Marcus D. Hanwell's Blog

Well it has been a great week in Sapporo, Japan. The hotel is beautiful and the conference has been very productive. My three posters seemed to be well received and Tim's talk went well. I have tried lots of Japanese food - no sushi yet though. The food at the hotel is great and we have had some really great meals in Sapporo, although I didn't always know what I was eating!

The farewell party is a little later this evening, and we fly to Tokyo tomorrow where we have a week to explore and take in as much as we can before going home. I really wish I could remember the name of more of the foods we have tried. We went to a traditional spa which was very relaxing. I will hopefully write more of this down after I get home - I do have some great photos too - I just hope they all come out.

Well I am off to Japan. I think I managed to get most of everything done - three A0 posters (designed in LaTeX) and two conference proceedings articles submitted for LB11 in Sapporo. Trying to think if I have forgotten anything - can't take my tripod as it pushed my case 3 kg over the weight allowance I am taking my Nikon F80 and my little Sony Cybershot digital camera with me so I will hopefully get some great photos.

Haven't heard from any of the Japanese Gentoo developers about meeting up in Tokyo. I have heard from a few who can't make it though - I will try to check emails whilst I am out there but that will be sporadic at best. Wish me luck! First big conference and first ever trip to Japan! I will be back in the UK in two weeks.

Well I went paint balling for the first time ever yesterday. It was for a friends stag party, and I have to admit I had mixed feelings about it... All in all we had a pretty good day, and accumulated quite a range of injuries between us I have quite a few bruises from the paint balls - they really do hurt when they hit you! It was certainly an experience, although I don't think I will be doing it again any time soon.

Covered head to toe in a boiler suit, head protection and massive goggles on a hot summers day. Dripping with sweat and dehydrated after running round in it all day, covered in bruises and comparing battle wounds. We all went down to the dog track afterwards - after a good long shower and a couple of beers. Now that was more my speed - came up about even on my high stakes £1 bets! Back to work today after the hangover and suit fittings today at Meadowhall.

Just hope I get enough done before we leave for Japan on Friday.

I thought I would bow to peer pressure and show a picture of my desk in its natural state. I admit it - I tidied my desk for the picture that was published in the Gentoo Weekly Newsletter It is especially bad right now as I am preparing for a conference in Japan which is only weeks away.

If there are any devs in Japan at the moment I will be in Tokyo the week after the conference (4-8 July) - it would be great to meet up with some of you guys, may be sign each others GPG keys and have a few beers (or is it saki?) whilst I am out there. Back to work anyway...

I finally got some HRTEM images of my gold nanoparticles done yesterday and picked up the data today. They look pretty good. The first sample we looked at was my 4-methylbenzenethiol gold nanoparticles as dipped from a water surface at about 25 mN/m. Unfortunately the carbon film was all broken up and so the images were not as good as they could have been. Still managed to get size data on them as well as seeing how well packed they were. A small snapshot of a single nanoparticle (about 3 nm across) is shown below. You can even make out the interference fringes from the lattice spacing!

Got lots of images of the new hexanethiol coated gold nanoparticles too. They were smaller than we thought, and seem to be dominated by two sizes. The nanoparticles are clearly faceted with a good crystalline structure too. All great initial results, although I can't wait to get more images of an LS film deposited onto a holey carbon grid when the carbon is intact.

Just found out that my first paper has been pubilshed! It was published on the 27th of May with the title 'Evidence of collinear ferrimagnetism in (Fe, Tb)B metallic glasses from polarized beam neutron scattering' in the Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter. You can look at the abstract here and I believe the PDF can be downloaded for free by anyone.

They also picked our article to go in IoP Select! This was quite an honour for me with my first paper - I am second name on it too. Hopefully there will be many more high quality papers to come too.

I meant to write about this last week. My main amd64 box crashed the other week and managed to clear the BIOS settings along with it. It is a socket 754 Gigabyte board that I have never had too much luck with. They limit the RAM to DDR333 instead of DDR400 as they incorrectly quote AMD specs - I have built other systems using the same two sticks of double sided 512 MB DDR400 Corsair RAM!

Anyway, reset all the settings I could remember, and it all seemed OK. Then kept getting random crashes and segfaults and thought it was a bad kernel or something. Played with all sorts of settings, and even rebooted into Gentoo on another partition. Ram memtest86+ and it all passed just fine. At the point of pullling my hair out I took a breather and then thought may be upping the RAM voltage would help.

Did that and I have not had a single crash/segfault since! As I said what a difference 0.1 V can make Lost half a week messing about with it, but got it sorted in the end...

I have purchased several new toys over the last couple of months, and I kept meaning to write a little about them. The one I got about two months ago was my Belkin F8T003 bluetooth USB adaptor. Got it working with Gentoo without too many problems, I just needed to add bluetooth support to my kernel and used the HCI USB driver without any problems.

Coupled with bluez-libs, bluez-utils, openobex and kdebluetooth I was able to communicate with my mobile phone (Sony Ericsson P800) and my girlfriends new mobile and use the OBEX protocol to transfer files around. Still not got round to trying to use the GPRS feature of my phone with my laptop yet.

The next toy I got was the new Motorola V3 Black, T-Mobile offered me a great upgrade deal so I didn't even have to change tarriff or phone number. It worked well with my bluetooth adaptor and had a much better camera than my old phone. It is also quad band which should be better with all the travelling I am doing soon, and does everything through a mini-USB connector (even charges).

Then I bought my girlfriend an iRiver iFP 899 1 GB flash player. Main reasons for selecting it were because it was flash based (no moving parts - better for use at the gym etc), good memory size and it plays ogg vorbis files. My music is encoded about 50/50 mp3 (old stuff) and ogg vorbis (new stuff) so this was important.

I contemplated using the open source drivers developed at here, but then decided that I would much prefer the freedom of the UMS firmware - so I upgraded it immediately. It mounted without problems using gentoo-sources-2.6.11-r9 and the USB mass storage stuff I had for my flash memory cards. Transferred some music to it, and it worked just great.

Only had it for about a day but it seems great so far, I am thinking of getting one for myself. I may end up getting the iRiver iFP 999 though - we'll see. That is about it for all my new gadgets - thankfully they all get along with Gentoo Linux just fine on my AMD64 box.

After more than two months of chasing this refund, dozens of phone calls and a few dozen emails (I am not exaggerating here I am afraid) I have finally received the rest of my refund from them. What can I say, it amazes me that these guys are in business and this has been one of the most costly mistakes in terms of time I have made. In the end it became a matter of principal ensuring my money was refunded after several threats of getting my credit card company involved.

If anyone if thinking of using these guys I would advise you to think very carefully. I would also appreciate any recommendations of trustworthy, honest and approachable UK based colo/dedicated servers. I just need a decent dedicated server in London or preferably Manchester (closer to me) with affordable rates. I am hoping to put this whole thing behind me now, but I really cannot believe how terrible 1&1 have been from start to finish.