Suzuki Burgman UH200

In June 2009 I bought myself a brand new Sym Symply 125cc scooter for about £1500 to get myself to and from University. 15000 miles later I sold the Symply back to the agent for £200 because it would just cost too much to keep it on the road. However, I still needed something to get to uni and back. So I put the £200 towards buying a second hand Suzuki Burgman. I have been riding the Burgman that last two weeks and it really is such a delight. Despite the horrible weather we have had up here in the north of England I find myself  enjoying every minute of the trip.

One of the major advantages of the Burgman is that it has a massive luggage space under the seat. Unlike the Symply my helmet actually fits in there. Apparently it can take two helmets. I haven't tried two helmets but I'm pretty sure it will do it easily. I'm one of those people that are forever carrying myself to death with my backpack that I cart along with me wherever I go. The backpack fits under the seat with all my other goods and gadgets with ease.

The second thing that makes the actual ride such a joy is the seat. It is really comfortable. The seat is nice and wide and it has a little bit of a support behind your back. With more leg space you can stretch your legs out a bit making it much more relaxing. The Burgman is also much lower and I can put both my feet down flat when I stop, again making for a much more relaxed ride (or stop if you please).

The Symply had a little hook onto which one could hang a bag by your feet. When you hung a bag in the footwell though you had to swing your leg over the seat to get onto the scooter. Although, I guess, this kept me supple it was a bit of a drag and a couple of times the hooks on my boot nipped a tear in the seat which was  very annoying. With the big luggage compartment on the Burgman this problem does not arise.

I have only filled up the tank twice so I haven't worked out the fuel consumption yet, but the fuel tank on the Burgman is at least double the size of the Symply's. I did at least 120 miles after the first fill-up and the tank wasn't empty yet.

So both thumbs up for the Burgman!

The Suzuki Burgman UH200

The Sym Symply 125 when it was new.

Lack-of-service-BT continues ...

So, about 3 weeks ago someone from BT calls me and offers to put me through to their disputes team. Being in the middle of the day on a Friday while I'm in the lab, I couldn't take the call, so I was told to call back and ask for disputes. Today, after about 3 weeks it was the first time I was home during the day so that I could make the call. As usual I had to venture through an endless maze of menu options before someone answered the phone. Between being put on hold and arguing the fact that I actually want to talk to disputes and not pay extra to get out of a contract that was mis-sold to me, I was cut off after 19 minutes and 55 seconds. Then the first amazing thing happened. I was called back within seconds and offered an apology for being cut off. I was then transfered to someone whom I believe must be in disputes. I had to explain the whole static IP address again and was then transferred to someone to me that they just have to tell me that they are going to investigate the issue and have to inform me that they will be retrieving and listening to the original calls. Amazing! This is what I've been wanting from the beginning. So, hopefully in the next 5 working days I'll hear from them and get this resolved.

Lack-of-service-BT

It is probably not news to anybody that BT is totally incapable of providing decent support for their own services. Or even that they use illegal means such as lying and/or misselling to catch you as a customer.

However, like an idiot, I managed to get myself caught by them once again. Probably because of a naive believe that people can't be that bad all the time.

In January this year BT called me about switching to them for broadband. I used to be with Zen, who are very good, but they don't provide support after hours and over weekends which are the only times I have to resolve any issues. So when the BT guy called and confirmed SEVERAL TIMES that he can indeed provide me with 20MB broadband, 40Gb download, some other things AND A STATIC IP address, I decided to change.

Well, it is now June and my IP address has changed 4 times. When it changed the first time, in February, I submitted a complaint via the BT website. After a few days I received the normal confirmation with an incident number. To this day, I have not had a response. When it changed for the second time, I called (like an idiot) and merely was passed from one poor sod in India to another to get nothing resolved. This week, the IP changed again on 08.06.2011. Before I could even complain, it changed again today (10.06.2011). So I spent another hour being transferred between India and England and back to India just to be promised about an hour an a half (that, Mr BT translates to 90 minutes) ago that someone from customer services will call me back in 20 minutes. I have also submitted another online complaint and this time actually received an automated confirmation within a few minutes.

So, dear reader, if you have any idea who one is suppose to call to get BT issues resolved, please leave a comment. Or, just to show that you have read this, please leave a comment. I would like for as many people as possible to read this and not be caught in BT's dishonesty/incompetence. Tell your friends to read this and leave a comment. Maybe eventually some BT person with enough savvy, knowledge, influence and will to live, will read it, contact me and resolve the issue.

Another dissertation

So I'm almost at the end of my second MSc and hard at work with the writing of my dissertation. This time it is a MSc in Bioinformatics and Computational Systems Biology. So still very computery, but with a lot of Biology. Specifically molecular and synthetic biology.

I have decided to start writing this just to take a break from the dissertation every now and then. It has been difficult to get my thoughts organised and I hope thinking about something else every now and then will help.

Like last year I decided to use LaTeX. Unlike last year, I don't have to write a 10 to 15 thousand word document, but rather a 16 page write up of my research in the style of the Bioinformatics Journal. For this purpose I had to download a template provided by the Bioinformatics Journal.

I have selected applications again that will run on both Linux and Windows because my computer at uni runs Windows and all my computers at home run Linux. Off course the main requirement is that the software has to be open source.

Firstly there is Mendeley for managing references. It is quite good and I have been using it all year. It has a plug-in for OpenOffice and it works well with LaTeX too. Mendeley also keeps itself synchronised with a web account so when I work on a different computer I can synchronise that too with my references.

Then off course there is Texmaker that I used last year. I managed to set it up to run my own make script from one of the customizable menu items.

I managed to create a nice E-R diagram with DBDesigner4 for the mySQL database that I had to design and the rest of my graphics I have been making with Inkscape. As usual it is a bit of a faff to the graphics in the right place, but I found some nice tips here http://andrewjpage.com/index.php?/archives/48-Figure-spanning-2-columns-in-Latex.html.

I have had quite a bit of success this year running Windows applications on Linux using Wine. My favourite photo manipulation program is still Irfanview. It is not open source and you should really register it (which I have done). For £6 it is more than worth it though. I really don't mind supporting software like this little gem.

PDF-XChange Viewer is another application that I have really become attached too. I run it on both Windows and Linux. On Linux it runs quite successfully with Wine. It allows one to mark-up PDF documents, so unlike last year I don't have two files full of printed papers.

I also started using Dropbox this year. And boy, has that made my life easier! I now know my stuff is backed up and it is usually in at least three places, my PC at uni, my PC at home and my laptop. I only need to log on to the Internet and my computer is synchronised with the Dropbox website. If off course I am on somebody else's computer or a computer in one of the clusters at uni I only need to log onto the Dropbox website and download the document I need. Amazing.

Well, I should probably get back to the dissertation - or to bed, if I can convince myself to fall asleep ...

Categorical imperative

Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.

Immanuel Kant (translated by James W. Ellington)

Reference: Wikipedia

The origin of serendepity

"It was once when I read a silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip: as their highnesses traveled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of: for instance, one of them discovered that a camel blind of the right eye had traveled the same road lately, because the grass was eaten only on the left side, where it was worse than on the right—now do you understand serendipity? One of the most remarkable instances of this accidental sagacity (for you must observe that no discovery of a thing you are looking for, comes under this description) was of my Lord Shaftsbury, who happening to dine at Lord Chancellor Clarendon's, found out the marriage of the Duke of York and Mrs. Hyde, by the respect with which her mother treated her at table."

by Horace Walpole on 28 January 1754 in a letter he wrote to his friend Horace Mann

Reference: Wikipedia

Using LaTeX for your dissertation - part 1 (On my soapbox)

Why use LaTeX?

I don't know whether I'll ever be able to finish my dissertation for my MSc, but even if I don't, I thought I'd document the LaTeX environment I set up for myself. It might just be of use to someone else and save them all the time I wasted to discover things.

I could thank the Open University (in England) for wasting all of this time since they have never heard of anything other than Microsoft Word. They do say that you can use Open Office, but off course tutors HAVE to mark assignments using Word and if you've seen what Word can do to a Word document formatted by itself you'll know it is a somewhat futile gesture trying to get it to sensibly display a Word doc created with Open Office.

The OU will let you know with great enthusiasm that you can buy Microsoft Office for about £35. But if I'm going to spend £35 it will be on shoes for my daughter and not to enrich Bill Gates any further, even if he is going to give the money away to some unfortunate soul somewhere else. The reality is that my daughter still needs school shoes. The OU folks, as sincere as they might be, seem to be as out of touch with reality as the judges in this country.

Since I discovered many years ago that many academics (not those from the OU though) use LaTeX, I thought it would be great if I could use it for my dissertation. I'm always game for learning something new and if there ever is an opportunity to rebel against the blind, numbskull use of Microsoft applications, I'll go for it!!

I have two main reasons for using LaTeX. Firstly, it can be used cross-platform. I like being able to freely switch between Windows and Linux. It allows me to work anywhere and at any time. Secondly I like not to be forced to work in a GUI environment. It is faster and it is much more stable and again it allows me to work anywhere and at any time. Even if I don’t have any LaTeX stuff installed where I happen to find myself, my work doesn’t have to stop because I can use a plain editor to carry on writing. I can generate a pdf or RTF document whenever I get to a computer with my LaTeX apps installed.

Forums for getting help

Firstly I have to mention the forums I only discovered a week ago. I can’t believe that I didn’t come across them at the beginning of the year. I have done searches on Google for LaTeX related information for hours and hours but I never came across these forums. If I did, it would have save me a tremendous amount of time. So the first thing to do is to bookmark this site: www.latex-community.org

Choosing the right applications

I did try MikTex, but in the end decided to use a Linux environment for assembling my documents. I just open a terminal onto one of my Linux servers and run my scripts to create my document. The drive is Samba shared so I can edit my tex files with my GUI applications too.

Vi is my favourite text editor. I chose to use Texmaker as my editor when I do work in a GUI environment for the same reasons as previously stated. Texmaker is available for both Windows and Linux.

For my bibliography I decided to use JabRef. JabRef is written in Java and thus offers the same portability. JabRef creates a BibTex file and thus, when not in a GUI I can use vi to carry on working.

To give an example how these choices served me right I can relate to you my holiday story of August 2008. It was probably not the best time to go in terms of finances and considering the fact that I desperately needed to work on my dissertation. But, I haven’t seen my family for 5 years and I was desperate to see them and for them to meet my children. It was the best holiday that my daughter, my son and I have ever had, so it was the right choice.

However, three days before we were due to leave I switched my laptop on and for no apparent reason, all Windows could give me was a blue screen of death. I honestly did not have the time, energy or inclination to figure out why. I was just not interested.

Fortunately I had a choice of three operating systems on my laptop. With Windows failing, I was left with Ubuntu and Puppy Linux. Ubuntu off course would work, but so would Puppy. My preference was Puppy, just because it is so much smaller and quicker to do things. The only thing I haven’t bothered to get working on Puppy is JabRef because I haven’t bothered trying to get Java installed. I’ll get around to that sometime.

While on holiday I thought I’d ask friends and family who have more interest in Windows than me whether they have any ideas how I could restore the broken system. A friend suggested a Linux based utility for recovering Windows systems. It didn’t work because apparently there was no space in the registry to set an administrators password and one needed to log in as administrator to do the recovery. Then three weeks later I was going to show my cousin what the installation was doing. At this point it decided to start working again - for no apparent reason. Just in case you think I was mistaken, I did boot into Windows a few times over the three weeks to try things people suggested and every time I got the blue screen of death.

In the next few posts, I’ll discuss the scripts I wrote, software applications and LaTeX packages I use in more detail.