In transit again... Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

I'm currently in transit to the VOEvent meeting in Pasadena, where no doubt I'll get into a very large argument about how light weight the message format needs to be if it wants to be generally accepted by the robotic telescope community.


Anyone noticed how many more code shares there are these days?
As usual I had a quick look around the Dixons in Terminal 3's departure lounge but, this time at least, I wasn't thrown out of the store. However, while I was in there, I spotted a bunch of Solio chargers. It turns out they are a lot smaller than I thought they were, about the size of an iPod if the box is anything to go by...


The Solio, a lot smaller than I thought it was going to be...
This post was brought to you via the T-Mobile HotSpot in Heathrow's Terminal 3 departure lounge, but annoyingly the T-Mobile account which I picked up when I was in the States didn't let me log me into the hotspot here in the UK. I had to go through the entire process of setting up yet another account. so much for roaming agreements...

Blogger or bust? Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

I'm sure anyone using Blogger to publish their blog is just as fed up as I am with the recent problems we've all been experiencing. However for those of you fortunate enough to be using some other platform right now, Wired has an article about the current difficulties...

Update: Looks like the coverage of the recent problems has got a response, according to the Blogger status blog they're trying to do something about the performance problems we've been suffering.

Update: It also seems to have spurned the Blogger team have rolled out a new feature to help recover lost posts. This is something people have been desperate for, I know I've lost several posts recently due to Blogger flakeiness. It seems like they're using browser cookies to save the state of your post, which is a pretty neat solution to the problem...

Back home Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

I'm back home from my two days at NAM after spending most of yesterday evening in the clutches of the remnants of British Rail on a train that ended up two hours late into Exeter St. Davids...

Higher Order Perl Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

Mark Jason Dominus can usually be relied on to say something interesting about Perl. So I was excited to see that his new book Higher Order Perl, about how to write functions that manufacture or modify other functions, has just been published.

This is something I do, somewhat, inside the eSTAR code base. But like a lot of people who came to Perl from C I don't have much background in functional languages like Lisp, so I'm going to be picking up a copy. After all, if Damian Conway says nice things about it, how badly can you loose...

Update: The Perl Review has an interview with Mark Jason Dominus about Higher Order Perl...

The second day at NAM 2005 Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

We started the day with a plenary talk from Keith Horne discussing extra-solar planets and the three methods for discovery which are the Doppler wobble, transit lightcurves and micro-lensing.

The Doppler wobble method suggests that >6% of Sun-like planets host a (usually hot) Jupiter, usually with much more eccentric orbits than the Solar planets, however we don't yet know enough to tell whether this means that Solar system is unusal.


Keith talking about extra-solar planets
The second plenary talk of the day was given by Simon Conway Morris on the possibility of life in the Universe and evolutionary convergence. A bit off the wall for a NAM as he's a biologist, and has a very different approach to things than your average astronomer, but interesting stuff.

However I've now got a series of meetings scheduled for the rest of the day, this is the other side to NAM since it's one of the few times that the bulk of the UK's astronomical community is in the same place, so I doubt I'll get to go to any more talks...

Google & satellite maps Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

Google has just announced that they have finally got round to doing something with the technology they got in their acquisition of Keyhole in October last year, and incorporated satellite imagery into Google Maps and Google Local. In response Dion Almaer makes some good comments about usability, but I must admit to being impressed with Google's new service...

However the guys over at O'Reilly's MAKE magazine had the same idea as me, this service, a mobile phone and a bluetooth GPS have the words "killer app" written all over it...

Update: Slashdot has also picked up the story...

The first day of NAM 2005 Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

Today is the first day of the National Astronomy Meeting here in Birmingham, but while the conference runs till Friday I'm only here today and tomorrow. Unfortunately I don't have the time to hang around just for interests sake, as I'm off to the VOEvent Workshop in Pasadena next week, so I'm doing a hit and run on the relevant sessions.


Dave Giaretta talking about Starlink and the VO
Following plenary talks on AGN, by an old friend of mine Chris Done, and on LIGO by Peter Saulson I headed off to the Grid Applications & e-Science parallel session where I presented my talk on eSTAR and heterogeneous telescope networks. Unfortunately I hadn't really had enough time to spend thinking about what I was going to say, so it wasn't really the best talk I've ever given...

After a brief break for lunch, and to burn a copy of the Mac OS X port of the Starlink Classic software to DVD for someone, I ventured to the afternoon plenary session which kicked off with Alex Szalay from John Hopkins talking about the potential of the Virtual Observatory. The second plenary talk was by Ofer Lahav talking about data compression, classification and parameter estimation.


Alex Szlay talking about the Virtual Observatory
I must admit to being somewhat surprised that talks about the VO made it into the "mainstream" conference, although thinking about it the attendance at the e-Science parallel session was up on last year as well. Interesting!

I'm now heading off to the parallel session on novel algorithms for astronomy...

In Transit Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

I'm currently holed up in a hotel in Birmingham's China Town, in transit to the UK's National Astronomy Meeting which is being held this year at the University of Birmingham.


Birmingham's China Town
I'll be talking tomorrow in the Grid session about heterogeneous telescope networks, that is, I will if I ever finish writing the talk...

Eye tracking Google search results Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

While looking for something entirely unrelated I just stumbled across an interesting press release, although that's an oxymoron if ever I heard one...

CREDIT: Enquiro/Did-it/Eyetools

Eye tracking map for a sample Google search result
A eye tracking study jointly carried out by the marketing firms Enquiro and Did-it, along with the eye tracking firm Eyetools, on sample Google search results has shown that (perhaps unsurprisingly) your search ranking matters a lot if you're looking for traffic.

The results aren't startling, although I was surprised to see so little attention was paid to the AdSense adverts. However I realised that unless I'm trying to find somewhere to buy something really odd and don't even have a clue where to start looking, I rarely even glance at them myself. It is interesting to see that unless a company ends up as the top advert in the AdSense link column they're very unlikely to get any traffic.

However what was really interesting is that this study confirmed what I always figured, despite people's claims to read the search results and choose the most appropriate link, they rarely look past the top one or two. As Gord Hotchkiss said in the release "We see a marked difference in how people say they search and what they actually do. Previous research had indicated that people were considered searchers and spent some time before choosing a link".

Broken Jabra 250BT? Español | Deutsch | Français | Italiano | Português

Does anyone know anything about the internals of a Jabra 250BT headset? After working just fine with my Nokia 6600 and Apple Powerbook for some time suddenly I'm not getting any audio to the headset, can't hear a thing, not even the beeps when it pairs itself up with the phone.


My defunct Jabra 250 BT
The volume controls still works, so my guess is that that I've got a hardware fault in the speaker rather than some sort of Bluetooth protocol problem.

I was sort of hoping that if I opened it up there would be a obvious broken wire, but there wasn't, and no, it's not still under warranty. While the headset is very comfortable, that flexible hook that goes round the ear has always looked really fragile to me, maybe I've finally sat on it one too many times...