General

Yesterday my wife was supposed to be travelling back to England. She had been planning the trip for over half a year and was looking forward to attending her friend's wedding as well as catching up with friends and family for a couple of weeks. The day started off early as her flight with Delta from Pittsburgh, PA to JFK, New York, NY left at 10:00am.

About an hour after she had left I got an automated call from Delta saying that her flight had been cancelled and they had booked her onto a flight at 6pm that evening! I knew that her British Airways from JFK to Manchester, UK was due to leave at 6:05pm. This was obviously a problem and so we started looking for alternatives to get her there on time.

I called a friend who offered to drive me to the airport to meet her and try to get this sorted out. Delta were less than helpful and claimed weather which apparently means they are not obligated to help. Checking the weather reports confirmed that storms were predicted that afternoon but offered no explanation why they were grounding flights that morning. After talking to them it seemed clear they were not going to get her there in time.

So we called British Airways. We have been loyal customers for years, taken more flights with them than I remember and had always been very happy with the service. We had never had cause to use their customer service but assumed it would be good as every other dealing we had with them was always positive.

After speaking with a customer service agent she assured us that there was nothing to worry about. She advised us to try and get to JFK today, but if we couldn't make it they could put Louise on the flight tomorrow for a fee of approximately $120. This made us feel much better and we thought worst case the journey was just going to be delayed by a day. We abandoned the plan of attempting to hire a car and drive to JFK which according to Google and MapQuest would have taken just shy of seven hours.

After confirming with Delta that there was little chance of them getting my wife to JFK in time for her flight we accepted the flight the next day on the proviso that Louise could get a refund if she found an earlier flight with a competitor. So we headed back home, scoured the travel sites and Louise called British Airways back to see about getting her flight switched to one tomorrow.

To her horror the second representative told her that this was not possible and no changes could be made to her ticket on the day of travel. She then proceeded to very unhelpfully quote that it was in the terms and conditions and that the previous agent was incorrect. We talked with the first person at about 8:20am when we might have had a shot at making it to JFK by car but being at home at around 10:30am we knew that we have no chance of making it.

I made the point that it was their previous agent that had given us incorrect information and that they should take some responsibility and work with us. My wife was obviously really upset by this and so I tried to talk with the woman who just kept repeating that it was in the terms and conditions and that if my wife didn't make it to JFK that day then her ticket would be forfeit and she would need to buy a new ticket.

I quite honestly couldn't believe it and after speaking with this woman it became clear that she thought she was in the right, I couldn't speak to anyone else about the matter and the previous agent was wrong. I was apparently free to make a complaint about this but beyond that she simply didn't care. When I asked her whether she thought it was fair that we pay for the poor training of the previous agent she went on to repeat that it was clear in the terms and conditions. I made the point that the previous agent didn't seem to know it but apparently I should know it myself.

As my regular readers will know I moved over to Pittsburgh, PA in the USA at the end of September last year. Before I left I got some of mine and Louise's family webcams so that we could stay in touch. Then it took ages to sell our house and the shipping nightmare began (which I will try and bring myself to talk about one of these days). Eventually I actually got my desktop computer back (a little worse for wear after the shippers "carefully packaged it").

Going back to my original point, I had been putting off buying a webcam as I wanted it to work well in Linux, and every time I looked into which webcams might be my best bet it seemed that even individual models had multiple chipsets, which may or may not be supported. On Saturday I bit the bullet as Louise had been asking about getting Skype working.

I chose the Logitech Quickcam Pro 9000 (photo above) as it seemed to be part of the new USB video class standard I had been reading about and saw there was a healthy Linux UVC project already. I still anticipated having trouble getting it working on Gentoo but thought I should be able to get it working eventually.

Imagine my surprise when I just typed emerge -av media-video/linux-uvc media-video/luvcview, modprobed the new kernel module, ran luvcview and I could see me staring at the camera! Sometimes I worry this Linux thing might be getting a little too easy Another five minutes and I had the microphone working (just usb audio) and was testing it out in Skype. On Sunday we had our first intercontinental video chat with my Mum and two nephews. Skype also integrates into my KDE 4 desktop without any trouble.

I am pretty new to the webcam thing and had resisted it for a while but it was great to be able to chat and see family and friends back home. I would rather use an open source, cross platform video conferencing application but have yet to find a viable one. Open Wengo looks like it might be that application one day but I couldn't get it to work reliably last time I tried (although I did like the look of it). I also don't seem to be able to find a nice application that will let me capture video messages easily.

I was very pleasantly surprised by my experience and am very happy with the performance of the Linux drivers for the webcam as well as the camera itself. Any Linux webcam tips would of course be gratefully received!

UPDATE: Forgot to mention this great blog post I spotted that helped me decide this webcam was probably a good bet...

What a hectic week. I never got chance to record our first all American weekend on the long weekend. We started off on Saturday morning shopping in the sales and found a great BBQ at Wal-Mart. It is nearly twice the size of the one we had back in the UK with a great labour saving ash collector at the bottom. We then loaded up on meat and other BBQ essentials.

Had lots of friends over on Saturday evening and then exposed our American friends to the Eurovision song contest! It was very hard to explain this phenomenon to them but it was as amusing as ever with expert commentary by Terry Wogan

Then on Sunday we went along to our first ever baseball game and saw the Pittsburgh Pirates beat the Chicago Cubs. It was a really fun day out, beautiful sunny weekend and then we had another BBQ when we got back. I have always loved BBQs and our new one works great.

This weekend we are heading out on a road trip with a few friends from work. I haven't really taken any photos for about a year now so I am really hoping we can see a little of the country around us and get some photos I can show off. I would love more time for hacking on code too, may be Sunday evening when we get back. I have been seriously neglecting my new game too - GTA IV.

I haven't been keeping up with XKCD since my laptop stopped working - never set up my RSS feeds for the few comics I used to regularly read. I thought I would catch up and this one really made me laugh - I guess geek humour is alive and well!

Along with the one linked to from slashdot about the Googlebomb caused by the died in a blogging accident which I may have just added to now I guess.

I thought I would join in, a little late, with the posts about 2007. I think it is good to reflect at times. Please feel free to skip this whole post if you were hoping for something more focussed. For me 2007 has really been a roller coaster of a year filled with highs and lows. If I were ever to write my memoirs this one would probably go down as the most surreal so far.

At the start of October I began my first postdoctoral position, at the University of Pittsburgh in the Chemistry Department working in the newly formed Hutchison Group for Geoffrey Hutchison. Life has been so hectic these last few months finishing my doctorate and preparing for my biggest move ever.

Louise and I arrived on the 27th of September and had less than a week to find a suitable apartment out here ready for me to start work. I am now a legal non-resident alien (I think - someone correct me if I got it wrong). I am very excited to be starting this new job, the move has been really tough but the research looks very interesting and I am sure that my time here will be very productive.

I have already been to quite a few interesting talks in the department and am making the transition from physics to chemistry. It is OK though as I get to do lots of physics and programming along with some more chemistry. Exciting times and I am sure I will talk more about my work in future. I have already posted a tutorial article on installing Sun Grid Engine on a Mac OS X cluster.

Dax made it out here and we are both enjoying the recent snow. This entry sat in drafts for about a month or so as I have been so busy sorting things out, coding, reading and going to physio for my high ankle sprain which I am told is both unusual and the worst kind of sprain...

On Wednesday Dax, my overgrown German Shepherd dog, took his first ever flight. Originally they were supposed to fly him into Pittsburgh International Airport but apparently there were no carriers that could accommodate such an overgrown dog!

So eventually they gave up and told us that they couldn't get him to Pittsburgh as promised. I think it was Thursday night last week I had a voice mail left from what sounded like Dallas International Airport asking me to call them back and confirm that I would take delivery of Dax. I nearly had kittens of my own as I saw how far away this was!

It turned out that there is a Dulles International Airport, and the way it is pronounced sounds very much like Dallas. That was a much more manageable four hour drive away near Washington DC. So I hired a large pickup truck for Wednesday of this week.

Since moving out to Pittsburgh I have been using my Acer Ferrari laptop at home for development, keeping in touch with people back home and trying to figure out some of the weirder rules out here such as driving licenses in this state. Last night I booted up when I got home and after logging in everything went a little funky - got I/O errors when typing ls for example.

I tried rebooting but it wouldn't even get to the GRUB prompt. So I got out an old Gentoo LiveCD which I had luckily left in my laptop bag. That got so far then failed to mount the drive. After a few reboots and a little wine (to calm my nerves ) I managed to access the drive. I thought I would try copying some stuff across to my external hard drive and ended up getting more I/O errors and some memory errors for good measure. Half the time when I booted from the LiveCD the kernel panicked when attempting to mount the hard drive partitions.

So today I am a very unhappy English man in Pittsburgh. Due to me having spent far more than I budgeted for moving out here, and then more again on flying my dog out, I don't foresee being able to replace it any time soon. This means my development activity will be limited. Not sure if compiling part of a KDE 4 checkout might have been what finished it off. Looks like some kind of motherboard issue. The trackpad stopped working months ago, now I am getting random memory and I/O errors and the CPU has been running hotter and hotter recently. It served me for just over two years which isn't great but I worked it pretty hard and it travelled a fair part of the globe with me too.

Still can't help being cheered up a little as I will be picking Dax, my overgrown German Shepherd dog up from Dulles Washington International Airport tomorrow (not Dallas as it sounded like on the message they left me which made me very unhappy when I first heard).

Update: My very nice and generous new boss has very kindly offered to let me use the group laptop in the interim. It is a MacBook Pro though using something called Mac OS X Leopard. I can keep hacking on Avogadro with it and I even know how to take screen shots with it now too! It is also capable of checking email and browsing the web so my Internet connection in the apartment won't go to waste. I am considerably happier now but will miss my KDE 4 and Linux fix

So I had my first experience of Halloween in the US tonight. As I went grocery shopping I saw all the shops with big bowls full of sweets handing them out to passing children. Dozens of children dressed up as various ghoulish characters wandering around with their parents in toe, helping them to carry their swag.

I walked back to my apartment to witness yet more children wandering the streets with their parents and people up and down my street handing out sweets (or candy as it is known over here). I got home to meet a few of my neighbours work colleagues handing out treats on our doorstep. Lots of the houses around here have been decorated for weeks and it amazes me what a big thing Halloweeen is.

I am really going to miss Guy Fawkes Night on the 5th of November - don't think anyone knows about it over here We always had great parties and gatherings on Bonfire night, although currently my social calendar is emptier than it has ever been due to me being very new in town. Hope you have all enjoyed your Halloween and have a great Bonfire night if you celebrate it!

As I moved continent I guess it is only right I move servers too I have spent most of the weekend backing up, transferring and restoring email, web sites and other assorted services over to a different server I will be sharing access to. Thankfully it is still a Gentoo Linux based server that I will be sharing with my brother-in-law.

The move has taken a lot longer than I anticipated but I think everything is over now. Still some cleaning up tasks to perform. Hopefully this blog hasn't been kicked off planets or spammed them during the move over. If you notice any problems with anything feel free to poke me. Hoping I have finished moving for quite some time now - it isn't much fun and reduces productivity...

What a hectic few months it has been. This year has been really tough on many levels but also very rewarding in other ways. I never really got chance to write up my final thoughts on my Google Summer of Code project and will hopefully get the time to do that soon. Still working on it adding new functionality and fixing bugs where I can.

I completed my thesis over the summer and did my viva which went very well. Managed to hand in the final library copy of my thesis the day after my viva before leaving for a two week diving holiday. Louise won the holiday at the London International Dive Show in March of this year. It was an awesome week away in Curacao and a second week in Bonaire with some amazing diving, although I sprained my ankle really badly at the end of the last week.

Then we returned home for a couple of days before leaving for Pittsburgh via JFK. Got to Pittsburgh on 26 September to start my postdoctoral position at the University of Pittsburgh on 1 October (or October 1 as they say over here). Louise came out with me on the first week and helped me look for a place to live and everything.

Life has been amazingly hectic and I am still feeling very displaced and missing many of the creature comforts I am used to such as money, a car, furniture, good beer... I did get cable, internet and phone on Monday and brought my laptop out with me so things are picking up a little. Hopefully I will be able to write more soon about the dive holiday, my new job, GSoC and continuing work on Avogadro.

For now I am going to hobble to the shops to find some dinner - still not used to eating out alone... Lots of work to get on with that will keep me occupied at least!

Yesterday was the day of my viva (or viva voce in full). It is one of the reasons I have been so quiet recently - preparing for it. I am pleased to announce that it went really well and I passed. There is some paperwork and stuff I need to take care of but I am now a doctor (well, almost ). I did go out for a few drinks for most of yesterday evening with friends to celebrate which was great.

Wow - what a hectic week. This has got to have been one of the most exhausting weeks I have had in years. Started off with final corrections and tweaking of my doctoral thesis. After many hours of printing I got the three copies submitted on Tuesday afternoon. Managed a few celebrations on Wednesday evening along with a friend who submitted her thesis on Wednesday. Thursday we went to a friend's wedding which was really nice.

Yesterday we had a really long day, we caught a train at just after 7am down to London. We weren't allowed to take any electronics as we were going to the US embassy to apply for a visa. I really missed having my mobile phone and being in London it would have been good to have had a camera. We got to the embassy in good time, spent about three hours in there before having our applications approved, which means we can finally start making travel arrangements! I start my new job in Pittsburgh at the start of October and am really looking forward to getting out there. I am sure I will talk more about my postdoctoral position more soon! We didn't get back home until just after midnight, by which pointy we were very tired.

Now we are on Saturday and I can finally sit down in front of a computer. I am surrounded by electronics again and so am much happier now I don't think people appreciate how hard it is for someone like me to be without electronics for a day. I am now surveying what I can get done for my Google Summer of Code project before it ends. I will blog shortly about some of the stuff I have done recently but just haven't found the time to talk about yet too.

Last week I went to Paris for a couple of days to visit my mentor Benoit. It was a great chance to take a quick look around the city as I have never been before. Thanks to bmibaby I was able to get over quite economically and stayed in a nice, clean (albeit a little small) room in a hotel near Place d'Italie in the 13th district of Paris (not sure if they are called districts or something else). It was quite close to where Benoit lives, close to a Metro stop and within walking distance of central Paris.

I got to Paris on Tuesday evening and Benoit met me at the airport. Once I had checked in to my hotel we walked to a creperie and got a fairly traditional three course meal consisting of different kinds of crepes. I also tried some of the local pear cider. Apparently the crepes weren't as good as they could have been but I really enjoyed them. We chatted about the history of Paris, I made some feeble attempts at French and we also moved onto discussions of my Google Summer of Code project and the bigger goals of the Kalzium/Avogadro project.

Tired from traveling I returned to my hotel to get some sleep with plans to visit the Eiffel Tower the next day. In the morning I went to the Eiffel Tower and had a really good look around. Benoit advised me to get off at the Trocadero stop as the walk down to the Eiffel Tower was much nicer and it was a great tip. I spent most of my morning walking around the bottom of the Eiffel Tower, walking up the stairs to the second floor (it was a far shorter queue) and then I got the lift right to the top. It was very crowded despite getting there early - as I left early in the afternoon it had become far more crowded. There are some great views and it is such an iconic landmark.

I met up with Benoit in the afternoon. He showed me around some of the other sites of the city. We walked around Notre Dame and the Louvre before going to the Japanese district to get some dinner. Before dinner we got some hacking done in one of the gardens near the centre of Paris where we discussed the finer points of transformation matrices, 3d geometry and some of my recent changes to the Painter API in Avogadro. We then went to Paris beach near to my hotel and had a few beers by the Seine. After Benoit went home I had a beer in a small cafe near my hotel overlooking Place d'Italie before retiring for the evening.

My final day on Thursday we decided to head out for Versailles. It is an amazing place and the gardens were a great place to get some more hacking done and have a picnic. We hacked on some eye candy, we discussed a month or more ago, for the navigation and manipulation tools to give better visual feedback on what is happening. We haven't committed it yet as I need to finish it off but I think it is really great work and may be something that can be applied to other tools. It also helped me to see the best way to implement ribbon support as a new view which I think will be awesome. Very productive day and some amazing sights!

Benoit was busy on the last evening so I headed back into Paris solo after dropping off my laptop and camera. I had dinner at a traditional (or at least it claimed to be) French restaurant. I tried some frog's legs and was surprised by how nice they were - I wasn't sure I would like them at all. I was lucky enough to sit next to a lovely Australian couple who were out on a tour of Europe. The lady works for IBM and we ended up discussing open source and my work on Avogadro as well as culture around the world and comparing notes on the sights of Paris.

It was a great couple of days in Paris. It would have been nice if Louise had been able to get some time off work to come out. It is our two year anniversary today so I will have to do what I can to make it up to her today My thanks go out to Benoit for being such a good host and showing me the sights of Paris and teaching me the finer points of the mathematics of 3d visualisation and OpenGL.

Originally I thought I would just attend the aKademy conference on the weekend and return home after that. I submitted an abstract for my talk on Gentoo and KDE and had hoped to meet some KDE developers and see if we could work with KDE better. Later I applied for my Google Summer of Code project working on the Kalzium 3D molecular editor and was accepted. This caused me to change my plans and stay for the entire week and I am really glad I did

I have been to quite a few open source conferences over the years but I have to say aKademy is my favourite so far. There was a great atmosphere and lots of very intelligent and dedicated hackers present. There were also lots of laughs and humour along with important discussions and debates. I got to meet so many people who work on KDE and whose blogs I have been reading for years. My only regret is that I couldn't get out for a few more beers in the evenings...

I thought it would be a good idea to camp as aKademy was in June and the odds were good that the weather would be fair. In the days leading up to my departure Sheffield flooded and I think it rained every day of aKademy (some days solidly throughout the day). On Sunday evening we came back to a rather large pond at the side of our tent that had previously been a patch of grass with a dip in it. I chose where to pitch the tent well though and the tent remained out of harms way

The last week has been pretty surreal. I was in work on Monday getting a bit of work done when we had some really heavy rain. The commute home was a nightmare and I was glad I left early. It seems that I had a lucky escape though as in Sheffield (where I live and work) we have had some of the worst floods I have ever known. Rivers have burst their banks and literally washed cars down the road.

Unfortunately a few people have also died in the midst of the floods. A nearby dam has also developed cracks in its walls which led to sections of the M1 being closed along with nearby homes getting evacuated. Rolling power cuts and the threat of more rain this weekend make life in Sheffield pretty difficult. We have been fortunate to have escaped most of the problems where we live and have not had any flooding or power cuts. A recent article on events shows some of the problems faced by our city.

I just found out that my Google Summer of Code (TM) application to work on the Kalzium 3D molecular editor has been accepted! The status just changed to accepted. So over the summer I am going to be working on perfecting the 3D molecular editor in Kalzium. I am so amazingly pleased that my project was accepted and it certainly promises to be an amazing summer where I get to work on a project combining my passions for KDE, Qt, C++ and molecular visualisation!

Time to get some sleep as it has gone 4am in the UK! Thanks to Google and everyone at KDE and I am sure there will be lots more to come over the summer.

Today was a beautiful day (as have been the last few) so I took a break from writing my thesis to get out for a while. We went out by Ladybower reservoir for a walk with Dax. It was great to get out of the office for a few hours after having quite an intense week of work. Lots more to do but it has been a productive week.

As you can see in the photo the weather really was great although it was really crowded out there too. Dax enjoyed himself and I got some nice pictures too. We came back and had a barbecue. It is really nice now the weather has improved and it isn't getting dark so early.

In other everyday news I got my new office chair too. It was a bit rubbish so I transplanted the arms to my old chair and all is well Even got a foot stool out of it as it seemed a shame to waste the rest of the bits. I am hoping to spend a little less time in the office once I get my thesis finished though...

It would seem I have been working so hard on my thesis that my chair has given up the ghost and broke. I was pondering over some graphs in I was plotting for my thesis, lent back slightly and the plastic arm broke I am going to have to go out tomorrow and find a replacement as I am getting back ache and don't need any excuses not to work on my thesis

They just don't make things to last any more... In related news Nick convinced me to join Facebook. Despite writing my random ramblings for the world on my blog, and putting up random pictures in my gallery I have never really bothered taking part in any social networking sites. I will see how it goes but don't intend to let it distract me from my primary goal right now - finishing my thesis!

On Saturday and Sunday I attended the Sheffield Open Street Map party. All this is pretty new to me but I was certainly interested in the concept of creating a free and openly editable map of the world. The party was kindly hosted and organised by the IET and ShefLUG in cooperation with the OSM guys who brought along some GPS gear for those of us who don't have our own.

We got a crash course on how to use the handheld GPS devices and then went out to do some mapping. I partnered up with Dan on Saturday and we wandered around the back streets quite close to the Mappin building which was our base. We took it in turns making notes and using the GPS and I think we managed to map just about every street in the patch we covered as well as quite a few footpaths.

Above is a copy of the OSM map of Sheffield as it stands right now after some of our weekends work has been added. It still hasn't rebuilt the tiles with the extra bits I have just added but I am sure it will get on there soon. I really enjoyed doing the mapping and hope to do more in the future. There are so many good reasons to help out with this project if you can.

Marble is planning on adding support for OSM, it is also a great way to do something pretty geeky and get out of the office for a while I love the freedom it gives you to add data, correct mistakes and use the data for whatever you like. Personally I am thinking of adding dive sites as I go to them and using Marble to display all the sites I have been to. I could also use it to map out runs and check on my performance as I train.