Techno Cambridge

Some excellent Raspberry Pi

2011-12-08T15:57:00.001-08:00

Mondays CHASE meeting had the feel of the release of yet another new product product from the Apple. All of the 70 or so people in the room passionately wanted to own a Raspberry Pi even though they are not in production yet. But the Raspberry Pi is the complete antithesis of yet another "shiny, shiny" product from the "dark star" with its stranglehold on everything that it shines on. Bizarrely all the other "fruit based" technology (Apricot, Apple, Blackberry, Tangerine......) that has gone before the Raspberry Pi has revolutionize the world of IT in some way and the Raspberry Pi seems to have the same potential.

In their own words:

"The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a UK registered charity which exists to promote the study of computer science and related topics, especially at school level, and to put the fun back into learning computing.

We plan to develop, manufacture and distribute an ultra-low-cost computer, for use in teaching computer programming to children. We expect this computer to have many other applications both in the developed and the developing world.

Our first product is about the size of a credit card, and is designed to plug into a TV or be combined with a touch screen for a low cost tablet. The expected price is $25 for a fully-configured system.

Provisional specification

700MHz ARM11
128MB or 256MB of SDRAM
OpenGL ES 2.0
1080p30 H.264 high-profile decode
Composite and HDMI video output
USB 2.0
SD/MMC/SDIO memory card slot
General-purpose I/O
Optional integrated 2-port USB hub and 10/100 Ethernet controller
Open software (Fedora, Iceweasel, KOffice, Python)"

What it doesn't say is that the design of the hardware will be open source and its this and "the many other applications both in the developing and the developed world" coupled with low costs that makes the Raspberry Pi capture the imagination of such a wide range of people and gives it the potential to revolutionize the world of computing in much the same way as Open Source software.

Freedom of Information, Data Protection and good record keeping practise

2010-01-28T01:26:00.000-08:00

With the University of East Anglia and what the press have predictably called "Climate Gate" refusing to die and rearing its head again but this time for UEA reportedly failing to comply with the UK freedom of information legislation. Now might be a good time to reflect on some of the sometimes conflicting issues surrounding UK data legislation faced by organisations in the public sector.

Staff ignorance - While in a well regulated organisation data should be controlled, data have no boundaries with every activity undertaken by an organisation being supported by data. This means that every member of an organisation should have a good understanding of UK data legislation if the organisation is not to fall fowl of the legislation. Unfortunately, experience of working in and regularly dealing with organisations in the public sector demonstrates that this is not the case. Typically there are a small number of "experts" in an organisation (often not known to others) and a varying understanding ranging from good to non existent or worse still wrong. Policy and procedure is improving but has a long way to go.
Conflicting requirements of legislation. My interpretation of the general principals of legislation are:
- Data protection - to protect data on an individual.
- Freedom of Information - to promote transparency in public bodies particularly in the area of governance.
- Record retention - All data have one or multiple purposes (contractual, informative, operational) but in effect has a useful life for which it needs to be kept (retention period).
This is often further complicated because data are often not discreet, with multiple items of data in one container. A typical example of this is an email which could contain data covered by all three of the above legislative needs (which makes email management and retention a minefield).

This situation is further complicated as there are different penalties for falling fowl of different legislation (FOI, DP, contractual).
Effort involved in retrieving information - The reason for implementing systems to manage data is nearly always efficiency (faster turnaround, cost savings). Therefore retrieving information should be quick, cheap and accurate? Unfortunately this does not appear to be the case. Systems in the majority of organisations have evolved rather than been designed, or if they have been designed as part of an overall information strategy they may not have been designed with legislation in mind. Retrieving the information to service a FOI request can be a nightmare with data distributed across multiple records in multiple information silos and often in a non searchable form. I suspect that a large number of organisations could be brought to their knees if subjected to multiple targeted FOI requests due to the manual effort often needs to service these.

This is not intended to be an authoritative or definitive guide but more of a personal insight. On the face of it CRU would have appeared to have "cocked up" big time. However, having worked as a scientist and with academics in commercial research and the public sector. I think that they have been unfortunate and there are many "accidents waiting to happen" in a large number of organisations. CRU have been in the spotlight due to the nature of their work.

Are the press right to claim that their work is flawed on the basis of failure to comply with FOI? - In my opinion no, my guess is that if you lifted the lid on any number of academic and commercial organisations you would find similar cans of worms.

Howto fix GRUB 2 After Installing Windows XP Ubuntu 9.10

2010-01-08T02:42:00.000-08:00

I recently had to reinstall Windows XP on my PC. When I rebooted the PC the GRUB boot menu had disappeared and I could not get back into Ubuntu to fix the problem. This is how I repaired GRUB.

Please note that I am not a Ubuntu expert, any changes to the master boot record risk loosing the data on your hard disk and that this method may not work with GRUB found on earlier versions of Ubuntu - i.e. you do this at your own risk.

Boot option 1 on the live CD (test Ubuntu prior to installing)
select Applications>Accessories>Terminal from the menu bar
Find the partition with the Ubuntu installation by typing "sudo fdisk -l" (l is lower case L) into the terminal
Mount the partition containing the Ubuntu installation with the command "sudo mount /dev/sdXY /mnt" (where XY is the partition)
Reinstall GRUB 2 on the hard drive with the command "sudo grub-install --root-directory=/mnt/ /dev/sdX" (where X is the partition letter - NB do not specify the number)
Reboot into Ubuntu from the hard disk (Assuming that everything has worked)
select Applications>Accessories>Terminal from the menu bar
Refresh the GRUB 2 menu by rescanning your partitions with the command "sudo update-grub" (I needed to do this to boot into windows even though it appeared in the GRUB menu).

I used the Ubuntu Grub2 Community documentation to get this method.

Good luck!

What Copenhagen means for you - 3rd November in Cambridge

2009-11-06T00:57:00.000-08:00

I attended this joint event organized by The University of Cambridge, Cambridge City Council and the British Antarctic Survey in the Guildhall Cambridge on 3rd November. A panel of experts consisting of; Emily Shuckburgh head of the Open Oceans research group at the British Antarctic Survey who is undertaking research on understanding the dynamics of the atmosphere and oceans to improve predictions of future climate change, Chris Hope Reader in policy and modeling at the Judge Business School and nominated by the UK Government as Lead Author and Review Editor for the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Julian Alwood Group Leader of the Low Carbon and Materials Processing Research Group at the Department of Engineering and Michael Kelly, Professor of Technology in the Department of Engineering. gave short presentations on current thinking on climate change and what effective measures they would put in place to tackle climate change at COP15 The United Nations climate change conference in Copenhagen from the 7th to the 18th of December. The event was chaired by Tim Radford from The Guardian Newspaper.

Some of the interesting information presented by the panel included:

Carbon Dioxide (CO2) levels are the highest they have been in the last 20 million years.

Studies of gas trapped in ice proves a correlation between CO2 and temperature.

The North and South poles are being affected faster than the rest of the world by global warming.

Glaciers in Greenland are retreating at 1 meter per hour.

At current rates there will be no summer sea ice by the middle of the century.

At current energy demands there is insufficient space to meet the the worlds needs using alternative energy, world leaders need to focus on energy reduction before energy generation.

If the rest of the world used as much energy as the USA, UK and other developed countries we would need three planets.

Lighter cars, slower ships and trains, passively heated houses and longer lasting goods and materials are all things we can do now that would have a major impact on climate change.

In the UK CO2 emissions from houses has dropped by 4% since 1990 despite more houses being built but 6 fold reductions are needed.

Globally taxes work better than targets at controlling pollution (i.e. CO2).

Initial pollution taxes of £80 per ton of CO2 are considered effective for controlling CO2 with reductions in VAT and income tax of around 5%.

Carbon reduction measures have been demonstrated to improve the efficiency of the economy. This is a strong driver for developing countries but the developed world needs to lead by example.

90% to 95% of all climate change damage will be to poor countries and has been caused by rich countries.

We can't rely on politicians alone to solve these problems.

Photo Rita Willaert

Spareground.com

2009-03-11T00:47:00.000-07:00

Spareground.com is a new site created by Anne Jones (an old work colleague). The site which is still in its infancy is providing an innovative solution to the lack of available and cost efficient space in the UK. It works by allowing individual people or businesses to create listings to advertise their free or unused space.

The types of space which can be listed on the site includes car parking spaces, driveways, garages, storage space (sheds or barns for example) car sharing spaces, gardens or unused land or even accommodation. Listings can be for long or very short term use, for example if you lived near an event such as a music festival or a sports tournament, you could list and state it is for that period only.

The site also allows users to create listings to request any space or accommodation they are looking for. It is its free to use with no costs to list, or to use the listings.

This is an economical and ethical approach to getting the maximum benefit from the limited space that we have in the UK and promotes the use of redundant space. People can list their garden space for example if its overgrown and never used, allowing someone else to use it for growing vegetables. Garages near the coast could be leased to someone to store their water sports equipment saving CO2 emissions.

There appear to be limitless ways in which the Spareground website can be used to get the best use of of space and perhaps allow people to generate a little extra income, which in our current financial climate is something that could be particularly welcome.

Anne is keen to grow this site as quickly as possible in order to provide a useful online resource with a community feel.

The importance of getting the requirements right up front

2009-01-06T04:23:00.000-08:00

Having undertaken and overseen a fair amount of systems implementation in my time. I saw this video over the holiday period and it served as a useful reminder as to how easy it is to get the requirements for a new system wrong through poor communication and assumptions both from the customer and the supplier. Which is made harder by the frustration that inevitably follows.

Liquavista

2008-12-26T16:33:00.000-08:00

Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) technology has been with us for many years now and is widely used (in fact you are probably reading this on an LCD screen) but while it has undergone significant refinement it is far from perfect.

Issues with LCD displays include poor reflected or transflected performance making them difficult to see in high ambient light levels (e.g. sunlight) and relativity high power consumption required by the back light, which limits the time that portable devices can go between charges.

Liquavista is a spin out from Philips Research Labs who are developing a new display technology based on electrowetting to overcome some of the drawbacks with LCDs.

In simple terms electrowetting involves using the application of a voltage to change the properties of the repulsion and attraction between oil and water. Using this effect, Liquavista have created a coloured, pixelated optical switch, capable of switching in milliseconds, which in the future will form the basis of displays capable of showing video content.in daylight and in darker environments.

Mark Gostick, CEO recognises that the display industry has made significant investments in LCDs and does not expect to break into this market overnight. His strategy is an evolutionary one which is to ensure that Liquavista technology can be produced using the same plant for producing LCD and will interface with the device hardware in a similar way to existing LCD. The first market where the technology will be used is in phone and media player displays where its low power consumption, ease of use outside and graphic design advantages should provide a significant win over LCD technology.

I am looking forward to the day when I can use my laptop outside for extended periods between charges.

Howto - Use a Blackberry 8800 for data without Blackberry Internet Services

2008-12-21T05:28:00.000-08:00

I have recently aquired a second hand Blackberry 8800 to improve the communication with prospective employers. This has been facilitated by Virgin Mobile introducing a 30 pence per day flat rate data charge making mobile internet access affordable.

I selected a Blackberry because they are designed for business use. The battery life and display are outstanding and the qwerty keyboard is functional. They also have a bullet proof operating system which can be locked down by IT departments. This makes them popular with corporates and there is a plentiful supply of ex-company machines at reasonable prices which are generally not locked to a mobile provider.

Up until recently a blackberry would not have been a great choice because of the proprietary data communication methods that they used: Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES). This aimed at corporates where the IT department can integrated them with corporate email and calenders (e.g. Microsoft Exchange). Some mobile service providers also provided dedicated services for blackberries called Blackberry Internet Services (BIS) at a premium. However, more recent machines can connect to standard data services and run non blackberry applications such as Google and Yahoo clients (though these do not support push email services as BIS and BES do). As Virgin do not offer BIS I elected to take this route.

I found little (and often conflicting) information on how to set up a Blackberry without BIS so I have documented how I set my 8800 in this post in the hope that it will help you if you are thinking of doing the same. Please note that I am technically competent but know little about blackberries. Also this post represents the current position and will quickly be out of date.

Therefore you follow in my footsteps at your peril!

I purchased my blackberry from the turnonyourmobile-webshop on eBay this is because they are an established powerseller specialising in mobiles, offered a three month warrenty and the price was very competitive which helped to mitigate the risk that my plans may not work.

There is a useful on buying a second hand Blackberry FAQ in the Blackberry Forums which is worth reading before you buy a Blackberry.

The next step was to remove the corporate IT security policy which restricted access to some of the installed applications by following this excellent FAQ from the Blackberry Forums.

The Blackberry was now prepared and ready for me to configure and install the applications.

The first thing that I did was to set up access to the Virgin data network. I did this by going into Setup>advanced options>tcp and changing the APN: to goto.virginmobile.uk. I left the username and password blank. You should be able to get your APN from your mobile services provider.

The next thing was to install the Opera mini browser (The Blackberry default browser did not seem to work without BIS) by downloading it and installing it using the Blackberry desktop software. This allows me to access my Google, Hotmail and Yahoo mail plus surf the web.

Finally I installed Google maps which works well with the built in GPS. To do this I went to http://www.google.com/mobile/gmm/bes.html and downloaded the ALX package which I unzipped and installed through the Blackberry desktop software.

If you have any corrections, improvements or if you know of other good applications please tell others by leaving a comment.

Virtual Conference on Climate Change and CO2 Storage

2008-12-05T11:56:00.000-08:00

A couple of days ago I attended the virtual conference on climate change and CO2 storage hosted by the Department of Earth Science and Engineering at Imperial College London in Second Life which had the following presentations:

Martin J. Blunt
"Design of Carbon Dioxide Storage"
Head of the Department of Earth Sciences and Engineering at Imperial College

4-5pm in the UK, 8-9am in California

Sir Brian Hoskins
"Climate Variability and Change"
Director of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College

5-6pm in the UK, 9-10am in California

Franklyn M. Orr Jr.
"Technology in the Greenhouse: Research to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions"
Director of the Global Climate and Energy Project and Professor of Energy Resources Engineering at Stanford University

6-7pm in the UK, 10-11am in California

I had two reasons for attending the conference. The first was that I have a keen interest in the environment and the potentially devastating effects of global warming on the ecosystem. The second stems from my interest in collaborative tools and in particular, online collaboration.

It was clear from the distinguished list of presenters that this was going to be an interesting and informative conference and I was not disappointed. Global warming is thought of in terms of its mean effects such as mean temperature rise and mean rises in sea level, while these are undoubtedly important. A major risk hidden within the mean projections are localised extremes in temperature, rainfall and wind which will have severe impacts. From the work done so far CO2 storage would seem to be a practical tool in the reduction of atmospheric CO2 when used with other measures.

I came away from the conference with a personal view that the effects of global warming are here now, will get worse and that the world is "fiddling while Rome is burning" The conference also left me wondering if there are potential opportunities to reduce atmospheric carbon emissions as a result of the recession through increased investment into energy efficiency and reductions in CO2 created through energy generation, instead of buoying up an economic model that relies on the increased consumption of finite world resources with what would appear to be a depressingly predictable outcome.

The more interesting reason for this post was would a conference in Second Life work? I have to admit to being some what skeptical about how the delegates and speakers would fare in an alien virtual environment with multiple technological dependencies. There is some mitigation in so far as I suspect most of my fellow delegates were scientists and therefore probably fairly savvy with technology.

This was my first foray into Second Life as perhaps surprisingly I am not really into computer gaming. So I guess that I could be thought of as an excellent "guinea pig". I was very impressed with Second Life as a vehicle for delivering the conference.

The organisation of the conference was excellent. Delegates enrolled by email in advance and were then given clear and concise information in a number of well timed emails on how to create an avatar for virtual registration. A couple of days before the conference I was sent another email with instructions on how to "teleport" to the the conference centre on the Elucian Islands, which is "virtually-owned" by the Nature Publishing Group. Delegates were advised to visit the conference hall a day in advance to ensure that their Second Life client software was configured correctly. The conference organisers were on hand as avatars to help resolve any issues that delegates may have. On the day of the conference posters were put up a couple of hours in advance on the external walls of the conference centre. The virtual experience matched that of a real world scientific conference.

Attending the sessions in Second Life was much better than being in a real world conference with speakers and real delegates at Imperial and at Stanford. However, there were a few expected avatar "driver errors" with delegates standing, walking through and floating in front of the virtual screen. There were also some technical errors with the sound, the first speaker was distorted, the sound also took a while to get set up for the third speaker. However, when one considers that the speakers and delegates were dotted around the globe there were fewer technical issues than I was expecting. The other slightly disappointing thing was the apparent lack of interaction between delegates in between the presentations.

Second Life is an excellent tool in an educational context. It really felt like I was in a room with others but there were many advantages. I could leave my avatar body and go to other vantage points in the room, so I got an excellent view of the slides without blocking anyone else. The local text chat feature was brilliant for providing feedback to the organisers and asking questions to the conference. The virtual conference was a level playing field the anonymity encouraged me (and I suspect others) to ask questions of the experts speakers that I may have been less inclined to ask at a physical conference.There was also a one to one chat feature that allowed text (and I suspect voice) communication between individual delegates. Then there was the snapshot feature (used to take the pictures in this post) that allows delegates to record interesting slides. I also experimented with video capture of the session using Camstudio but have not had a chance to play with this yet.

This innovative use of an existing technology adds a new dimension to distance learning and virtual learning environments such as moodle. Virtual or simulated lecture theatres or class rooms are never going to be a replacement for the real thing but they could add great value to courses that follow an Open University format.

Thank you Imperial and Nature for a great experience.

For more pictures of the conference go to http://tinyurl.com/5botg2

Cambridge Hi-Tech Association of Small Enterprises (CHASE)

2008-08-12T11:57:00.000-07:00

CHASE is an association of small businesses in and around Cambridge, whose main business is connected with high technology. It was founded in 1987 and hosts regular monthly talks by local entrepreneurs.

Membership comprises a mixture of around 50 small enterprises as well as individuals and covers a wide range of specialisms, including computing, electronics, communications, biotechnology, and support services such as patent agents, accountants and lawyers.

Full membership is open to firms and individuals with up to 10 employees, larger concerns are welcome to become associate members. Attendance at meetings is free though regular attendees are expected to pay a small annual membership of around £20.

I attended the talks and demonstrations of new software and web applications meeting held at ARM on the 4th of August. I was made to feel welcome by a group of four people within two feet of walking in through the door and had some very interesting exchanges of knowledge and ideas before the meeting formally started.

To be honest the presentations of new software was somewhat disappointing. This was due largely to a lack of preparation by those presenting which lead to I suspect an unfair conclusion that many of the products were little more than "vapourware" My reason for saying that this is an unfair conclusion is that in subsequent discussions with the presenters it was quite clear that they all had some significant merrit to their products.

The remander of the "formal" meeting was an informal oportunity to showcase and discus good and inovative solutions that members had discovered or used on the web. This was very intersesting and I hope to review some of the applications in a later post.

I have been invited back and intent to continue to attend CHASE events and would encourage anyone else in the Cambridge area to investigate CHASE for them selves.

Link to CHASE web site

Barcam2

2008-08-02T14:34:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I was fortunate to be able to attend Barcam2 hosted by the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute at the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge. I wasn't sure what to expect as this was my first Barcamp. The day was most rewarding. OK I was the oldest person there and the majority of the attendees are self confessed geeks, neither of these were an issue. I was made to feel very at home and the attendees amply demonstrated the geek stereotype to be totally unfounded with a high degree of commitment and enthusiasm for diverse topics ranging from chemistry through to anthrapology in addition to interpersonal skills much higher than those normally encountered in business. The day was broadly unplanned with all attending expected to contribute a pressentation to the group. The day had no set agenda other than breaks for coffee and lunch with contributors volunteering pressentations of 10 or 20 minutes on a whiteboard. Times were very loosly policed during the day but we finished on time only dropping one pressentation, with a tour of the sequencing machines at the Sanger centre thrown in for good measure. If you are passionate about technology and science and are open to exchanging ideas and knowledge with highly motivated and commited individuals, I would urge you to keep an eye open for Barcamp events. It is well worth the effort.

Link to my huridly produced pressentation

Link to Barcamp wiki

Link to Barcamb video