Engine Ranking
Why is it that reading Tim Bray's blog seems to generate more of my own blog entries than anything else?
...
(Contribution 107, 2005-05-31)
Maybe I spoke too soon about Massachusetts
In January I was pleased to find that Massachusetts had effectively banned Microsoft XML (presumably Office 200X) documents from being archivable documents. I was pleased, not because of any particular issues with Microsoft (although I have them), but because it recognised the importance of being ...
(Contribution 106, 2005-05-31)
Cosmological Artists In Residence
I've just found out about Jem Finer who is "Artist in Residence" in the Astrophysics department of Oxford University.
...
(Contribution 105, 2005-05-25)
Project Management, Part One
As NDG1 nears completion (September), we are moving to try and deliver the first products of three years research on data grids in the environmental sciences. While NDG2 is funded to start immediately after, and provide "proper" deliverables, it is an interesting time to think about how ...
(Contribution 104, 2005-05-25)
Dual Core Opterons
In general I try and avoid being a hardware geek, but it appears that I'm going to have to understand the relative performance issues between dual-core opterons and normal ones and xeons ...
...
(Contribution 103, 2005-05-24)
Nodding off in Lectures
Some colleagues in atmospheric physics at Oxford found and circulated references to seminal work on the "Incidence of and risk factors for nodding off at scientific sessions".
...
(Contribution 102, 2005-05-24)
Cherry Picking
There is a nice article on "Cherry Picking" at prometheus. I especially liked this:
...
(Contribution 101, 2005-05-23)
EU Patent Directive
There are many problems with the proposed EU patent directive, and I'm no expert on them. Groklaw has a short article on the necessity for better wording to avoid what I call patent drift to frivolous patents (example).
...
(Contribution 100, 2005-05-23)
There is no such thing as an XML editor
Oh how I agree with this (via) on the sad state of play of XML editors.
...
(Contribution 99, 2005-05-18)
On NCAS Blogging Policy
If we do start hosting blogs for NCAS staff, then we'll need policy. I've mentioned this before. It's nice to see via Tim Bray (as usual!) that IBM have published some policy guidelines too. I like Tim's analysis of their guidelines, but the thing I picked out as relevant for our scientific ...
(Contribution 98, 2005-05-17)
WSDL or not
In a meeting yesterday I declared that I was becoming less suspicious of WSDL, although I still didn't think it was any use for "what service composition" or
"service discovery" (via any sort of registry). It turns out that most folk I know are using WSDL to write code: they write the WSDL, and ...
(Contribution 97, 2005-05-17)
Scientific Consensus and Climate Change
There is a nice short piece on consensus and climate change in Science by Roger Pielke Jr. This was following up the Orestes paper I highlighted back in November.
...
(Contribution 96, 2005-05-16)
Grid Architecture
In the NDG we're grappling with exactly how we deploy the components we've designed and started building. There is a nice simplified view of the way these things have to work in the
SAKAI EVALUATION EXERCISE report by Crouchley et.al. (pdf):
...
(Contribution 95, 2005-05-16)
Disappointment with Suse 9.3
The bottom line is that several attempts to install it have failed, having meant that I've been essentially computerless for the past 72 hours. Fortunately, I was attempting to install it in an empty partition, so I haven't broken my data (or old systems) ... mind you it was invisible because ...
(Contribution 94, 2005-05-15)
Citation Decay Rate
I found out via the Digital-Preservation Mailing List about this article about the decay rate for online citations.
...
(Contribution 93, 2005-05-11)
Prefetching etc
There is considerable discussion on Google's Web Accelerator and how it has highlighted problems with folks applications. See for example:
...
(Contribution 92, 2005-05-10)
Internationalisation in Metadata
Clearly scientific metadata is international in context, even if some folk think that English is ...
(Contribution 91, 2005-05-06)
Orographic cloud in a GCM: the missing cirrus
At last a chance to talk about real science: Sam Dean, myself, Don Grainger, and Darlene Heuff (Dean et. al.) have had a paper on orographic cirrus accepted by Climate Dynamics. The abstract is:
...
(Contribution 90, 2005-05-03)
Glacier Retreat
The NERC quarterly mag ...
(Contribution 89, 2005-04-29)
Glaciers Indicate Temperature Increase
Back when I started criticising Michael Crichton, I commented on glacial length from what I freely admitted was a state of ignorance.
...
(Contribution 88, 2005-04-29)
US Likely to cut Earth Observation
Science is reporting that the U.S. are seriously considering cutting back on their global observation programme. It would appear that NASA and NOAA are in what I would call and inverse
turf war: neither wants to take responsibility for "non-operational" earth observation missions.
...
(Contribution 87, 2005-04-29)
XML Databases
Ronald Bourret has a nice article in xml.com on xml databases, with lots of examples of real live systems using native xml databases, and some of the power of using xpath type queries on semi-unstructured documents (where you
know something about some elements of the structure). ...
(Contribution 86, 2005-04-28)
Sparklines
Joe Gregorio in his
bitworking blog has some python code for producing sparklines (RFC2397 inline images as opposed to URI referenced images). He makes the point that it doesn't work on IE browsers. Regrettably it doesn't on my kde3.3 konqueror 3.3.2 browser either. ...
(Contribution 85, 2005-04-28)
Managing Action Items
43 folders (via dirtsimple) has a nice discussion of how to manage one's action items, particularly in the context of categorising things into "next actions". I liked the following key points about action item lists (paraphrased):
...
(Contribution 84, 2005-04-28)
Sleepless in Oxfordshire
Like all new parents, I'm not getting enough sleep, but I'm back at work, sort of. Anyone wanting gratuitous baby photos can look here ... ...
(Contribution 83, 2005-04-26)
Fine Excuse for Digital Silence
This blog will go silent for a couple of weeks now, as our first child arrived on Tuesday night, and will be home from the hospital shortly. Everyone tells me I'll be too tired to do anything. I believe them.
...
(Contribution 82, 2005-04-14)
To trac or not to trac?
... that's the question!
...
(Contribution 81, 2005-04-11)
Satellite Temperature Trends
There has been some contention over exactly what the satellite data tells us about temperature trends. In particular, analysis of data from the MSU
instruments aboard the NOAA satellites has been interpretted in
a number of ways.
...
(Contribution 80, 2005-04-11)
Suse 9.3 Looming
My personal computational environment consists of my work laptop, and my home computer. Both run Suse 9.2, and on the whole I'm pretty happy with Suse, I've been upgrading regularly on my laptop every six months (on the Suse release cycle) for years now ... and everytime it's got easier (the first ...
(Contribution 79, 2005-04-10)
Arctic Climate Change
I've just found the Arctic change site via Overland and Wang, GRL, 2005. The website has some excellent graphs of climate change indicators for the arctic region. Two of the most interesting (my definition, there are lots of others that you might find interesting, go look ...) are
...
(Contribution 78, 2005-04-10)
Another excellent summary of climate modelling
The Institute of Physics commissioned Alan Thorpe to
explain how predictions of future climate change are made using climate models. They did so hoping
...
(Contribution 77, 2005-04-08)
PDF Heads down hill?
Can this really be true?
...
(Contribution 76, 2005-04-07)
Predictability and Crichton
Well, back to that book :-)
...
(Contribution 75, 2005-04-07)
Loaded Dice
...
(Contribution 74, 2005-04-07)
xmlbase, xinclude and schemas
I found Norman Walsh's excellent discussion of issues with xmlbase, xinclude and validating schemas via Tim Bray.
...
(Contribution 73, 2005-04-04)
Function Creep and Institutional Repositories
The case for institutional repositories (IRs) is well made in Crow et.al.: ...
(Contribution 72, 2005-03-31)
Snippets from Lunchtime
Today's lunchtime reading was from newsforge via the osdir newsfeed and included two tasty morsels:
...
(Contribution 71, 2005-03-30)
Attention Deficit Trait
eliterate librarian has an article describing this "disorder", defined as
...
(Contribution 70, 2005-03-30)
More Legality
The Digital Curation Centre is starting to provide useful information for those of us who are professional curators of scientific data. I've just skimmed through
"Public Domain; Public Interest; Public Funding: focussing on the 'three Ps' in scientific research" by Waelde and McGinley (main link ...
(Contribution 69, 2005-03-29)
Blog Summaries
In order to provide limited support for feed aggregation in Leonardo, I've developed a piece of code which exploits Mark Pilgrim's feedparser
and Fredrik Lundh's elementree. The code can be found here. It has currently only been used to provide a summary of this blog itself, see summary.
...
(Contribution 68, 2005-03-29)
Debunking Crichton Done for Me
I haven't finished with my comments on Crichton's book. I have finished reading it, and it sits on my desk with a few bits of paper marking things I want to pick up on ... but other things intrude :-)
...
(Contribution 67, 2005-03-28)
Wiki Parser Update
The wiki that provides the xhtml for this site has been updated to support footnotes, and a couple of other modifications that have been requested by the leonardo mailing list. Details of the parser's current syntax are at WikiFormat. (The wikiformat page with the new parser is valid xhtml). ...
(Contribution 66, 2005-03-27)
JISC Digital Rights Meeting
On Tuesday I attended a JISC Consultation Workshop on Rights in Digital Environments. While the emphasis of this meeting was on rights management issues in a learning environment, and on documents etc, there was some interesting discussion on data rights issues. Among a number of interesting ...
(Contribution 65, 2005-03-24)
GPL Tested in Case Law
Groklaw has an article on a case where the GPL has actually been tested in (a US) court, and won. This is important because some argue that the GPL hasn't been properly tested. Well it has now.
...
(Contribution 64, 2005-03-24)
Linus spoof letter to Bill Gates
This is absolutely brilliant! ...
(Contribution 63, 2005-03-23)
P2PGIS
I've just had my attention drawn (by the good folks at EDINA) to the
Peer-to-peer GIS project and the OPen Use Server (OPUS).
The link refers to their implementation being based on Java, Apache, PHP and MapServer. It also says that it is based on RoMap.net (Rapid Online Mapping Network), and they ...
(Contribution 62, 2005-03-23)
ICSU Recommendations
Yesterday, while on a train to a JISC meeting in Bristol on ...
(Contribution 61, 2005-03-23)
Python Eggs
One of the main complaints new users of python give is that the library dependency issue is not as clearly dealt with as it is in the perl and java communities. Today, I found out about the python eggs project via this. In the latter, eggs were described as
...
(Contribution 60, 2005-03-22)
Sea Level Rise Predictions
Well, I'm clearly not an oceanographer, but given my recent interest in assertions by Michael Crichton (there is more to come on that subject), I thought this might be interesting
for occasional readers.
...
(Contribution 59, 2005-03-20)
SOA Design Principles
John Crupi (via Tim Bray) has this to say about the design of Service Orientated Architectures:
...
(Contribution 58, 2005-03-20)
More thoughts on Blogging
Apparently the original Tim Bray article on why blogging is good for you is Tim's most linked to article. In that latest he links to an excellent critique from a European perspective by Rui Carmo. It's worth reading.
...
(Contribution 57, 2005-03-17)
DDT and Malaria
I started my series of responses to State of Fear (SOF) thinking that I was going to be commenting on climate change issues alone. However, Crichton goes off on a lot of tangents, and I now understand why, having understood that State Of Fear is essentially a novel written around a speech ...
(Contribution 56, 2005-03-16)
Cloud Feedbacks
In my ongoing criticism of Michael Crichton's book, I made the point that parameterisation links small and large scales, and I emphasised the IPCC point that clouds and humidity remain sources of significant uncertainty.
...
(Contribution 55, 2005-03-15)
Peopleware
A few weeks ago, various blogs I read started praising "Pragmatic Version Control using Subversion" by Mike Mason. One thing led to another, and I found this with a list of three seminal books, only one of which I had read (the Mythical Man Month). So, I bit the bullet and bought the other two and ...
(Contribution 54, 2005-03-15)
When is a webservice a grid service?
I often get asked what is this thing called a grid. Soon after, I get asked, so what is the difference between a web service and a grid service. The short answer is nothing ... the slightly longer answer is a grid service is a web service packaged up to deal with state, notification, and pointers ...
(Contribution 53, 2005-03-10)
More Satellite Broadband Woes
For the last couple of weeks I've had no satellite signal on my home broadband, and i've been wondering what was wrong ... given my previous frustration, the fact that Micronet don't answer email, and my current workload, I'd done nothing about it and simply gone back to 128 kbit ISDN until I ...
(Contribution 52, 2005-03-10)
Video Conferencing
As part of my JCSR duties, I spent yesterday learning about what is needed to support academic video conferencing in the UK. There are three key
technologies hanging around:
...
(Contribution 51, 2005-03-10)
Security in Python for the NDG
The NDG secure access infrastructure is being engineered in both python and java, because we believe there are two different groups that will want to implement it.
...
(Contribution 50, 2005-03-10)
Your website really does need to be current
A lesson from NZ on why an out of date website can be a legal and financial problem.
...
(Contribution 49, 2005-03-09)
Why blogging is good for you (and yes we need a policy)
Tim Bray and Sam Ruby on why blogging is a "Good Thing (TM)"
...
(Contribution 48, 2005-03-09)
Meteorological RSS Feeds
I've just spent a frustrating hour trying to find rss feeds
for the table of contents of atmospheric and climate journals. I've
found plenty of websites, and even email notification pages, but all I want
is RSS. Given our discipline really stretches computational ability
at the top end, why can't ...
(Contribution 47, 2005-03-08)
More State of Fear
Another installment in my (seems likely weekly) discussion of Michael Crichton's work of fiction. Before I get started, I can highly recommend the essay entitled "Dangerous Fiction" by Jeremy Leggett in New Scientist (5th March Edition).
...
(Contribution 46, 2005-03-05)
HinesParameterisation
Alison has just pointed out that Colin Hines has a new paper on his Doppler Spread Parameterisation. The abstract states that:
...
(Contribution 45, 2005-03-02)
Content Management, Wikis, Blogging etc
A number of threads are banging around in my mind. Here at the BADC we are running a number of bits of software that all do a bit of the same
task. We run
...
(Contribution 44, 2005-03-02)
What is a Web Service
Last week I gave a kick off talk at the National Institute for Environmental e-Science (niees) on "What is a Web Service". This was in a meeting on "Developing applications for real-time environmental data" (DARTED).
...
(Contribution 43, 2005-02-28)
Internet Explorer REALLY Sucks
I've been aware that my blog didn't render properly on internet explorer.
I thought it was probably because my CSS and/or my XHTML weren't standards
compliant. So, I've done some testing. My new wikiBNL code and my style sheed have
been tested with
...
(Contribution 42, 2005-02-28)
Matplotlib
In my last post, I produced a figure of temperature data. As an exercise in learning something new, I produced it with python and matplotlib. I have to say I was pretty impressed with matplotlib. Although I only played
with the tkinter gui and the postscript and png backends, it looks like
there ...
(Contribution 41, 2005-02-27)
The Temperature is Increasing
In my last polemic on the State of Fear, I said I'd put up some station data from elsewhere. Recalling that Michael Crichton has his characters imply that one can only trust U.S. data, I've plotted some data from the Central England Time Series. I don't think there is any doubt about the quality ...
(Contribution 40, 2005-02-27)
State of Fear, pick my timeseries
Following on from this.
...
(Contribution 39, 2005-02-26)
XHTML Table Alignment
Leonardo purports to produce xhtml1.1, so I decided to do some work on validating my pages (with the new underlying wiki format). It turns
out that table alignment was one of two big problems (and a few minor ones) for me to resolve
(the other one is that images can't exist in paragraphs, I have ...
(Contribution 38, 2005-02-25)
M2Crypto Woes
Guido (he of python fame), has a rant about M2Crypto. This is a worry from an NDG point of view. In it he also
makes the following comment about SWIG as well:
...
(Contribution 37, 2005-02-25)
Broadband Frustration
"Broadband Britain" is a wonderful but empty phrase. I work at home a lot, but it isn't always easy ...
...
(Contribution 36, 2005-02-24)
State of Fear, the beginning
Well, I threatened to post my thoughts about Michael Crichton's State of Fear. I finally got to start the book last night,
and it's immediately apparent it's going to annoy me as I read it. This book
has 170+ references in a bibliography, so he's trying to assert some
sort of psuedo-scientific ...
(Contribution 35, 2005-02-19)
DataDeluge
I have just got a hard copy of the JISC briefing paper
on the Data Deluge: Preparing for the explosion in Data.
...
(Contribution 34, 2005-02-14)
Sunday Morning Procrastination
It's Sunday morning, and outside can't make up it's mind whether it is a hailstorm, a gale, rain, or sunshine ... clearly time to do something useful. So I'm procrastinating and catching up on blogs and such.
...
(Contribution 33, 2005-02-13)
Testing, Extreme Programming and Demos
Patrick Logan has some really good thoughts on how to do design
a demo so that it doesn't break ...
...
(Contribution 32, 2005-02-13)
Upgraded to v166
This web site is now running a very slightly modified rev 166 version
of leonardo. I only had to make a few changes:
...
(Contribution 31, 2005-02-12)
Copyright and Blogs
Oh well, while I'm on the legal thing, it turns out that my
thoughts on coyright and blogging
preceded (coincidently) a rather good article on some of the issues in
informationweek. ...
(Contribution 30, 2005-02-03)
yet more on licensing
The licensing saga isn't over yet. I so don't want to be thinking about this ...
As Steven Vaughan-Nicholls writes in e-week.com, commenting on the plethora of open source licenses:
...
(Contribution 29, 2005-02-03)
there is no such thing as a foolish question
Generations of young children have been admonished with variations of a quote typically attributed to Mark Twain:
...
(Contribution 28, 2005-02-03)
non rigid metadata classification
It is an act of faith in the data management community that we need controlled vocabularies that interact using thesauri and ontologies. It's an act of faith at the moment because we dont think we have any other options ...
...
(Contribution 27, 2005-02-03)
Impermanent Links and Icebergs
The wonderful think about the Net is that you can link to things. What's not so wonderful is when the link disappears. Even less wonderful is when the content at the link target changes after you made your link. A couple of weeks ago I linked to NASA ...
(Contribution 26, 2005-02-01)
FreeAccess
From JISC:
...
(Contribution 25, 2005-01-31)
Open Document
I have previously commented on the importance of open document formats for long term archival. One interesting possibility coming over the horizon is
OpenDocument. At the moment this is based around OpenOffice.org software, but should kOffice gather more momentum there is a prospect that it will ...
(Contribution 24, 2005-01-31)
Derivative Works
The GPL talks about derivative works, and we've already seen that UK law doesn't know what ...
(Contribution 23, 2005-01-31)
Latex Wiki
Back in November I wrote an entry on maths and blogging where I stated that I would inevitably want maths on this wiki. In the intervening time, it became clear that we needed an easy way
of producing XHTML markup including mathematical expressions for a
number of programmes (CF support and NDG ...
(Contribution 22, 2005-01-28)
The Economist isn't always 100% right
The Economist has an article which amongst other things is about the ClimatePrediction.net
early results recently in the Nature news column.
...
(Contribution 21, 2005-01-28)
State of Fear, Part 1
A colleague has sent me a copy of ...
(Contribution 20, 2005-01-27)
Legal Stuff
I've already been talking about the legal implications of
open source software on our activities here at the BADC (here and here). Some initial feedback is that apparently the GPL is just as liable as the MIT license under UK law ...
...
(Contribution 19, 2005-01-27)
Oil Again
I don't know much about energy issues, but it's one of those things that any citizen of a modern democracy should think about from time to time. I am trying to do a bit of thinking about it from time to time (e.g.
here), and track relevant info (e.g.here).
...
(Contribution 18, 2005-01-26)
Internet Explorer Sucks
I've just discovered that Internet Explorer has been rendering the menu for this site with nothing readable in the menu ... for three months! (I checked it out on firefox, konqueror, and safari ...). The menu used to look like this:
...
(Contribution 17, 2005-01-25)
Atomic content in NCAS
The NERC Centres of Atmospheric Science, NCAS, consists of a number of centres and facilities that have their own life and web presences. Today some of us had a brief discussion about whether it would be feasible to utilise RSS and/or Atom to improve the connections between the centres, the ncas ...
(Contribution 16, 2005-01-25)
Model Resolution, Ensembles and Physics
Last Wednesday I attended a meeting of the Royal Met Society on ...
(Contribution 15, 2005-01-24)
More on Open Source Licensing
In my blog entry on open source licensing I reported a pre-workshop meeting on software licensing. The actual workshop happened on Friday. As it happens, it was more targetted to the commercial exploitation of software by the CCLRC, rather than the scientific exploitation of software (The Baker ...
(Contribution 14, 2005-01-24)
xml handling in python
Much of NDG will depend on code for handling xml documents. This will probably need to be done in two architectures: python and java
(to support two communities: scientific application programmers and web development of access tools).
...
(Contribution 13, 2005-01-19)
Massachusetts Contributes to easier Document Curation
Groklaw reports that the (US) State of Massachusetts is going to require all agencies to store public documents in nonproprietary formats such as HTML or PDF.
...
(Contribution 12, 2005-01-18)
Python Gui Kits
jkx@home has a brief review of his experience
with python gui toolkits. I've been flirting briefly with all of these
except glade based kits, so it's interesting he recommended it.
...
(Contribution 11, 2005-01-13)
A view of an iceberg/glacier collision from Space
NASA have released a news article showing images from space of a large iceberg (about the size of Long Island, NY) moving towards the Drygalski Ice Tongue. The article speculates the collision is due within a few days, but even if it doesn't happen, the mpg movie that shows the comparative sizes ...
(Contribution 10, 2005-01-13)
Open Source Licenses
We're in the curation business. That means we're in the business of keeping our data for a very long time ... the reality of data is that it's always accompanied by software to use it. If we're serious about longevity of the data we're forced to be serious about longevity of the accompanying ...
(Contribution 9, 2005-01-08)
Searching Techniques
Serendipity is a strange thing. Two days ago we started a discussion on the internal NDG mailing list about what should or shouldn't be in our B metadata elements (the schema is nearly fixed, but would we allow XHTML markup within some elements?). The discussion broadened into what B metadata is ...
(Contribution 8, 2005-01-07)
On Energy Supplies
Despite the content of most of my blog entries, I am fundamentally an atmospheric physicist, and only a computer geek by proxy. I've resolved as a new years resolution (yet again) to spend more time actually thinking about
atmospheric physics. I'm resolved to live up to this by having at least ...
(Contribution 7, 2005-01-05)
On Binary XML
NDG reviewers the first time around suggested we would need binary XML. I think they thought we would put all our data in XML, not just the
metadata.
...
(Contribution 6, 2005-01-04)
Verifyable Statements
I have just had my attention drawn to hacknot where I found an excellent article on "Basic Critical Thinking for Software Developers". In the article "Mr Ed" makes clear the importance of making verifyable statements if you want
to contribute any information to discussion about software ...
(Contribution 5, 2004-12-22)
Knowledge Management Horizon
Today I attended a workshop "on "Towards Integrated Knowledge Management", organised as part of a DEFRA horizons scanning project. These horizon projects are meant to give DEFRA a chance (!) of being ready for the next environmental crisis, instead of always being in reactive mode. A totally ...
(Contribution 4, 2004-12-21)
xmlsec
Yesterday and today I got to spend some substantial time on trains (a trip to
Liverpool actually) ... and spent the time learning about
pyxmlsec (and by implication
xmlsec). I was most interested in the
application of digitally signing xml documents (and the subsequent
verification). We need to ...
(Contribution 3, 2004-12-21)
renewables
Not sure one should confess to reading slashdot, but they
pointed me to this in the Houston Chronicle, basically, the bottom line is that a company ("Green Mountain Energy") is providing ...
(Contribution 2, 2004-12-21)
Inaugural Post
I've been interested in blogs, and blogging software for a long while. I run the KDE akregator on my laptop, and find that i have learnt a lot from other folks ruminations (as well as having been apalled and amused to various degrees).
...
(Contribution 1, 2004-12-21)