The FLOSSUK conference was held in Edinburgh last week. I attended the two day conference and the hacking the raspberry pi workshop. The conference was excellent. Abstracts of all talks are on the FLOSSUK website. What follows are some notes from the talks I particularly liked. Reproducible Build Talk by …

We are now halfway through the 14 day strike over changes to our pension scheme. A further 14 days of strike are on the table depending on the progress of the negotiations between the union, the employers and the pension fund. At the centre of the dispute are different views …

Life in 2017 is pretty shit. It's not that I can complain about anything in particular, it's more a general feeling of utter crapness on all sorts of levels - some expected, others totally unnecessary. Level I: Family life is busy and the boys keep us well occupied with their various …

One of the finest buildings in Edinburgh - the former Royal High School - is under threat to be developed into an exclusive 5 star hotel. The Royal High School is one of the finest examples of the Greek Revival style and is of international importance. The economic merits of the proposed …

Yesterday we had a big gradschool forum where the future of the GradSchool Conference was discussed. This post repeats and expands my initial thoughts yesterday. I work at the School of GeoSciences which is at the triple intersection of traditional geo-sciences (ie if you want to be provocative supplying talent …

A stormy night last night and although the weather somewhat calmed down during the day I still feel very upset. I needed some time to think about Wednesday's shooting in Paris at the Charlie Hebdo magazine and the reactions I observed. The terrorists struck at one of our fundamental principles …

So the predictions turned out to be reasonably accurate, Scotland voted NO and there is a bit of a hang-over mood. The waiting is over, and people voted for known unkowns. A great missed opportuinity and as someone commented - the greatest country of the 19th century remains stuck in the …

Even though my last post on the Scottish Independence Referendum ended up being quite long there is still much more. First of all, I found a very good essay by Charlie Stross on the referendum, well worth a read. I tried to come up with some reasons why I would …

I promised myself that I should write down my thoughts on the Scottish Independence Referendum before it actually happens on the 18th September 2014. It certainly has been a roller coaster ride of thoughts and only now a few days before the referendum my ideas have settled on a somewhat …

So, flickr.com updated its site layout quite drastically. I think it's a mixed bag. The new design is really good for viewing photos. However, I think it is quite difficult to get the information that used to be easily available. In particular the new home page is very difficult …