Marcus D. Hanwell's Blog

Well I finished the sci-visualization move today, so we have a new category for all the scientific visualisation applications. There are a couple of applications we had been holding off adding until after the move that should go in soon too. As far as I can tell there was one small bug with a reverse dependency that was missed. I have scanned through the tree and cannot find anything else, but please shout at me if you do It is good to have a specific category for visualisation applications as they were generally in media-gfx or sci-mathematics and it is quite a large area for us scientists - analysing and showing off our data.

Just given my talk (on my birthday no less) and I won joint first prize for it, so I am really pleased. I wrote it all in Linux using Kile, LaTeX and LaTeX beamer. You can look at a copy of the PDF here if you would like to. It is a summary of two of the main areas of my research - alkanethiol encapsulated gold nanoparticle Langmuir-Blodgett/Langmuir-Schaeffer multilayers, and the sensing/conductivity characteristics of these multilayers to various gases and vapours.

I just have to get more of my work published, write up my thesis, find a postdoctoral position (hopefully in the States or Canada) and pass my viva! Shouldn't be too hard, for now I am going to take the evening off and enjoy the rest of my 26th birthday

Well they finally fixed the new MADWiFi driver to work with AMD64 again, after about two months or so of it causes a kernel oops whenever traffic was transmitted over the wireless link. I have been too busy to get a new card and so I am still using this one. Still not happy about the closed source HAL and think the reasoning behind it is flaky. It is little better than a proprietary driver, but the old driver worked and thanks to brix the new driver is in portage already and has been rekeyworded ~amd64.

Hopefully wireless in Linux will improve soon, I don't think closed source drivers are the answer though. In other news I have also brought the latest version of boinc out of package.mask to receive wider testing. It seems to be working pretty well, but still isn't as smooth as I would like. If anyone has ideas on how to improve it, or better yet patches, I would love to hear from you.

With all the pressures of this year I decided that I would like to make some time to read for pleasure and had been meaning to read a discworld novel by Terry Pratchett for quite some time. Louise and I were in the city centre on Monday and I saw Thud! on special offer at Waterstones and bought it. It is the first fiction book I have picked up and read in months - always seem to have my head buried in physics, nanotechnology, mathematics and programming books these days.

I really enjoyed it and found the book very entertaining. I don't know if it is one of the better books in the series or not, but I certainly think I will find the time to read a few more. I don't want to get too engrossed though as I need to write up my thesis this year

Well it is the New Year already! 2006 has come around so fast... This will (hopefully) be the final year of my PhD studies at the University of Sheffield. I spent quite a bit of time before the break polishing up my CV, and will be sending it out to some research groups shortly to see if there are any potential postdoctoral positions going for when I finish. I am also scouring the job web sites for potential positions.

On top of that I am of course working on some more papers and my thesis! I also have to prepare a presentation to summarise my work for the final year PhD talks that are taking place on the 26th (by coincidence this coincides with my 26th birthday). If there is any time left in there I will hopefully be able to do some Gentoo development and work on my Qt4 based X-ray/neutron reflectivity package.

This is certainly going to be a tough year with lots of uncertainties. Time to get started!

As my reply to Doug's post seems to be stuck in moderation oblivion (and has been for the past two days) I thought I would just make it a post on my blog instead, and may be extend it a little. My original reply was (in italics),

I would like to point out that I have worked with you in the past on KDE issues when you have been less than polite. Others have made comments on the way in which you ask people to do things and I have to agree that you could do with working on that a bit. I will continue to work on making KDE just work, and I do work with Gnome herd members where necessary and spent significant time working the on the hal/dbus stuff.

I also work on amd64 stabling as do several other members of the architecture team. I wouldn’t say that stable has been abandoned, but there are certainly places where it has. In my roles in the scientific and KDE herds I work towards stabilising packages in reasonable time frames and always aim to have stuff in ~arch working. Where there is doubt it goes in p.mask or an external testing tree. I will work with anyone who has similar goals even if they don’t always communicate them in the best way.

I would certainly agree that there are areas that we can improve and the Gentopia concept is a worthwhile one if implemented in the right way. Most of us are also volunteers though and I don't have very much free time until the end of January. Unfortunately this means that my productivity will drop until that time. This is why we have herds and there are quite a few KDE and Gnome herd members I keep in regular contact with.

There have certainly been packages in the past that have taken far too long to be included or updated but that seems to be improving as far as I can tell. If Gentopia helps improve this situation I am all for it, but I have not seen that many results from it thus far. From the KDE side I will continue to work with the Gnome herd and/or Gentopia. I think all of us would like a desktop that just worked whatever desktop environment we choose. As always patches are more than welcome