search.json

[

  
    {
      "title"			: "UK Lustre Users Group",
      "url"			: "/talks/2023/12/computational-storage/",
      "tag"       : "HPC, exascale, storage, excalibur",
      "category"  : "talks",
      "date"      : "2023-12-06",
      "excerpt"		: "In this keynote talk I introduced the work we have been doing on active storage (also known as computational storage) as part of the ExcaliData projects within Excalibur (the UK exascale software readiness programme)."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Using Deep Learning to find cyclones in model output",
      "url"			: "/science/2023/07/tcdetect/",
      "tag"       : "aiml, cyclones, daniel",
      "category"  : "science",
      "date"      : "2023-07-09",
      "excerpt"		: "  Galea, D., Kunkel, J., & Lawrence, B. N. (2023). TCDetect: A New Method of Detecting the Presence of Tropical Cyclones Using Deep Learning. Artificial Intelligence for the Earth Systems, 2(3), e220045.https://doi.org/10.1175/AIES-D-22-0045.1"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "NCAS@Reading Weekly Seminar",
      "url"			: "/talks/2023/06/what-lies-beneath/",
      "tag"       : "HPC, exascale, hrcm, modelling_futures",
      "category"  : "talks",
      "date"      : "2023-06-23",
      "excerpt"		: "In this seminar I laid out the background to the new ENES infrastructure strategy, including not only the computing context but a good part of the science motivation for a spectrumof climate modelling activities. Below I sketch out a summary of a few of the points I made."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Draft ENES Infrastructure Strategy Open for Comment",
      "url"			: "/science/2023/06/infrastructure-strategy/",
      "tag"       : "exacale, hpc, climate, modelling_futures",
      "category"  : "science",
      "date"      : "2023-06-20",
      "excerpt"		: "One of the many reasons I have been so quiet of late is that I have been bevering away on a new ENES1 infrastructure strategy for climate modelling. We now have a draft out for public feedback, so please do comment!            ENES is the European Network for Earth System modelling - main website is at https://portal.enes.org. (Footnote added, 21/06/23). ↩      "
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Dual Tariffs for EVs Don't Play Nicely with Heatpumps",
      "url"			: "/ecolife/2023/06/dual-tariffs-4evs/",
      "tag"       : "ev",
      "category"  : "ecolife",
      "date"      : "2023-06-18",
      "excerpt"		: "So we have an EV (a “2021 Vauxhall corsa e”, since you asked). We had to get one in a hurry as our 2008 Seat Ibiza ecomotive died very suddenly and unexpectedly. We had always planned to replace with an EV, but imagined that would be in a year or two.  As we live in place with no public transport, and my wife and I both have o(20) mile commutes (in diffiferent directions), we had to buy a replacement in a hurry - without doing much due diligence, either around car or charging options."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "UKNCSP Strategic Workshop on High Resolution Climate Modelling",
      "url"			: "/talks/2023/06/data-challenges-4hrcm/",
      "tag"       : "HPC, exascale, hrcm",
      "category"  : "talks",
      "date"      : "2023-06-16",
      "excerpt"		: "This was an inaugural meeting of the UK high resolutionclimate modelling community under the auspices of the newUK National Climate Science Partnership."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Baljifest",
      "url"			: "/talks/2023/05/perspectives4baljifest/",
      "tag"       : "HPC, exascale, modelling_futures",
      "category"  : "talks",
      "date"      : "2023-05-15",
      "excerpt"		: "Baljifest was a celebration of the contributions of Balaji to climate modelling at GFDL and Princeton. There was a day of presentations, followed by a panel on the future of climate modelling. Saravanan and I kicked off the panel with a presentation each."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "UK Turbulence Consortium, 2023 Annual Meeting",
      "url"			: "/talks/2023/03/data-for-uktc/",
      "tag"       : "HPC, exascale, esiwace, excalidata, cmip6, ipcc",
      "category"  : "talks",
      "date"      : "2023-03-27",
      "excerpt"		: "An invited talk to the UK turbulence consortium which aimed todescribe some of the activities the climate science commmunityhas undertaken, and is undertaking, to deal with the data deluge."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Two new preprints",
      "url"			: "/science/2021/10/preprints/",
      "tag"       : "climate,, epidemiology",
      "category"  : "science",
      "date"      : "2021-10-05",
      "excerpt"		: "I’ve just added links to two preprints to my publications page. Quite different topics. (There are also a lot of recent talks online as well, I’ve had a busy month!)"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "ESiWACE2 2021 General Assembly",
      "url"			: "/talks/2021/09/esiwace2-ga-wp4/",
      "tag"       : "HPC, exascale, esiwace",
      "category"  : "talks",
      "date"      : "2021-09-27",
      "excerpt"		: "An update on progress in the ESiWACE2 fourth work package, WP4, data (systems) at scale."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "19th Workshop on high performance computing in meteorology",
      "url"			: "/talks/2021/09/digital-twins/",
      "tag"       : "HPC, exascale, digital-twins",
      "category"  : "talks",
      "date"      : "2021-09-20",
      "excerpt"		: "Presentation: pdf (0.3MB)"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "ESCAPE-2 Final Dissemination Workshop",
      "url"			: "/talks/2021/09/excalibur4escape/",
      "tag"       : "HPC, exascale, esiwace, excalidata",
      "category"  : "talks",
      "date"      : "2021-09-03",
      "excerpt"		: "ExCALIBUR for ESCAPE"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Benchmarking for ExCALIBUR Update",
      "url"			: "/talks/2021/09/esi-to-exc/",
      "tag"       : "HPC, exascale, esiwace, excalidata",
      "category"  : "talks",
      "date"      : "2021-09-02",
      "excerpt"		: "From ESiWACE to ExCALIData"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Under the hood of a Digital Twin ESM",
      "url"			: "/computing/2021/06/under-the-hood/",
      "tag"       : "climate",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2021-06-16",
      "excerpt"		: "In which we peer under the hood of the idea that ephemeral data produced by a digital twin can be used by collaborators who co-designed the digital twin experiment."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Digital Earths - The fourth phase of (ESM) modelling maturity?",
      "url"			: "/computing/2021/05/modelling-maturity/",
      "tag"       : "climate",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2021-05-26",
      "excerpt"		: "I recently introduced my definitions of “Digital Twins” and “Digital Earths” and concluded with the statement that I thought there was scope to do good thing in (these new) twinning activities. There are two such axes of scope: scientific and technical. Here I want to discuss the latter (and it’s impact on some science). In the discussion which follows I’m talking about Earth System Models (ESMs), but the arguments could apply to many other modelling activities (e.g. epidemiological modelling)."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "What is a digital twin?",
      "url"			: "/computing/2021/05/what-is-a-digital-twin/",
      "tag"       : "modelling_futures, climate",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2021-05-22",
      "excerpt"		: "There is a lot of talk about “digital twins”, so my first question was: “what is a digital twin?”"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "When failure to share data costs lives",
      "url"			: "/academic/2021/05/a-data-sharing/",
      "tag"       : "academic, covid",
      "category"  : "academic",
      "date"      : "2021-05-16",
      "excerpt"		: "(June 2023: This draft article was inadvertently published some time in the past. It was written some time in 2020, I think, and I never finished it, and frankly I don’t know how it ever got published. I have just realised that it is “out there”, so rather than completely remove it, I have edited it slightly so the unfinished sentences are removed, and added a little coda on where we are now. However, it’s not my finest work.)"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "The future of the ESGF",
      "url"			: "/computing/bigdata/2020/11/the-future-of-the-esgf/",
      "tag"       : "software, curation, esgf, cmip, cmip6",
      "category"  : "computingbigdata",
      "date"      : "2020-11-13",
      "excerpt"		: "I think most of the community who use climate projections and the products of climate model intercomparison projects depend in some way on the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF). The ESGF consists of data nodes which are distributed globally, holding petabytes of data:"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Humans in climate models",
      "url"			: "/academic/2020/10/humans-in-climate-models/",
      "tag"       : "academic, climate, esm",
      "category"  : "academic",
      "date"      : "2020-10-26",
      "excerpt"		: "I recently had my attention drawn to Beckage et al, 2020 - “The Earth has humans, so why don’t our climate models?”"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "ESIWACE2 Mid-Term Review",
      "url"			: "/talks/2020/10/Data-Systems/",
      "tag"       : "HPC, exascale, esiwace",
      "category"  : "talks",
      "date"      : "2020-10-21",
      "excerpt"		: "Data Systems at Scale"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "On scientific software - reproducibility",
      "url"			: "/academic/2020/06/software4/",
      "tag"       : "software, curation, fair, publishing, journals",
      "category"  : "academic",
      "date"      : "2020-06-10",
      "excerpt"		: "Well I had to expose this series of blog posts before I had them all done because of this:"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "On scientific software - definitions",
      "url"			: "/academic/2020/06/software3/",
      "tag"       : "software, curation",
      "category"  : "academic",
      "date"      : "2020-06-07",
      "excerpt"		: "So far in this series on scientific software, I discussed the notion that it might not be that easy to define quality for scientific code (and left some questions hanging about how we might do that), and introduced some scope questions>scope questions about what we mean by science code, and did that by producing a big diagram with lots of stuff."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "On scientific software - scope",
      "url"			: "/academic/2020/06/software2/",
      "tag"       : "software, curation, FAIR, publishing, journals",
      "category"  : "academic",
      "date"      : "2020-06-01",
      "excerpt"		: "Last time I discussed the idea that the notion of “quality scientific software” wasn’t very helpful, insofar as scientific code quality is a bit like beauty, being “in the eye of the beholder” - but I concluded with a few questions that IMHO are more important than “is it quality?”, being:"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "On scientific software - a beginning",
      "url"			: "/academic/2020/05/software1/",
      "tag"       : "software, curation, FAIR, publishing, journals",
      "category"  : "academic",
      "date"      : "2020-05-27",
      "excerpt"		: "All the opprobrium for Neil Ferguson’s epidemiological code has got to me. Enough that I’m going to commit myself to a series of blog posts, after a long silence here … (note that I have not committed to the interval period though!)"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Earthcube - What about Data?",
      "url"			: "/talks/2020/05/What-about-simulations/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "talks",
      "date"      : "2020-05-05",
      "excerpt"		: "When (and how) should a simulation be Fair?Presentation: pdf (4 MB).After a reminder about FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable - not Reproducible), I discuss some of the issues about applying these concepts to Simulation Data. Apart from the volume issues, we have to decide just what “Simulation Data” actually means, does it mean the entire workflow, or just the outputs.  There are a huge variety of types of simulation, are they all important? Using the ES-DOC vocabularies, I point out that in practice simulations are not meaningfully reproducible - except in trivial cases, and actually it is more important to reproduce experiments - which is of course the heart of model intercomparison. At CEDA we have two decades of experience curating data, and we now use the JASMIN platform to provide a data commons to make data accessible. Lots of simulation data is analysed on JASMIN, alongside the CEDA archive, but for fifteen years we have made decisions about whether to archive simulation data based on (what was then) the BADC Numerical Model Data Policy.  The key insight in developing that policy was that it’s relatively easy to decide what’s important, and what’s not important, but there is a lot of middle ground for which value judgements are important. We developed polices to decide on the important and not important data, and to guide the value judgements, and these are summarised here. Underlying all decisions are questions about affordabilty, and whether or not adequate metadata can be (or will be) produced. Without such metadata curation of simulation data becomes pointless. The bottom line is that not all simulation data should be FAIR, but that which needs to be FAIR needs to be well documented. Money matters as simulation data at scale is incredibly expensive."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "The UM User's Workshop 2019 - Next Generation Modellin Systems",
      "url"			: "/talks/2019/06/umuw/",
      "tag"       : "HPC, exascale",
      "category"  : "talks",
      "date"      : "2019-06-18",
      "excerpt"		: "Challenges facing the modelling community"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "ESIWACE2 Kick-Off",
      "url"			: "/talks/2019/03/Data-Systems/",
      "tag"       : "HPC, exascale, esiwace",
      "category"  : "talks",
      "date"      : "2019-03-12",
      "excerpt"		: "Data Systems at Scale"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "NCAS Seminar",
      "url"			: "/talks/2019/03/end-of-climate-modelling/",
      "tag"       : "HPC, exascale",
      "category"  : "talks",
      "date"      : "2019-03-01",
      "excerpt"		: "The end of Climate Modelling as we know it"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Computer Science Seminar",
      "url"			: "/talks/2019/02/supercomputing-jasmin-diversity/",
      "tag"       : "HPC, exascale, JASMIN",
      "category"  : "talks",
      "date"      : "2019-02-11",
      "excerpt"		: "Supercomputers are no longer all the same and it will get worse; a climate modelling perspective"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "NERC HPC Strategy",
      "url"			: "/talks/2018/11/NERC-HPC/",
      "tag"       : "HPC, exascale, JASMIN",
      "category"  : "talks",
      "date"      : "2018-11-27",
      "excerpt"		: "Trends and Context for Environmental HPC"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Extreme Data Workshop",
      "url"			: "/talks/2018/09/lawrence-extreme-data/",
      "tag"       : "data-science, exascale, JASMIN",
      "category"  : "talks",
      "date"      : "2018-09-18",
      "excerpt"		: "Beating Data Bottlenecks in Weather and Climate Science"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Open Meeting for Hydro-JULES - Next generation land-surface and hydrological predictions",
      "url"			: "/talks/2018/09/lawrence-hydrojules/",
      "tag"       : "jules, hydrology, climate, exascale, hydro-jules",
      "category"  : "talks",
      "date"      : "2018-09-10",
      "excerpt"		: "Building a Community Hydrological Model"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Workload Revisited",
      "url"			: "/management/2018/07/workload2/",
      "tag"       : "workload",
      "category"  : "management",
      "date"      : "2018-07-03",
      "excerpt"		: "In April I reported my first couple of months of workload anlaysis using the timing app. I’ve now done three more months, so was interested to look at how I’d done."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Getting to know an Ipad: Week One",
      "url"			: "/academic/2018/07/ipad/",
      "tag"       : "management",
      "category"  : "academic",
      "date"      : "2018-07-02",
      "excerpt"		: "I was an early adopter of Android tablets, and my most recent one (a 2014 Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1) was excellent. It’s still excellent, but runs an ancient version of Android – too ancient for my paranoia about information security, so it needed replacement."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "JASMIN User Conference",
      "url"			: "/talks/2018/06/jasmin-uc/",
      "tag"       : "data-science, exascale, JASMIN",
      "category"  : "talks",
      "date"      : "2018-06-27",
      "excerpt"		: "The Changing Nature of JASMIN"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Data-Intensive weather and climate science",
      "url"			: "/talks/2018/06/climate-data-for-mpe/",
      "tag"       : "data-science, exascale",
      "category"  : "talks",
      "date"      : "2018-06-25",
      "excerpt"		: "Climate Data: Issues, Systems, and Opportunities"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "EuroHPC Requirements Workshop",
      "url"			: "/talks/2018/06/EuroHPC-Requirements/",
      "tag"       : "data-science, esiwace, eurohpc, exascale",
      "category"  : "talks",
      "date"      : "2018-06-13",
      "excerpt"		: "EuroHPC: Requirements from Weather and Climate"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Workload - Where does Bryan spend his time?",
      "url"			: "/management/2018/04/workload/",
      "tag"       : "workload",
      "category"  : "management",
      "date"      : "2018-04-12",
      "excerpt"		: "I’ve always wondered where I spend my time. I keep records for some projects because one has to, but I’ve never found a way of recording interesting information easily enough. That changed recently: it turns out it is now possible to get a handle on where you spend time pretty easily, and at the same time learn about what applications you use most."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Data Sciences for Climate and Environment (Alan Turing Institute)",
      "url"			: "/talks/2018/03/data-science/",
      "tag"       : "data-science",
      "category"  : "talks",
      "date"      : "2018-03-26",
      "excerpt"		: "This talk covers a range of challenges for, and examples of, using (modern) data science techniques in Environmental Science (of course we have been using data science forever).  Some issues with hardware and software environment are discussed."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Requirements for a global data infrastructure in support of CMIP6",
      "url"			: "/computing/2018/03/wip-paper/",
      "tag"       : "cmip6",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2018-03-22",
      "excerpt"		: "Our paper on the work of the WCRP Working Group on Climate Modeling (WGCM) Infrastructure Panel (WIP) wrecommendations for the global data infrastructure needed to support CMIP design, future growth and evolution has just appeared in GMD discussions.Please have a look and potentially contribute to the online review/discussion."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "The Exascale Challenge to the UK - Part Tree - Capacity",
      "url"			: "/computing/2017/12/exascale3/",
      "tag"       : "exascale, cms, modelling_futures",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2017-12-31",
      "excerpt"		: "In this post we want to consider how much science we can do with the computers we currently have available (ARCHER and NEXCS), and in subsequent posts we’ll consider the route to exascale."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "The CF Data Model Paper Appears",
      "url"			: "/academic/2017/12/cfdm-paper/",
      "tag"       : "cf, data_modelling, papers",
      "category"  : "academic",
      "date"      : "2017-12-20",
      "excerpt"		: "It’s always a nice present for any academic when a paper finally appears “in print”. After some months in public review, our paper introducing a formal data model for the Climate Forecast (CF) conventions (Hassell, 2017) has appeared in Geoscientific Model Development. Although CF was developed for content stored in NetCDF files, this data model has been developed in such a way that the logic can be used for CF content stored in other formats."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "ESiWACE General Assembly",
      "url"			: "/talks/2017/12/esiwace-ga/",
      "tag"       : "esiwace, exascale",
      "category"  : "talks",
      "date"      : "2017-12-12",
      "excerpt"		: "The talk covers the “exploitability” component of the ESIWACE project. The work we describe is development of cost models for exascale HPC storage, plus new software to write and manage data at scale."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "The Exascale Challenge to the UK - Part Two - Compute",
      "url"			: "/computing/2017/12/exascale2/",
      "tag"       : "exascale, cms, modelling_futures",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2017-12-10",
      "excerpt"		: "Last time I set up the generic exascale challenge, this time I want to discuss how it is playing out here and now for UK climate modelling. This long-ish post discusses computer hardare and benchmarking of our codes. The next one will discuss the implication for science."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "The Exascale Challenge to the UK - Part One",
      "url"			: "/computing/2017/12/exascale/",
      "tag"       : "exascale, isenes, esiwace",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2017-12-05",
      "excerpt"		: "It is no secret that much of the progress in climate system modelling in recent decades has been on the back of the (then) inexorable increase in computational power associated with Moore’s Law - much of which came for free as chips got faster. However, now they’re not so much getting faster as we will get more processors and more processor types, and we have to be smarter about how we programme for them (Lawrence et al, . This is a problem for all of science!The US, Japan and China have been working on the problem for a while, and Europe is rapidly trying to catch up, but the “exascale problem” is all but invisible in the UK. While it’s obviously unfeasible for the UK to build an exascale computer on their own in the current economic and political climate, it’s absolutely the case that UK science and industry will have to work out how to use exascale computing, not least because the tools and techniques will percolate down eventually. However, even before the percolation, UK will have to exploit exascale computing to remain competitive, so what will that entail for us?"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Dr Matt Jones",
      "url"			: "/academic/2017/11/congrats2matt/",
      "tag"       : "teaching, hpc_io",
      "category"  : "academic",
      "date"      : "2017-11-28",
      "excerpt"		: "A good day for any academic - when one of her or his students passes their viva (oral examination) for their doctorate."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "European Big Data Value Forum",
      "url"			: "/talks/2017/11/HPC_Bigdata/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "talks",
      "date"      : "2017-11-22",
      "excerpt"		: "The Data Deluge in High Resolution Climate and Weather Simulation"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Science and the Digital Revolution - Data, Standards, and Integration",
      "url"			: "/computing/2017/11/science_and_the_digital_revolution/",
      "tag"       : "data, cmip, esgf",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2017-11-15",
      "excerpt"		: "I was asked to give a talk at this CODATA meeting which was aimed at developing a roadmap for:  Mobilising community support and advice for discipline-based initiatives to develop online data capacities and services;  Priorities for work on interdisciplinary data integration and flagship projects;  Approaches to funding and coordination; and  Issues of international data governance.Details of my talk are here."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Science and the Digital Revolution -  Data, Standards, and Integration",
      "url"			: "/talks/2017/11/data_interop_lawrence/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "talks",
      "date"      : "2017-11-14",
      "excerpt"		: "Data Interoperability and Integration: A climate modelling perspective"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Gung Ho Network Meeting",
      "url"			: "/talks/2017/07/ppp4_gungho/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "talks",
      "date"      : "2017-07-18",
      "excerpt"		: "Performance, Portability, Productivity: Which two do you want?"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "International Supercomputing (ISC) and JASMIN User Conferences",
      "url"			: "/talks/2017/06/lawrence_jasmin/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "talks",
      "date"      : "2017-06-27",
      "excerpt"		: "I gave two versions of this talk, one at at the International Supercomputing Conference’s Workshop on HPC I/O in the data centre, and one at the 2017 JASMIN User’s Conference."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Week Eight",
      "url"			: "/diary/2017/02/week_eight/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "diary",
      "date"      : "2017-02-27",
      "excerpt"		: "Spent nearly the entire week (and certainly more than a “European maximum 48-hours”) on things to do with ESIWACE (on the deliverable  I mentioned last time, reporting for the EC, etc). I did have a fair chunk of one day on other things as also chaired a meeting of the advisory panel for our climate predictions for the copernicus climate data store project  (CP4CDS, a project about deploying and maintaining sofware for a special ESGF data node to support climate services) - that took up the best part of day. However, that’s pretty much it for the week. Hard to believe we’re two months into the year - and I still haven’t come up for air and managed to create any significant blogging time."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Weeks Six and Seven",
      "url"			: "/diary/2017/02/weeks_six_and_seven/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "diary",
      "date"      : "2017-02-19",
      "excerpt"		: "Two weeks to report this time, primarily because I had a day off on sick leave, and two days on real leave, so there’s only seven weekday workdays to talk about (althoughI have just spent bit chunks of both yesterday and today, that is, sat and sun, on work as well)."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Space and Open Plan Offices",
      "url"			: "/management/2017/02/space_and_open_plan_offices/",
      "tag"       : "management",
      "category"  : "management",
      "date"      : "2017-02-06",
      "excerpt"		: "I was paying a bit more attention to twitter this morning than usual (I’m hoping I’ll  get some feedback on my analysis of citations that I posted yesterday). One thing that blew by was this headline the Washington Post:"Google got it wrong. The open-office trend is destroying the workplace.""
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Week Five",
      "url"			: "/diary/2017/02/week_five/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "diary",
      "date"      : "2017-02-05",
      "excerpt"		: "Nothing exciting to report. I spent nearly the entire week processing email, interacting with my team (both directly and on slack), and producing short things (e.g. a management level one pager on why NCAS should continue to support the CF conventions, and how). However, I did spend a wee bit of time trying to reinforce some of my observations around why storage is becoming a much bigger deal in environmental science. More on that next …"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Why so much data?  Part I -   The rise of direct numerical simulation",
      "url"			: "/computing/2017/02/so_much_data_one/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2017-02-05",
      "excerpt"		: "Over the last decade or so, many in the scientific community (especially in the environmental sciences) have been surprised by the increased cost of data handling - not only in absolute terms, but in terms of the percentage of the cost of doing “normal science”.This increase has been problematic on a number of fronts: not only do individuals not always plan appropriately for managing their data storage and handling, but even where they have, institutions and funding agencies have themselves been surprised and not always too keen to pay up. After all, in a world where there is very little new money in real terms (or even none), an increase in one part of the budget needs to be offset elsewhere. So, the real consequence of these increases in storage cost have to be decreases in the amount of science done (fewer staff/instruments/computers), and that’s unpalatable even if it’s unavoidable. At the moment many choose to think it is avoidable, which is quite a feasible position if you’re an ostrich, but not so good if you’re responsible for delivering science!"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Week Four",
      "url"			: "/diary/2017/01/week_four/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "diary",
      "date"      : "2017-01-29",
      "excerpt"		: "Not much to report for week four, since the work I did this week was mostly “processing email” - although we did submit the outline EPSRC bid, so one thing actually done (for now). The lack of anything else substantial was down to still being in the States in the early part of the week, coupled with a virulent bout of (probably) food poisoning which knocked me out for a couple of days."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Week Three",
      "url"			: "/diary/2017/01/week_three/",
      "tag"       : "meeting, isenes",
      "category"  : "diary",
      "date"      : "2017-01-23",
      "excerpt"		: "Quite a different week, for different reasons.Firstly, the work.  Up before the larks on Monday to take my daughter to school and then on by Eurostar to Paris. Monday through Wednesday this week was the final general assembly for the IS-ENES2 project: the second “Infrastructure (to support) the European Network for Earth System Modelling”."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Week Two",
      "url"			: "/diary/2017/01/week_two/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "diary",
      "date"      : "2017-01-15",
      "excerpt"		: "Another week, another load of paperwork written … another week that didn’t feel much like science except for the Intel bit which at least was interesting …"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Week One",
      "url"			: "/diary/2017/01/week_one/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "diary",
      "date"      : "2017-01-08",
      "excerpt"		: "So this is the end of week one of 2017. What did I spend the week doing?"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Back to the Future - I think therefore I WILL blog",
      "url"			: "/diary/2017/01/back_to_the_future_-_i_think_therefore_i_will_blog/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "diary",
      "date"      : "2017-01-07",
      "excerpt"		: "(with apologies to Descartes :-)"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "NERC Town Hall Meeting on Data Centre Futures",
      "url"			: "/talks/2016/10/lawrence_infrastructure/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "talks",
      "date"      : "2016-10-13",
      "excerpt"		: "Data Centre Technology to Support Environmental Science"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Meteorology meets Computer Science Symposium",
      "url"			: "/talks/2016/09/lawrence/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "talks",
      "date"      : "2016-09-15",
      "excerpt"		: "Computer Science Issues in Environmental Infrastructure"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "JASMIN User Conference",
      "url"			: "/talks/2016/06/jasmin_lawrence/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "talks",
      "date"      : "2016-06-27",
      "excerpt"		: "Science Drivers: Why JASMIN?"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "CEDA Vocbulary Meeting",
      "url"			: "/talks/2016/03/esdoc10minutes/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "talks",
      "date"      : "2016-03-01",
      "excerpt"		: "A ten minute introduction to ES-DOC technology"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "IS-ENES2 2nd General Assembly",
      "url"			: "/talks/2016/02/esdoc4cmip6/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "talks",
      "date"      : "2016-02-18",
      "excerpt"		: "ESDOC for CMIP6"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "International Computing in Atmospheric Science (ICAS)",
      "url"			: "/talks/2015/09/lawrence_icas15/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "talks",
      "date"      : "2015-09-14",
      "excerpt"		: "UK academic infrastructure to support (big) environmental sciencePresentation: pdf (18 MB).Abstract:  Modern environmental science requires the fusion of ever growing volumes of data from multiple simulation and observational platforms. In the UK we are investing in the infrastructure necessary to provide the generation, management, and analysis of the relevant datasets. This talk discusses the existing and planned hardware and software infrastructure required to support the (primarily) UK academic community in this endeavour, and relates it to key international endeavours at the European and global scale – including earth observation programmes such as the Copernicus Sentinel missions, the European Network for Earth Simulation, and the Earth System Grid Federation."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "RCUK Cloud Workshop",
      "url"			: "/talks/2015/06/Lawrence_Cloud/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "talks",
      "date"      : "2015-06-04",
      "excerpt"		: "Why Cloud? Earth Systems SciencePresentation: pdf (6 MB).Alternative title: Data Driven Science: Bringing Computation to the Data. This talk covered the background trends and described the JASMIN approach."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "playing with docker",
      "url"			: "/computing/2015/05/playing_with_docker/",
      "tag"       : "docker",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2015-05-10",
      "excerpt"		: "From time to time I get a very short opportunity to try and do some science, and I find the context switching harder and harder. To that end, I want to make more use of ipython-notebook."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "EGU",
      "url"			: "/talks/2015/04/Lawrence_Tyranny/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "talks",
      "date"      : "2015-04-17",
      "excerpt"		: "Beating the tyranny of scale with a private cloud configured for Big DataPresentation: pdf (5 MB).At the last minute I found that I wasn’t able to attend, but Phil Kershaw gave my talk. The abstract is available here (pdf)."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "A citation and provenance system for climate modelling",
      "url"			: "/computing/2015/03/a_citation_and_provenance_system_for_climate_modelling/",
      "tag"       : "cmip",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2015-03-02",
      "excerpt"		: "What would a modelling citation and provenance system need to do?"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Pagico Experience at week one.",
      "url"			: "/management/2015/02/pagico_experience_at_week_one/",
      "tag"       : "management",
      "category"  : "management",
      "date"      : "2015-02-01",
      "excerpt"		: "Ok, I promised to report my experience with pagico at week one."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Big Data and Extreme-Scale Computing (BDEC)",
      "url"			: "/talks/2015/01/lawrence_4slides/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "talks",
      "date"      : "2015-01-30",
      "excerpt"		: "There were two back to back meetings organised as part of the 2015 Big Data and Extreme Computing meeting website.  In the first, organised as part of the European Exascale Software Initiative (EESI), I gave a full talk, in the second, I provided a four page position paper with a four page exposition.It starts and Ends with Data: Towards exascale from an earth system science perspectivePresentation: pdf (7 MB).Six sections: the big picture, background trends, hardware issues, software issues, workflow, and a summary.Bringing Compute to the DataPresentation: pdf (3 MB).This was my main BDEC contribution. There was also a four pagesummary paper: pdf."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Pagico and getting things done",
      "url"			: "/management/2015/01/pagico_and_getting_things_done/",
      "tag"       : "management",
      "category"  : "management",
      "date"      : "2015-01-25",
      "excerpt"		: "Getting Things Done. GTD."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Leptoukh Lecture",
      "url"			: "/academic/2014/12/leptoukh_lecture/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "academic",
      "date"      : "2014-12-18",
      "excerpt"		: "I was honoured by the informatics section of the American Geophysical Union this year by being awarded the Leptoukh Lecture. The abstract and talk itself are here."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "AGU Fall Meeting",
      "url"			: "/talks/2014/12/lawrence_leptoukh/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "talks",
      "date"      : "2014-12-17",
      "excerpt"		: "I was honoured to be the third recipient of the AGU Leptoukh Lecture awarded for significant contributions to informatics, computational, or data sciences."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Symposium on HPC and Data-Intensive Apps",
      "url"			: "/talks/2014/11/Lawrence_ICTP/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "talks",
      "date"      : "2014-11-14",
      "excerpt"		: "Or to give it it’s full name: Symposium on HPC and Data-Intensive Applications in Earth Sciences: Challenges and Opportunities@ICTP, Trieste, Italy.I gave two talks at this meeting, the first in the HPC regular session, on behalf of my colleague Pier Luigi Vidale, on UPSCALE, the second a data keynote on day two.Weather and Climate modelling at the Petascale: achievements and perspectives. The roadmap to PRIMAVERAPresentation: pdf (37 MB).Abstract:Recent results and plans from the Joint Met Office/NERC High Resolution Climate Modelling programme are presented, along with a summary of recent and planned model developments. We show the influence of high resolution on a number of important atmospheric phenomena, highlighting both the roles of multiple groups in the work and the need for further resolution and complexity improvements in multiple models. We introduce plans for a project to do just that. A final point is that this work is highly demanding of both the supercomputing and subsequent analysis environments.Infrastructure for Environmental Supercomputing: beyond the HPC!Abstract:We begin by motivating the problems facing us in environmental simulations across scales: complex community interactions, and complex infrastructure. Looking forward we see the drive to increased resolution and complexity leading not only to compute issues, but even more severe data storage and handling issues. We worry about the software consequences before moving to the only possible solution, more and better collaboration, with shared infrastructure. To make progress requires moving past consideration of software interfaces alone to consider also the “collaboration” interfaces. We spend considerable time describing the JASMIN HPC data collaboration environment in the UK, before reaching the final conclusion: Getting our models to run on (new) supercomputers is hard. Getting them to run perfomantly is hard. Analysing, exploiting and archiving the data is (probably) now even harder!Presentation:  pdf (22 MB )"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "NERC ICT Current Awareness",
      "url"			: "/talks/2014/10/Lawrence_JASMIN/",
      "tag"       : "jasmin",
      "category"  : "talks",
      "date"      : "2014-10-07",
      "excerpt"		: "JASMIN - A NERC Data Analysis Environment"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Building your own JASMIN Virtual Machine",
      "url"			: "/computing/2014/08/building_your_own_jasmin_virtual_machine/",
      "tag"       : "jasmin",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2014-08-04",
      "excerpt"		: "I make a good deal of use of the JASMIN science virtual machines, but sometimes I want to just do something locally for testing. Fortunately you can build your own virtual machine using the “ JASMIN Analysis Platform” (JAP) to get the same base files."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "simulation documents",
      "url"			: "/computing/environment/2014/08/simulation_documents/",
      "tag"       : "esdoc, metafor, cmip6",
      "category"  : "computingenvironment",
      "date"      : "2014-08-01",
      "excerpt"		: "In my last post I was discussing the relationship between the various elements of documentation necessary to describe the simulation workflow."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Updated version of the model documentation plots",
      "url"			: "/computing/2014/07/updated_version_of_the_model_documentation_plots/",
      "tag"       : "esdoc",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2014-07-29",
      "excerpt"		: "A couple of weeks ago, I outlined three figures to help describe the model documentation workflow and asked for a bit of feedback."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "NCAS Science Conference, Bristol",
      "url"			: "/2014/07/ncas_science_conference-2C_bristol/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "",
      "date"      : "2014-07-18",
      "excerpt"		: "In the middle of two days in Bristol for the NCAS science conference. Good to see what so many of my colleagues are up to (distributed as they are, across the UK)."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "NCAS Science Meeting",
      "url"			: "/talks/2014/07/Lawrence_NCAS_Sci/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "talks",
      "date"      : "2014-07-17",
      "excerpt"		: "The influence of Moore’s Law and friends on our computing environment!"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "The vocabulary of documenting models",
      "url"			: "/computing/2014/07/the_vocabulary_of_documenting_models/",
      "tag"       : "esdoc, metafor",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2014-07-09",
      "excerpt"		: "Some time ago our European project Metafor migrated to a global project called es-doc.   During the metafor project we put a lot of effort into trying to develop materials which describe what it is trying to achieve,  but I think we never really got that right (despite a number of papers on the subject - e.g. Lawrence et al 2012 , Guilyardi et al 2013 etc)."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "e-Research NZ",
      "url"			: "/talks/2014/07/e-researchNZ14/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "talks",
      "date"      : "2014-07-02",
      "excerpt"		: "I gave three talks at this meeting:"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Accessing JASMIN from Android",
      "url"			: "/computing/2013/11/accessing_jasmin_from_android/",
      "tag"       : "jasmin",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2013-11-13",
      "excerpt"		: "I have a confession to make. I sometimes illicitly work using my android phone and legitimately with my android tablet. Sometimes that work involves wanting to ssh into real computers, and edit files on real computers. One real computer I want to access is JASMIN, and access to JASMIN is controlled by passphrase protected public/private key pairs."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "vertical resolution",
      "url"			: "/environment/2013/09/vertical_resolution/",
      "tag"       : "dynamics, resolution",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2013-09-18",
      "excerpt"		: " Last week I pointed out that I wasn’t at all sure the analysis by LFR89 really applied at modern horizontal grid resolutions, since the vertical scales implied for quasi-geostrophic motion didn’t make sense."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "zotero, zandy, greader, evernote, and me",
      "url"			: "/academic/2013/09/zotero-2C_zandy-2C_greader-2C_evernote-2C_and_me/",
      "tag"       : "zotero, evernote",
      "category"  : "academic",
      "date"      : "2013-09-11",
      "excerpt"		: "Quite a while ago (i.e. years), I decided that managing my bibliographic information in a bibtex file wasn’t working any longer. Back then I had a look at Mendeley and Zotero. I can’t really remember why, but I chose Zotero (I think it was a combination of how it worked for me, I played with both, and I didn’t like having to use their PDF viewr. I also had some worries about Mendeley and the software and information IPR … when Elsevier bought out Mendeley I felt vindicated on the latter.)"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Vertical and Horizontal Resolution",
      "url"			: "/environment/2013/09/vertical_and_horizontal_resolution/",
      "tag"       : "dynamics, resolution",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2013-09-09",
      "excerpt"		: "I’ve been delving in the literature a bit this week … considering model resolution and various issues around it. This post is by way of notes from my reading."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Storing and manipulating environmental big data with JASMIN",
      "url"			: "/computing/2013/08/storing_and_manipulating_environmental_big_data_with_jasmin/",
      "tag"       : "jasmin",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2013-08-28",
      "excerpt"		: "We’re pleased that our paper on the first year of JASMIN has been accepted by the IEEE BigData 2013 conference."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Gavin's Proposal",
      "url"			: "/computing/2013/08/gavins_proposal/",
      "tag"       : "cmip",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2013-08-23",
      "excerpt"		: "Gavin made some proposals in a comment on my blog for how he thought an easy automatic DOI system could be set up for CMIP data in ESGF."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "github repo for badc text file code",
      "url"			: "/computing/2013/08/github_repo_for_badc_text_file_code/",
      "tag"       : "curation, formats",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2013-08-22",
      "excerpt"		: "Some years ago, my colleagues Graham Parton and Sam Pepler developed a metadata content standard to allow the ingestion of comma separated value (csv) files of data into the BADC archive. What they wanted to do was allow folks whose primary data manipulation tool was a spreadsheet to have a viable and easy mechanism of getting their data into our managed environment."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "confusion on dois",
      "url"			: "/computing/2013/08/confusion_on_dois/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2013-08-13",
      "excerpt"		: "The discussion on twitter and my blog about DOIs and CMIP5 and what did and didn’t work reflects a bunch of different perspectives."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "On CMIP6 and DOIs",
      "url"			: "/computing/2013/08/on_cmip6_and_dois/",
      "tag"       : "cmip, citation",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2013-08-09",
      "excerpt"		: "There is clearly a lot happening at the CMIP6 meeting, however, as is often the case, only Gavin is tweeting. That’s a shame. Many of us couldn’t get to the meeting (or were not invited, or both). So thanks Gavin!"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "On advocacy",
      "url"			: "/environment/2013/08/on_advocacy/",
      "tag"       : "communication",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2013-08-08",
      "excerpt"		: "I’ve spent a good deal of the last couple of days sitting around waiting, with nothing but my trusty mobile phone and it’s twitter and feed reader client to keep me company. (Technically, I’m on holiday, but for various reasons, I’m not actually on holiday …)"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "IS-ENES2 Kickoff Meeting",
      "url"			: "/talks/2013/05/isenes/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "talks",
      "date"      : "2013-05-28",
      "excerpt"		: "The Future of ESGF in the context of ENES and IS-ENES2Presentation: pdf (2MB).I probably tried to do too much in this talk. There were three subtexts:  We as a community have too much data to handle, and I mentioned the apocryphal estimate that only 2/3 of data written is read … but I confused folks … that figure applies to institutional data, not data in ESGF …  That the migration of data and information between domains (see the talk) requires a lot of effort, and that (nearly) no one recognises or funds that effort (kudos to KNMI :-),  That portals are easy to build, but hard to build right, and maybe we need fewer, or maybe we need more, but either way, they need to both meet requirements in technical functionality, and information (as opposed to data) content."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Coupling Workshop (CW2013)",
      "url"			: "/talks/2013/02/coupling/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "talks",
      "date"      : "2013-02-21",
      "excerpt"		: "Bridging Communities: Technical Concerns for Building Integrated Environmental ModelsPresentation: pdf (1MB)."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "2nd IS-ENES Workshop on High-performance computing for Climate Models",
      "url"			: "/talks/2013/02/hpc-enes/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "talks",
      "date"      : "2013-02-01",
      "excerpt"		: "Data, the elephant in the room. JASMIN one step along the road to dealing with the elephant.Presentation: pdf (2MB)."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "AGU Fall meeting",
      "url"			: "/talks/2012/12/LawrenceAGU2012/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "talks",
      "date"      : "2012-12-06",
      "excerpt"		: "Issues to address before we can have an open climate modelling ecosystem"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "AGU Fall Meeting 2012",
      "url"			: "/academic/2012/12/agu_fall_meeting_2012/",
      "tag"       : "meetings",
      "category"  : "academic",
      "date"      : "2012-12-06",
      "excerpt"		: ""
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "ESA CCI 3rd Colocation Meeting",
      "url"			: "/talks/2012/09/lawrence_esa_cci_v04/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "talks",
      "date"      : "2012-09-24",
      "excerpt"		: "Exploiting high volume simulations and observations of the climate"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "ICT Competitiveness",
      "url"			: "/talks/2012/09/Lawrence_ICTBigData/",
      "tag"       : "modelling_futures",
      "category"  : "talks",
      "date"      : "2012-09-19",
      "excerpt"		: "Weather and Climate Computing Futures in the context of European Competitiveness"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "A tale of two ethics",
      "url"			: "/academic/2012/02/a_tale_of_two_ethics/",
      "tag"       : "ethics",
      "category"  : "academic",
      "date"      : "2012-02-27",
      "excerpt"		: "A couple of years ago I took part in a lengthy discussion on scientific ethics. The context of that discussion was “the ethical risks” of any given piece of research, but I well remember the bottom line: in matters of ethics, there is no real black and white, “it all depends”. It’s possible to find a standpoint from which most “thinking people” (whatever that means) will believe you behaved ethically, and a standpoint from which most will not; often for the same action, albeit generally in different contexts!"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Reviewing Parson and Fox on the data publication metaphor",
      "url"			: "/academic/2011/12/reviewing_parson_and_fox_on_the_data_publication_metafor/",
      "tag"       : "curation",
      "category"  : "academic",
      "date"      : "2011-12-16",
      "excerpt"		: "Mark Parsons have a draft paper out for public review  and are inviting comments there …"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Communicating Science (to the media)",
      "url"			: "/academic/2011/12/communicating_science_to_the_media/",
      "tag"       : "environment",
      "category"  : "academic",
      "date"      : "2011-12-14",
      "excerpt"		: "Interesting seminar here this morning on the subject."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "data scientists are anally retentive too!",
      "url"			: "/computing/2011/12/data_scientists_are_anally_retentive_too/",
      "tag"       : "metadata, curation",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2011-12-08",
      "excerpt"		: "Well, that title ought to make this blog article inaccessible to those of us with anally retentive firewalls, but because it’s only a minor misquote of an article from the Times Higher Education, it is legitimate!"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "European Exascale Software Initiative",
      "url"			: "/computing/2011/07/european_exascale_software_initiative/",
      "tag"       : "exascale, hpc, meetings, modelling_futures",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2011-07-02",
      "excerpt"		: "Last week I spent two days at the lovely Domaine de Tremblay (an hour from central Paris):"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Thought provoking talk on climate policy",
      "url"			: "/environment/2011/05/thought_provoking_talk_on_climate_policy/",
      "tag"       : "environment",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2011-05-18",
      "excerpt"		: "Today at the ICTP workshop on e-infrastructure for climate science,George Philander gave a really thought provoking talk on global warming and aspects of policy consequences - particularly in an African context."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "hpc futures - part two",
      "url"			: "/computing/2011/04/hpc_futures_-_part_two/",
      "tag"       : "exascale, hpc, badc, resolution, modelling_futures",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2011-04-28",
      "excerpt"		: "What is this exascale wall that I’ve been tweeting about?"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Pushing Water Analogies too far",
      "url"			: "/computing/2011/02/pushing_water_analogies_too_far/",
      "tag"       : "metadata, badc, neodc",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2011-02-09",
      "excerpt"		: "Recently I heard a talk by Kevin Trenbeth, who showed a slide with the following cartoon:"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Weather Forecasting's Bad Name",
      "url"			: "/environment/2011/01/weather_forecastings_bad_name/",
      "tag"       : "environment, weather",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2011-01-31",
      "excerpt"		: "Sometimes weather forecasting deserves its bad name!"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Numerical Observation Time",
      "url"			: "/computing/2011/01/numerical_observation_time/",
      "tag"       : "metafor, metadata",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2011-01-07",
      "excerpt"		: "Over four years ago I had a series of conversations with colleagues, that led to my blog posts on meteorological time.Jeremy Tandy has subsequently refined our thinking of all those years ago in a cogent proposal intended for both OGC and WMO which casts the discussion of “forecast time” in an observations and measurements framework."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Citation, Digital Object Identifiers, Persistence, Correction and Metadata",
      "url"			: "/computing/2011/01/citation_digital_object_identifiers_persistence_correction_and_metadata/",
      "tag"       : "metadata, claddier, badc, curation, identifiers, dois",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2011-01-07",
      "excerpt"		: "CEDA now has a mechanism for minting Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs). This means we need to finalise some decisions of rules of behaviour, which means wehave some interesting issues to address."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Australian Adventures",
      "url"			: "/computing/2010/11/australian_adventures/",
      "tag"       : "metadata",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2010-11-15",
      "excerpt"		: "This is going to be a difficult blog entry, because I’m going to have to say some nice things about Australia (something most kiwis find difficult). So, on with it."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "An Aussie Triumvirate",
      "url"			: "/talks/2010/11/eResearch-keynote/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "talks",
      "date"      : "2010-11-11",
      "excerpt"		: "These were three talks given in Australia during a short trip in November, 2010. I gave one in Canberra, and two on the Gold Coast."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Can we put distributed query to bed please?",
      "url"			: "/computing/2010/11/can_we_put_distributed_query_to_bed_please-3F/",
      "tag"       : "ogc",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2010-11-09",
      "excerpt"		: "Yesterday I got caught in a vociferous conversation about the benefits of distributed queries. Vociferous because I was trying to convince a bunch of true believers that distributed query is an edge case - the big use case is harvest, index, and efficient query. (This in the context of exploiting metadata). Clearly Google is an existence proof that harvest+index keeps information seekers happy.Of course that depends on Google understanding the formats, and that there is a smart way to index the data, which either  depends on the content, or  the links between the contentto rank the data."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Tales from the EA linux coal front",
      "url"			: "/computing/2010/10/tales_from_the_ea_linux_coal_front/",
      "tag"       : "computing, UML",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2010-10-21",
      "excerpt"		: "Infrequently I get to do some real work (i.e. interesting work1), but it’s so infrequent that every time I get to do work, my “environment” has moved on. In this case, I wanted to produce a simple model extending a couple of ISO classes to provide a different view of how we might describe a climate model. A few minute work I thought … but it took me half a day, on and off, to get myself in a position to do that few minutes work. So this is by way of saving someone else the bother of working out how (and one of my colleagues at today’s metafor meeting needs this info too).            really interesting work is actual climate science, and I get to do that even less frequently ↩      "
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Instances and Properties",
      "url"			: "/computing/2010/10/instances_and_properties/",
      "tag"       : "metadata, metafor",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2010-10-21",
      "excerpt"		: "Someone else will probably find a better way to express this, and give me the proper language, but meanwhile, I wanted to expose something that I think is important about my meta-model of using domain modelling to produce descriptions of things, and indexes of those descriptions. It came up over lunch time at a metafor coding sprint, and someone asked me to write it down, so here it is."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "The choice is python",
      "url"			: "/computing/2010/10/the_choice_is_python/",
      "tag"       : "python",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2010-10-13",
      "excerpt"		: "Summary"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Integrating data handling libraries",
      "url"			: "/computing/2010/10/integrating_data_handling_libraries/",
      "tag"       : "cf, netcdf",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2010-10-12",
      "excerpt"		: "Earlier this week I was talking with one of my colleagues about the difference between NetCDF3, NetCDF4, HDF etc … and also about my hope that there is a future where projects stop inventing bespoke data formats AND exploit existing conventions as to how to use existing formats."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "NSF Cyberinfrastructure for Data",
      "url"			: "/talks/2010/09/cyberinfrastructure_for_data/",
      "tag"       : "data_deluge",
      "category"  : "talks",
      "date"      : "2010-09-30",
      "excerpt"		: "Cyberinfrastructure Challenges (from a climate science repository perspective)"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "cyberinfrastructure for data",
      "url"			: "/computing/2010/09/cyberinfrastructure_for_data/",
      "tag"       : "curation",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2010-09-30",
      "excerpt"		: "Today I’m sitting in a “data task force” meeting organised by NSF to address future cyberinfrastructure requirements.  We’re in a Microsoft building in Redmond: comedy moment as it seems that of the three dozen or so folks here, half of them are using Macs … (and I suspect a few more are like me, using Linux). That said, I’m obviously drinking from the kool aid, because there is a feeling afoot that Microsoft are doing the right thing in a number of fields nowadays (unlike Oracle who are trending darkwards)."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Climate Roulette",
      "url"			: "/environment/2010/09/climate_roulette/",
      "tag"       : "climate, environment",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2010-09-27",
      "excerpt"		: "I have yet to read the paper (pdf sub needed), but via Joe Romm I see that MIT have just had a new study appear, from which they  apparently (it’s not in the paper itself) produced the following figure:"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Public Opinion and Climate Change",
      "url"			: "/environment/2010/09/public_opinion_and_climate_change/",
      "tag"       : "climate, environment",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2010-09-16",
      "excerpt"		: "Public opinion as to the reality of climate change waxes and wanes, but like most things, there are three categories of folks: the non-believers, the unconvinced, and the convinced."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Surface Temperature Workshop",
      "url"			: "/environment/2010/09/surface_temperature_workshop/",
      "tag"       : "climate, environment",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2010-09-10",
      "excerpt"		: "I’ve just spent three days in Exeter at a Met Office initiated exercise on issues associated with constructing a new surface temperature working programme."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "hpc futures - part one",
      "url"			: "/environment/2010/08/hpc_futures_-_part_one/",
      "tag"       : "climate, modelling_futures, resolution",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2010-08-02",
      "excerpt"		: "Anyone reading my twitter feed will know that I’ve been going to strategy meetings a lot lately.  We’ve been talking a lot about the impending problems with computing as new architectures become more complex. By way of organising my thinking about increased resolution, and in some ways, following up on an even older discourse, I’ve spent a bit of time thinking about computing capacity. Hence this."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Janet Futures",
      "url"			: "/computing/2010/06/janet_futures/",
      "tag"       : "badc, networking",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2010-06-24",
      "excerpt"		: "I’ve just attended a workshop on the research community’s future requirements for the UK academic network, JANET. The workshop was held at the new royal society conference venue - the Kavli Royal Society International Centre - which as you can see is a bit special:"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "two sides of the same coin",
      "url"			: "/environment/2010/06/two_sides_of_the_same_coin/",
      "tag"       : "environment, climate",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2010-06-16",
      "excerpt"		: "Struck by two figures that came by me today (thanks twitter):"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "too much trac and twitter?",
      "url"			: "/diary/2010/05/too_much_trac_and_twitter-3F/",
      "tag"       : "metafor",
      "category"  : "diary",
      "date"      : "2010-05-25",
      "excerpt"		: "Most of the silence on my blog over the last year has been because I have been heavily involved in a lot of management bumf (yawn) and deep in the bowels of some interesting projects (big smile). A lot of the project work has involved documents and wiki work, and in the case of metafor, about 10,000 lines of python using the django framework. If you’re that interested, you can nosy around:  the metafor trac site,  the moles trac site, and  the go-essp trac sitefor a flavour of what I’ve been up to."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Provenance, processes and O&M",
      "url"			: "/computing/2010/05/provenance-2C_processes_and_o-26m/",
      "tag"       : "moles, metadata",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2010-05-25",
      "excerpt"		: "This is by way of a summary of the first of a bunch of recent discussions about MOLES. The context is that of the upcoming ISO19156 Observations and Measurements standard which boils down to the material and concepts which surround this high level view of an observation:"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "AR5 Timetable",
      "url"			: "/environment/2010/05/ar5_timetable/",
      "tag"       : "climate, cmip5",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2010-05-15",
      "excerpt"		: "I keep having to resort to web pages all over the place as well as email to find the AR5 timetable, which has changed a few times.  So I’m going to put it here, and update it as necessary (via trackbacks and/or direct editing)."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "To shred or not to shred?",
      "url"			: "/environment/2010/04/to_shred_or_not_to_shred-3F/",
      "tag"       : "environment",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2010-04-18",
      "excerpt"		: "For a long time my wife has been suggesting we should get a garden waste shredder -  we end up taking at least a dozen car loads of green waste to the tip a year, and often end up with piles of stuff waiting for a trip.  I’ve been lukewarm, reckoning that we live close enough to the rubbish tip that buying a shredder is not justified. However, just for the hell of it, and inspired by King of the Road, I thought I’d do the  calculation."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Computing capacity, capability, climate simulations and impacts.",
      "url"			: "/environment/2010/03/computing_capacity_capability_climate_simulations_and_impacts/",
      "tag"       : "climate, resolution, modelling_futures",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2010-03-31",
      "excerpt"		: "One of the outputs of the IS-ENES project is to be a foresight document outlining where European Earth System modelling should be going in the next decade or two. Of course foresight exercises are fraught with difficulty … but we need to try, especially for ESM, where the lead time on developing a really high end model is probably of the order of 10-20 years, and where supercomputer procurements are multi-year events."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "ENES Earth System Modelling Scoping Meeting",
      "url"			: "/talks/2010/03/european-esm-strategy/",
      "tag"       : "modelling_futures",
      "category"  : "talks",
      "date"      : "2010-03-30",
      "excerpt"		: "Software & Data Infrastructure for Earth System Modelling"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Quotation of the day",
      "url"			: "/computing/2010/03/quotation_of_the_day/",
      "tag"       : "metadata",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2010-03-16",
      "excerpt"		: "Hankin et al at OceanObs09:Today we find remarkable agreement on expectations for vastly improved ocean data management a decade from now -- capabilities that will help to bring significant benefits to ocean research and to society.Advancing data management to such a degree, however, will require cultural and policy changes that areslow to effect. The technological foundations upon which data management systems are built are certain tocontinue advancing rapidly in parallel. These considerations argue for adopting attitudes of pragmatismand realism when planning data management strategies."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "hollow world and svngate revisited",
      "url"			: "/computing/2010/03/hollow_world_and_svngate_revisited/",
      "tag"       : "metadata, computing, UML",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2010-03-15",
      "excerpt"		: "For a number of projects I’m having to revisit some domain modelling, exploiting both HollowWorld and the upcoming ISO19156 Observations and Measurements standard."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Oh no  I can't keep up ..",
      "url"			: "/diary/2009/12/oh_no_google_i_can-27t_keep_up_",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "diary",
      "date"      : "2009-12-16",
      "excerpt"		: "As you have all noticed, I’m a tad busy at the moment, and blogging has been the obvious thing missing out. The other thing missing out is new technology:  Google Wave I hear you say?  No …  Google Fusion Tables API… oh no not another thing I can’t pay attention to."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Clouds Revisited",
      "url"			: "/environment/2009/12/clouds_revisited/",
      "tag"       : "clouds",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2009-12-14",
      "excerpt"		: "I’ve just been reading “How well do we understand and evaluate climate change feedback processes”, by Bony et.al. (2006) which appears in the Journal of Climate.)While I’ve delved into GCM cloud physics in the past, I’ve never really taken the trouble (beyond this) to get into cloud feedbacks in the climate sense, I’ve been happy to accept the received wisdom that cloud feedbacks are the dominant uncertainty in climate sensitivity, but that most folks (Lindzen apart)  believe that despite their uncertainty, the sign at least is very probably positive, that is to enhance the affect of increasing CO2 on surface temperature."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "The Back of the Envelope and the Removal of Guilt",
      "url"			: "/environment/2009/12/the_back_of_the_envelope_and_the_removal_of_guilt/",
      "tag"       : "environment",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2009-12-13",
      "excerpt"		: "Some of the most important things one learns in a physics degree are:  Dimensional Analysis (have I stuffed up anything obvious?)  Scale Analysis (what terms in this equation actually matter for this problem?), and  Start with an Envelope (know what your answer is roughly, before further calculation)."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Drawn into climategate",
      "url"			: "/academic/2009/11/drawn_into_climategate/",
      "tag"       : "environment",
      "category"  : "academic",
      "date"      : "2009-11-29",
      "excerpt"		: "It’s a long time since I bothered to write a letter to the editor, but the cru email controversy pushed me over the edge. Or to be more precise, Anne McElvoy’s opinion piece did. Of course I would never have known anything about it, not normally having access to London Evening Standard , but their letters editor actually approached me to solict an intervention in the next edition (by which I assume that a) he was desperate, and/or b) he figured I might say something silly, or both)."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Still here",
      "url"			: "/diary/2009/11/still_here/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "diary",
      "date"      : "2009-11-09",
      "excerpt"		: "I’m still here … but my day job is all consuming at the moment. Blame CMIP5."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "erase to transparency",
      "url"			: "/computing/2009/11/erase_to_transparency/",
      "tag"       : "gimp",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2009-11-09",
      "excerpt"		: "The easy way (with The GIMP): somehow select an area (choose by fuzzy selector contiguous colour is one good option), then, if your image hasn’t got an alpha channel, add one (right click, choose transparency, add an alpha channel) … then color to alpha (right click, choose transparency, color to alpha)."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "my hero",
      "url"			: "/computing/2009/09/my_hero/",
      "tag"       : "computing, ndg, metafor, advice",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2009-09-29",
      "excerpt"		: "Everyone needs to understand this:A 50%-good solution that people actually have solves more problems and survives longer than a 99% solution that nobody has because it's in your lab where you're endlessly polishing the damn thing. Shipping is a feature. A really important feature. Your product must have it."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Reading in 2009, 15-18 - Teenage action fodder for summer",
      "url"			: "/diary/2009/09/reading_in_2009-2C_15-18-3A_teenage_action_fodder_for_summer/",
      "tag"       : "books",
      "category"  : "diary",
      "date"      : "2009-09-17",
      "excerpt"		: "Even the unobservant readers of this blog will have noticed the silence by now. It’s workload folks … something has to give. I’ll be back …"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "The relationship between collecting metadata, and the optimum size of a child's plate of food",
      "url"			: "/environment/computing/2009/08/plate_size/",
      "tag"       : "cmip5, metadata, metafor",
      "category"  : "environmentcomputing",
      "date"      : "2009-08-26",
      "excerpt"		: "I’ve said it before, and no doubt I’ll have to keep saying it, but the word metadata is understood by nearly every individual differently. This has a number of consequences, starting with defining (in any given) case, what comprises metadata. The problem is nicely encapsulated a recent email on the Galeon list. I hope Gerry Greager wont mind me further publicising his statement:A lot of otherwise really sharp folks tend to  define everyone's data and metadata by their own prejudices, including  me. After all, MY data's easy to identify and define, and I can see how YOUR data should be identified and defined, too. What? you don't agree with me? How dare you?"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "contrails",
      "url"			: "/environment/2009/08/contrails/",
      "tag"       : "climate",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2009-08-25",
      "excerpt"		: "Silence is golden, so this must be a golden blog … the last month I’ve either been head down over the keyboard slaving on the development of a tool to collect descriptions of the models used and simulations produced for CMIP5, or on holiday. More of the latter soon."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Reading in 2009, 14 - Canadian Wildish West",
      "url"			: "/diary/2009/07/reading_in_2009-2C_14-3A_canadian_wildish_west/",
      "tag"       : "books",
      "category"  : "diary",
      "date"      : "2009-07-16",
      "excerpt"		: "Anne picked up The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney somewhere, but I snaffled it out of her  book queue while she wasn’t looking."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Bryan's Fishy Example",
      "url"			: "/computing/2009/07/bryans_fishy_example/",
      "tag"       : "curation",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2009-07-16",
      "excerpt"		: "I’ve had a few days lately where I’ve trotted out my favourite “easy to understand example” as to why some scientific datasets need to be preserved, and some do not. In the final analysis, we find that it’s easy to identify some datasets as “must preserve” and then we enter “value judgement” territory. But it’s helpful to have a strawman to consider on the way."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "cf standard names growth",
      "url"			: "/computing/environment/2009/07/cf_standard_names_growth/",
      "tag"       : "curation, cmip5, cf",
      "category"  : "computingenvironment",
      "date"      : "2009-07-08",
      "excerpt"		: "Adequate descriptions of scientific data depend on precise descriptions of what the data actually are. At the heart of that are what we call “phenomenon descriptions”, which at BADC and in much of the climate community, we handle using “CF standard names”."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "UM Crack Cocaine",
      "url"			: "/computing/2009/07/UM_Crack_Cocaine/",
      "tag"       : "wrf, um",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2009-07-08",
      "excerpt"		: "One of the items of discussion at yesterday’s NCAS advisory group was whether or not NCAS should be working with more than one mesocale model (currently we do, with significant efforts invested in both the Met Office Unified Model and the U.S. WRF model)."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Reading in 2009, 13 -  Songs of Earth and Power",
      "url"			: "/diary/2009/07/Reading-20in-202009-2C-2013-3A-20Songs-20of-20Earth-20and-20Power/",
      "tag"       : "books",
      "category"  : "diary",
      "date"      : "2009-07-03",
      "excerpt"		: "I suspect I bought Songs ofEarth and Power by Greg Bear more thanten years ago - the price tag on the back is in NZD … and obviously I’ve read it at least once before …"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "ukcp09",
      "url"			: "/environment/2009/07/ukcp09/",
      "tag"       : "climate, environment",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2009-07-02",
      "excerpt"		: "One of the things that happened while I was away as the release of the latest UK climate predictions. This was (and is) a relatively big deal! While some have griped about the apparently unrealistic level of detail, the reality is that we do have to provide our very best predictions of climate over the next century, and we have to do it at the highest resolution we can. Of course there are caveats, but given we’re all convinced that the status quo is no longer a good predictor of the future, then we have to do better. Hence this government initiative which has run for a number of years to fund the running of ensembles of high resolution predictions, to come up with probably estimates of the future, and to produce a website so that prospective users can tailor the predictions to their own backyard. We’ve been responsible for the last bit!"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "holidays",
      "url"			: "/diary/2009/07/holidays/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "diary",
      "date"      : "2009-07-01",
      "excerpt"		: "So, I’ve been quiet. That’s what happens when you go on holiday, where the electrons don’t go …camping in the “Doone Valley” for three nights, followed by six nights “on the beach” in Hayle."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Reading in 2009, 12 -  Roman capers",
      "url"			: "/diary/2009/06/reading_in_2009-2C_12-3A_roman_capers/",
      "tag"       : "books",
      "category"  : "diary",
      "date"      : "2009-06-17",
      "excerpt"		: "Fire in the East by Harry Sidebottom was another airport purchase (the second of the two I took to Vienna).Unlike the last one this one came home, partly because I hadn’tfinished it, and partly because it’s a rollicking good read if you’reinto “late classical period military romps” … (when the Romanswere Romans and the Gauls  - with the honourable exception of Asterix and allthe other anti-Roman heroes -  were cowering behind their druids’ skirts)."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Interoperability, Data Fusion and Mashups",
      "url"			: "/computing/2009/06/interoperability-2C_data_fusion_and_mashups/",
      "tag"       : "curation, ndg",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2009-06-17",
      "excerpt"		: "I’m involved in the development and implementation of a new NERC information strategy, and it’s quite clear that amongst those of us developing the strategy, and amongst those making decisions in response to the strategy, there is a clear lack of agreement and/or understanding what the following three terms mean: interoperability, mashups, and data fusion. Some folk use them interchangably, some use them with specific activities in mind. Confusion about definition always  leads to slower progress."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Aral sea dessication",
      "url"			: "/environment/2009/06/aral_sea_dessication/",
      "tag"       : "environment",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2009-06-16",
      "excerpt"		: "Back in January I “reviewed” Fred Pearce’s “When the River’s Run Dry”, and in that I mentioned in passing the fate of the Aral Sea. Tonight I came across the Nasa Earth Observatory’s feature on the changes in the Aral Sea using Modis images. Just as I said back in January, I vaguely knew about this, and the detail was scary. However, it’s one thing to know something intellectually, and another thing altogether to know it emotionally - there’s something really immediate about pictures! So here are concatenated two images from the Nasa sequence: a map from 2000 and one from 2009 - with the 1960 shoreline shown for comparison. I reckon it’s truly stunning to see the change from 1960, to 2000, and on to 2009!"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "A controlled vocabulary for advection schemes",
      "url"			: "/computing/2009/06/a_controlled_vocabulary_for_advection_schemes/",
      "tag"       : "metafor, ndg, curation, badc, cmip5, environment",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2009-06-16",
      "excerpt"		: "Anyone who collects metadata for a living knows the problem. We ask a bunch of folk to give us metadata, and the results are variable, and not much use for searching and comparison."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Reading in 2009, 11 -  One to miss",
      "url"			: "/diary/2009/06/reading_in_2009-2C_11-3B_one_to_miss/",
      "tag"       : "books",
      "category"  : "diary",
      "date"      : "2009-06-15",
      "excerpt"		: "The Genesis Secret by Tom Knox"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "confidence and competence",
      "url"			: "/environment/2009/06/confidence_and_competence/",
      "tag"       : "environment",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2009-06-12",
      "excerpt"		: "Last night I read an article in New Scientist, the general gist of which is that we all prefer advice from a confident source, even to the point that we are willing to ignore a poor track record."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "the doi saga continued",
      "url"			: "/computing/2009/06/the_doi_saga_continued/",
      "tag"       : "curation",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2009-06-09",
      "excerpt"		: "Chris made a fairly ascerbic (and fair) comment when I complained about the disappearance of the digital identity of one of my papers. Amongst other things, he found the current(!) doi for it …"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Peak Everything revisited",
      "url"			: "/environment/2009/06/peak_everything_revisited/",
      "tag"       : "environment",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2009-06-09",
      "excerpt"		: "Despite appearances to the contrary, I’m not planning on disappearing down a computing geek hole, and forgetting about climate and the environment, it’s just that the day-to-day problems on the top of the list at the moment are “informatics” related."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "unhinged doi - who ya gonna call?",
      "url"			: "/academic/2009/06/unhinged_doi-3A_who_ya_gonna_call-3F/",
      "tag"       : "curation",
      "category"  : "academic",
      "date"      : "2009-06-04",
      "excerpt"		: "My publications list hasLawrence, B.N., 2001: A Gravity Wave Induced Quasi-Biennial Oscillation in a three-dimensional mechanistic model. Q. J. R. Meteorol. Soc., 127, pg(s). 2005-2021. doi:10.1256/smsqj.57607"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Reading in 2009, 10 - Careless in Red",
      "url"			: "/diary/2009/06/reading_in_2009-2C_10-3A_careless_in_red/",
      "tag"       : "books",
      "category"  : "diary",
      "date"      : "2009-06-03",
      "excerpt"		: "There can’t be many readers of crime novels who don’t eagerly await new Elizabeth George novels. For obvious reasons I wasn’t paying attention last year, so we missed the arrival ofCareless in Red. However, on my March/April US trip, I clearly passed through anairport bookshop or two, and was very pleased to find a new Lynley mystery."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Catalogues, Shopping Carts and Portals",
      "url"			: "/computing/2009/06/catalogues-2C_shopping_carts_and_portals/",
      "tag"       : "ndg",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2009-06-03",
      "excerpt"		: "The NDG (and INSPIRE) vision is that data providers stand upservices to expose their data and metadata. We imagine that catalogueservices harvest our metadata, and expose it in via catalogueservice interfaces. We imagine that portals exploit the catalogue serviceinterfaces to allow users to select data, and exploit the data invisualisation services."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Journals and Data Curation",
      "url"			: "/computing/2009/06/journals_and_data_curation/",
      "tag"       : "curation",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2009-06-02",
      "excerpt"		: "I’m hopelessly behind on my blog reading, otherwise I would have spottedthis new Nature policy sooner:Accordingly, we have modified the Nature journal policy on authorship, which is detailed on our [website](http://tinyurl.com/dkgbf8). For papers submitted by collaborations, we now delineate the responsibilities of the senior members of each collaboration group on the paper. Before submitting the paper, at least one senior member from each collaborating group must take responsibility for their group's contribution. Three major responsibilities are covered: preservation of the original data on which the paper is based, verification that the figures and conclusions accurately reflect the data collected and that manipulations to images are in accordance with Nature journal [guidelines](http://tinyurl.com/cmmrp7), and minimization of obstacles to sharing materials, data and algorithms through appropriate planning."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Resource Reality",
      "url"			: "/computing/2009/05/resource_reality/",
      "tag"       : "badc",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2009-05-28",
      "excerpt"		: "Why is it then we talk to the private sector, they’re always impressed with what we can do with the resources available (money, people), yet, when we talk to our scientific colleagues, many of them think we must be amazingly inefficient to cost what we do (in terms of, yep, money and people)?"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "i had to laugh, part 2",
      "url"			: "/computing/2009/05/i_had_to_laugh-2C_part_2/",
      "tag"       : "computing, funny",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2009-05-28",
      "excerpt"		: "Maybe I should now have a category on programming language humour. Meanwhile, Chris responded to this by digging out an email from 1994 on howto shoot yourself in the foot using a multitude of languages. I googled it, andfound a more extensive compendium (especially within the 301 comments) …"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "i had to laugh",
      "url"			: "/computing/2009/05/i_had_to_laugh/",
      "tag"       : "computing, funny",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2009-05-27",
      "excerpt"		: "and so should you! Read this (unless of course your only exposure to computing languages has been the one true language that you use today, and have always used). Hat tip Ned Batchelder."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "kubuntu frustration ... again",
      "url"			: "/computing/2009/05/kubuntu_frustration_..._again/",
      "tag"       : "kubuntu",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2009-05-23",
      "excerpt"		: "Late last year,  I wanted to upgrade my kubuntu to 8.10 (intrepid)… but I couldn’t because bluetooth was broken in the release."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Reading in 2009, 9 - Under Enemy Colours",
      "url"			: "/diary/2009/05/reading_in_2009-2C_9-3A_under_enemy_colours/",
      "tag"       : "books",
      "category"  : "diary",
      "date"      : "2009-05-16",
      "excerpt"		: "Well, I’ve read them all (I think), from C.S. Forrester to Alexander Kent, via Patrick O’Brian, Dudley Pope and Richard Woodman, even Julian Stockwin - others too. My shelves groan with “wooden walls” fiction; blamemy dad for introducing me to Hornblower at an impressionable age."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Busy Week",
      "url"			: "/diary/2009/05/busy_week/",
      "tag"       : "cmip5, metafor",
      "category"  : "diary",
      "date"      : "2009-05-13",
      "excerpt"		: "Just in case you’re wondering why the blogging has dried up yet again (from its already droughty state): I’mhalf way through a seriously silly week. Monday: Brussels, Tuesday, Wednesday: Lancaster, Thursday, Friday: Paris. I seem to be in a maelstrom of meetings and deadlines that never quite ends. This week it’s just a bit more obvious becauseI’m out of town, and I’m generating a huge number of train miles/hours: I will have been travelling for roughly 28 hours this week (although that time is inclusive of trips to and from stations, and underground etc, it still leaves in excess of 15 hours for real work done using my trusty laptop, albeit with a newly dodgy wireless connection)."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "lowering my co2 emissions one step more",
      "url"			: "/environment/2009/04/ecomotive_start/",
      "tag"       : "environment",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2009-04-30",
      "excerpt"		: "Our blue 1987 Megane catastrophically failed an MOT a few weeks ago (which means that it’s hors de combat, we can’t drive it on public roads, not get it insured). So it’s off to the knackers yard … (yes, we really did have  two Renault Meganes, albeit very different models, and yes, we do need two cars given where we live and work) …"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Reading in 2009, 6,7,8 -  The Language of the Stones Trilogy",
      "url"			: "/diary/2009/04/reading_in_2009-2C_6-2C7-2C8-3A_the_language_of_the_stones_trilogy/",
      "tag"       : "books",
      "category"  : "diary",
      "date"      : "2009-04-29",
      "excerpt"		: "The Language of the Stones,  The Giant’s Dance, and Whitemantle, by Robert Carter."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "WCS is dead, long live WFS",
      "url"			: "/computing/2009/04/wcs_is_dead-2C_long_live_wfs/",
      "tag"       : "ogc",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2009-04-23",
      "excerpt"		: "For many years Steve Hankin has been asking me why we want WCS when OPeNDAPhas similar functionality, and many, many, working implementations. For justas many years I’ve argued that OPeNDAP has/had three major flaws:  It wasn’t easily securable (soon not to be a problem),  Didn’t have good relationship with metadata, and in particular,  Was all about syntax, not semantics - you subset by array index, notthe desired portion of a semantically described domain (e.ggive me array elements 4-6 compared with give me the array elementswhich lie between latitudes 40 to 60 degrees)."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "sun_oracle",
      "url"			: "/computing/2009/04/sun_oracle/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2009-04-23",
      "excerpt"		: "These are strange times we live in …"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Tales from the EGU",
      "url"			: "/diary/2009/04/tales_from_the_egu/",
      "tag"       : "meetings, egu",
      "category"  : "diary",
      "date"      : "2009-04-22",
      "excerpt"		: "Vignettes from EGU  None (for now). I forgot the cable for my compact camera!"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Scientific Method",
      "url"			: "/computing/2009/04/scientific_method/",
      "tag"       : "curation, badc",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2009-04-16",
      "excerpt"		: "There are loads of depictions of the scientific method out there …"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Newark Liberty International Airport",
      "url"			: "/diary/2009/04/newark_liberty_international_airport/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "diary",
      "date"      : "2009-04-07",
      "excerpt"		: "Avoid it if you’re travelling internationally."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Reading 2009, 5 -  Pillars need shortening",
      "url"			: "/diary/2009/03/reading_2009-2C_5-3A_pillars_need_shortening/",
      "tag"       : "books",
      "category"  : "diary",
      "date"      : "2009-03-13",
      "excerpt"		: "Well, it’s some time since I caught up with my reading reports. Many weeks agoI waded through Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth.I say wade in both a positive and negative sense: it’s a long shallow book, with lots of good bitsand a fair bit of meandering, rather like wading through a river via warm pools interspersed with cold."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "the publication ecosystem",
      "url"			: "/computing/2009/03/the_publication_ecosystem/",
      "tag"       : "curation",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2009-03-08",
      "excerpt"		: "Cameron Neylon drew my attention to an absolutely fascinating set of figures that appeared in a Research Information network paper last year (pdf).  You should read Cameron’s post, it’s interesting in it’s own right for anyone interested in the place of peer review in the firmament. However, what I wanted to here was abstract some rather interesting numbers from the report. They all appear here:"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "ukrds",
      "url"			: "/computing/2009/03/ukrds/",
      "tag"       : "curation",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2009-03-04",
      "excerpt"		: "Last Thursday I attended an event to discussthe UK Research Data Service feasibility Study. Chris has blogged the details (sessions1,2,3,4respectively)."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "irony",
      "url"			: "/computing/2009/03/irony/",
      "tag"       : "curation",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2009-03-03",
      "excerpt"		: "Does anyone else think that it’s ironic that Peter Suber, open access guru, appears to have written an  article on open access in toll barred Nature Geoscience?"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Strongly Defend Weakly Held Positions",
      "url"			: "/computing/2009/02/strongly_defend_weakly_held_positions/",
      "tag"       : "curation, management, badc, advice",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2009-02-19",
      "excerpt"		: "I’ve just been at a NERC data management workshop. I may well blog some moreabout it, but one thing I spent a lot of time repeating to lots of peoplewas one of Bob Sutton’s mantras: “Strongly Defend Weakly Held Positions”."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "obscurity",
      "url"			: "/computing/2009/02/obscurity/",
      "tag"       : "blogging",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2009-02-03",
      "excerpt"		: "For some reason both bloglines and technorati seem to have turned up their noses at my blog. I wouldn’t mind, but I kind of rely on them to find if there are any inbound links to my blog (and thus anything worth pursuing). There aint much point asking the lazy web a question if I can’t find any links pointing to the question …"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "NDG papers appear in Phil Trans",
      "url"			: "/computing/2009/02/ndg_papers_appear_in_phil_trans/",
      "tag"       : "ndg, metadata, papers",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2009-02-03",
      "excerpt"		: "I’m really glad to see that our papers on  environmental metadata requirements of grids (really service orientated architectures), and  describing the deployment of NDG"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Reading in 2009, 4 -  Engleby not for me",
      "url"			: "/diary/2009/01/reading_in_2009-2C_4-3A_engleby_not_for_me/",
      "tag"       : "books",
      "category"  : "diary",
      "date"      : "2009-01-31",
      "excerpt"		: "I have a t-shirt that reads “too many books, too little time”."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "when the paparazzi are ok",
      "url"			: "/academic/2009/01/when_the_paparazzi_are_ok/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "academic",
      "date"      : "2009-01-30",
      "excerpt"		: "I stumbled across this a week or two ago, and have had it sitting tabbed waiting for a response since, because it really got my goat!"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "bbc goes to rdf",
      "url"			: "/computing/2009/01/bbc_goes_to_rdf/",
      "tag"       : "metadata, ndg, rdf",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2009-01-30",
      "excerpt"		: "RDF goes big at the BBC!"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Reading in 2009, 2 -  Water Supply",
      "url"			: "/diary/2009/01/Reading-20in-202009-2C-202-3A-20Water-20Supply/",
      "tag"       : "environment, climate, books",
      "category"  : "diary",
      "date"      : "2009-01-28",
      "excerpt"		: "And so to “When the Rivers Run Dry” by Fred Pearce. Which is about what it says on the tin …"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Reading in 2009, 3 - Miss Smilla",
      "url"			: "/diary/2009/01/reading_in_2009-2C_3-3A_miss_smilla/",
      "tag"       : "books",
      "category"  : "diary",
      "date"      : "2009-01-25",
      "excerpt"		: "We’ve just spent a week on holiday in Cornwall, where, apart from the IPCC tomes (mostly unopened) and Obama souvenier edition newspapers (mostly disguarded unread), my holiday reading was a reread of Peter Hoeg’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "SD cards to the rescue",
      "url"			: "/computing/2009/01/sd_cards_to_the_rescue/",
      "tag"       : "badc, curation, storage",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2009-01-13",
      "excerpt"		: "Next generation storage (press release pdf): The next-generation SDXC (eXtended Capacity) memory card specification, pending release in Q1 2009, dramatically improves consumers' digital lifestyles by increasing storage capacity from 32 GB up to 2 TB and increasing SD interface read/write speeds up to 104 MB per second in 2009 with a road map to 300 MB per second. SDXC will provide more portable storage and speed, which are often required to support new features in consumer electronic devices and mobile phones."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Heat not Drought",
      "url"			: "/environment/2009/01/heat_not_drought/",
      "tag"       : "climate",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2009-01-13",
      "excerpt"		: "Just as my night time reading is all about drought (I’ll tell you about that another day), I find this  fascinating paper in this weeks Science:"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "EGU 2009",
      "url"			: "/academic/2009/01/egu_2009/",
      "tag"       : "ndg, curation, badc, cmip5, metafor, moles",
      "category"  : "academic",
      "date"      : "2009-01-13",
      "excerpt"		: "Well, I haven’t been to a major conference for a while, and I received a raft of invitations to give talks at EGU this year."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Two degrees of Warming",
      "url"			: "/environment/2009/01/two_degrees_of_warming/",
      "tag"       : "climate",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2009-01-09",
      "excerpt"		: "William asked what ML thought would happen with two degrees. I suspect the reason he asked that is that most of us believe that two degrees is in the pipeline, and pretty much inescapable now. Indeed, I reckon we’ll see it (wrt 1960) within a few decades (wrt now)."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "curation and specification",
      "url"			: "/computing/2009/01/curation_and_specification/",
      "tag"       : "curation",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2009-01-08",
      "excerpt"		: "Chris Rusbridge has a couple of interesting posts (original and followup) about specification and curation. The gist is that he’s reporting some conversations, which I might baldly summarise as saying something like:  Any application stores data and renders it for consumption (by a human or another layer of software). In the best of possible worlds, a specification for the data structure AND the application functionality should be enough to ensure that a third party could render the data for consumption at the next level without reference to the application code itself. However, certain real world experience suggests that the specifications are not enough, you need the code as well, because real implementors break their specifications.  There was some discussion about the ability of OOXML and ODT to preserve semantic content preferentially over latex and PDF … (primarily I think because some of the key semantic content would have been in figures which could be parsed for logical content, and both latex and pdf would have turned those figures into images).  As a consequence, Chris gets to this position:So ... running code is better than specs as representation information, and Open Source running code is better than proprietary running code. And, even if you migrate on ingest, keep BOTH the rich format and a desiccated format (like PDF/A). It won't cost you much and may win you some silent thanks from your eventual users!"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Reading in 2009, 1 -  Six Degrees",
      "url"			: "/diary/2009/01/reading_in_2009-2C_1-3A_six_degrees/",
      "tag"       : "books",
      "category"  : "diary",
      "date"      : "2009-01-06",
      "excerpt"		: "So clearly in the last few weeks I’ve not been working and I’ve had half as many kids to look after … so in between tears I’ve been dealing with fears …. the sort that abound if you make it much past the first chapter of Mark Lynas’ book:Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "european summer drying",
      "url"			: "/environment/2009/01/european_summer_drying/",
      "tag"       : "climate",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2009-01-06",
      "excerpt"		: "OK, I confess, I’m clearly reading my abstract summaries this morning …"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "blimey! solar wind and tropical cyclones",
      "url"			: "/environment/2009/01/blimey-21_solar_wind_and_tropical_cyclones/",
      "tag"       : "climate",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2009-01-06",
      "excerpt"		: "Here are a couple of papers that I’m going to have to find time to read properly:  Prikryl, P., Ru?in, V., and Rybansk'y, M.: The influence of solar wind on extratropical cyclones ? Part 1: Wilcox effect revisited,  Ann. Geophys., 27, 1-30, 2009, and  Prikryl, P., Muldrew, D. B., and Sofko, G. J.: The influence of solar wind on extratropical cyclones ? Part 2: A link mediated by auroral atmospheric gravity waves?, Ann. Geophys., 27, 31-57, 2009."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Kia Kaha My Boy",
      "url"			: "/personal/2008/12/kia_kaha_my_boy/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "personal",
      "date"      : "2008-12-24",
      "excerpt"		: "Evan Lawrence,Born 5 July 2007,Died 18 December 2008. Forever Young:"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Nearest Book",
      "url"			: "/diary/2008/11/nearest_book/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "diary",
      "date"      : "2008-11-14",
      "excerpt"		: "A viral book meme is apparently propagating (thanks Sean):  Grab the nearest book.  Open it to page 56.  Find the fifth sentence.  Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.  Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "exist memory and stability",
      "url"			: "/computing/2008/11/exist_memory_and_stability/",
      "tag"       : "badc",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2008-11-14",
      "excerpt"		: "Within ceda we are producing more and more xml documents, and the obvious tool for most of them is an xml database. At the moment there appears to be onlyone candidate in the opensource world that has something approaching the necessaryreliability and scalablity: eXist. Colleagues who have used or are using Berkeley xml database and xindice have been pretty scathing about their experiences, and I’m not aware of other options (although something interesting may be happening in the mysqland postgres worlds). We’re not overly impressed with the reliability of eXist either, which is what I want to document here, but that said, we still believe it’s the way forward (e.g.in 2007 it was compared with MySQL circa 1997, which implies reasonable prospects)."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "CMIP5 - The Federation",
      "url"			: "/environment/2008/11/cmip5_-_the_federation/",
      "tag"       : "cmip5",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2008-11-14",
      "excerpt"		: "Next week there is a meeting which I hope will finalise the data requirements to participate in CMIP5. I can’t go, but there are a number of issues on the table which I care about, I’ll try and write about each in it’s own blog post, which you’ll be able to find by looking at my (new) CMIP5 category page."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "tales from the sleep deprived",
      "url"			: "/diary/2008/11/tales_from_the_sleep_deprived/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "diary",
      "date"      : "2008-11-13",
      "excerpt"		: "Milk chocolate is like low-alcohol beer. Pointless!"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "lack of service",
      "url"			: "/computing/2008/11/lack_of_service/",
      "tag"       : "downtime",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2008-11-10",
      "excerpt"		: "We’ve had a hell of a day today."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "peak everything",
      "url"			: "/environment/2008/11/peak_everything/",
      "tag"       : "climate, environment",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2008-11-05",
      "excerpt"		: "My blogging has almost dried up. It will be back, but maybe not yet."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "delicious on konqueror",
      "url"			: "/computing/2008/10/delicious_on_konqueror/",
      "tag"       : "kubuntu",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2008-10-15",
      "excerpt"		: "I’ve just spent three weeks without my laptop. That’s a story in itself. (IBM worldwide warranty for Lenovo might well work, but glacially, and  their ability to communicate sucks beyond belief … but I’ll tell that story another day, if I can be bothered)."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Virtual Conferencing",
      "url"			: "/computing/2008/10/virtual_conferencing/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2008-10-06",
      "excerpt"		: "For various reasons I’m unable to travel much at the moment, yet the last few weeks has seen two of the most important events of the year for me: one in Seattle and one in Toulouse. I was there, but not there, for both."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Reading Time and Reading Speed - both adrift",
      "url"			: "/diary/2008/09/reading_time_and_reading_speed_-_both_adrift/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "diary",
      "date"      : "2008-09-21",
      "excerpt"		: "When I was a lad, I thought nothing of reading a book a day. Now a book takes literally weeks to read, that’s a combination of a lack of time to read (when I was a lad, hours of reading per day was fine, now it’s minutes), and I suspect I read slower as well now too. Maybe I take more in now (though I’m not convinced, I can still read a book many times over and enjoy it nearly as much each time)."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "why global warming is too slow",
      "url"			: "/environment/2008/09/why_global_warming_is_too_slow/",
      "tag"       : "environment",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2008-09-01",
      "excerpt"		: "Another video to add to my collection: This one (by Dan Gilbert) is on why global warming hasn’t resulted in (much) action: it turns out it’s not PAINful (Personal, Abrupt, Immoral, Now)."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Defining a Metamodel - Part One",
      "url"			: "/computing/2008/08/defining_a_metamodel_-_part_one/",
      "tag"       : "metadata, metafor, ndg",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2008-08-19",
      "excerpt"		: "I’ve just introduced the concept of a  metamodel as being a key component of the conceptual formalism required to come up with a conceptual model of the world expressed in a conceptual schema."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Balancing Harmonisation",
      "url"			: "/computing/2008/08/balancing_harmonisation/",
      "tag"       : "metadata, metafor",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2008-08-14",
      "excerpt"		: "Of course all this nattering about formalising information model development is precisely the process that both GEOSS and INSPIRE are going through. The difference for us is that we’re a small domain, a lot of what we want to model (in the information sense) is not geospatial, and our user community is both global and not EO in the GEOSS sense."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Oil Demand",
      "url"			: "/environment/2008/08/oil_demand/",
      "tag"       : "environment",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2008-08-13",
      "excerpt"		: "Some interesting numbers:"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Formalising Information Model Development",
      "url"			: "/computing/2008/08/formalising_information_model_development/",
      "tag"       : "metafor, ndg, metadata",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2008-08-13",
      "excerpt"		: "Our metafor project is trying to establish a formal methodology for constructing UML, working with that UML in a team, and building multiple implementations using combinations of RDF and XML-Schema."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Model Intercomparison, Resolution, Ensembles",
      "url"			: "/environment/computing/2008/07/model_intercomparison-2C_resolution-2C_ensembles/",
      "tag"       : "cmip5, metafor",
      "category"  : "environmentcomputing",
      "date"      : "2008-07-28",
      "excerpt"		: "We’ve talked about the trade off between these things, but the reality is whichever way we go we get more data, and more data means more problems.This is what’s on my mind:Fortunately there is another wall (unfortunately it’s full too), and scope to replace these with higher capacity units, but we’ll need more power into the room too … (and more rooms) …"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "The Rising Storm",
      "url"			: "/environment/2008/07/the_rising_storm/",
      "tag"       : "environment, climate",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2008-07-18",
      "excerpt"		: "I’ve been on holiday … more of that anon. When I catch up on email and administrivia enough to return to things of interest to others, blogging will return too …"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "anatomy of a mip - part2",
      "url"			: "/computing/2008/06/anatomy_of_a_mip_-_part2/",
      "tag"       : "metadata, metafor, curation, moles",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2008-06-18",
      "excerpt"		: "My recent description of the key components of model intercomparison projects was done both as input to metafor deliberations and as preparation for a visit by Simon Cox. We spent a bit of that visit time discussing the UML describing such projects (which appeared in the previous post). In doing so, we managed a few simplifications and fixes to my UML …"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "exposing mips in moles",
      "url"			: "/computing/2008/06/exposing_mips_in_moles/",
      "tag"       : "moles, metafor, curation, badc",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2008-06-13",
      "excerpt"		: "In my previous posting, I should have pointed out that the MIP of interest is theRAPID thermohaline circulation model intercomparison project (THCMIP)."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "The anatomy of a mip",
      "url"			: "/computing/2008/06/the_anatomy_of_a_mip/",
      "tag"       : "metadata, metafor, curation",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2008-06-12",
      "excerpt"		: "We’re in the process of documenting a specific model intercomparison project (MIP) for the purposes of the Rapid programme. It’s the same issue we have for CCMVAL1, and for metafor in general.            that link doesn’t exist at the time of writing, but it will :-) ↩      "
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "moles basic concepts",
      "url"			: "/computing/2008/06/moles_basic_concepts/",
      "tag"       : "ndg, metadata, metafor, moles",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2008-06-04",
      "excerpt"		: "Another interim version of MOLES, the main changes here are to  make clear that dgEntity and dgBase are abstract (never instantiated),  for the moment at least, not all moles entities are discoverable  explicitly include attributes necessary for the mandatory ISO elements."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Having our granule cake and eating it too",
      "url"			: "/computing/2008/06/having_our_granule_cake_and_eating_it_too/",
      "tag"       : "metadata, ndg, metafor, moles",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2008-06-04",
      "excerpt"		: "Over on import cartography, Sean is convinced he’s not sabotaging the fight for a sustainable climate. He’s right."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Simple Thinking",
      "url"			: "/environment/2008/06/simple_thinking/",
      "tag"       : "environment, climate",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2008-06-03",
      "excerpt"		: "I’m quite surprised this hasn’t appeared on more of the blogs I read! (Simple thinking about the choices and risks about taking action on climate change!)"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Identifiers, Persistence and Citation",
      "url"			: "/computing/2008/05/identifiers_persistence_and_citation/",
      "tag"       : "metadata, curation, metafor",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2008-05-29",
      "excerpt"		: "Identifiers are pretty important things when you care about curation and citation, and they’ll be pretty important for metafor too."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "EA and Subversion, Resolved",
      "url"			: "/computing/2008/05/ea_and_subversion_resolved/",
      "tag"       : "UML",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2008-05-24",
      "excerpt"		: "The good folks at CodeWeavers have resolved my problems with the subversion client under Wine (which I needed to get working for use from within Enterprise Architect). All kudos to Jeremy White!"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Introducing Metafor",
      "url"			: "/computing/2008/05/introducing_metafor/",
      "tag"       : "ndg, metadata, metafor",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2008-05-23",
      "excerpt"		: "The EU has recently seen fit to fund a new project called METAFOR."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Metadata, Effort and Scope",
      "url"			: "/computing/2008/05/metadata_effort_and_scope/",
      "tag"       : "curation, badc, metadata",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2008-05-21",
      "excerpt"		: "I keep on harping on about how metadata management is time intensive, and the importance of standards."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Cost Models",
      "url"			: "/computing/2008/05/cost_models/",
      "tag"       : "badc, curation",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2008-05-20",
      "excerpt"		: "Sam and I had a good chat about cost models today - he’s in the process of honing the model we use for charging NERC for programme data management support."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Beginning to get a grip on ORE",
      "url"			: "/computing/2008/05/beginning_to_get_a_grip_on_ore/",
      "tag"       : "ndg, metadata, metafor",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2008-05-16",
      "excerpt"		: "This Friday afternoon I was trying to get to the bottom of ORE. ORE is pretty much defined in RDF and lots of accompanying text. I’ve been trying to find a way of boiling down the essence of it.  UML (at least as I use it) doesn’t quite do the job, so this is the best I could do:"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "From ORE to DublinCore",
      "url"			: "/computing/2008/05/from_ore_to_dublincore/",
      "tag"       : "metadata, ndg, iso19115, metafor",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2008-05-09",
      "excerpt"		: "Standards really are like buses, there’s another along every minute, exactly which one should you choose? I’m deepin a little “standards review” as part of our MOLES upgrade. I plan to muse on the role of standards another day, this post is really about Dublin Core!"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "RDF software stacks.",
      "url"			: "/computing/2008/05/rdf_software_stacks/",
      "tag"       : "metadata, ndg, badc, metafor",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2008-05-08",
      "excerpt"		: "So we want an RDF triple store with all the trimmings!"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "chaiten",
      "url"			: "/environment/2008/05/chaiten/",
      "tag"       : "environment",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2008-05-07",
      "excerpt"		: "There’s nothing like a big volcano to remind one of our precarious hold on planet earth. Thanks to James for drawing my attention to Chaiten, and the fabulous pictures, via: Alan Sullivan,   nuestroclima and the NASA earth observatory."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Big Java",
      "url"			: "/computing/2008/05/big_java/",
      "tag"       : "python",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2008-05-07",
      "excerpt"		: "Tim Bray:You know, thoseof us out there in the Ruby/Python/Erlang fringes might think we're buildingthe Next Big Thing, and we might be right too, but make no mistake about it:as of today, Java is the Big Leagues, the Show, where you find the most BigMoney and Big Iron and Big Projects.  You don't have to love it, but you'd bemoronic to ignore it."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "atom for moles",
      "url"			: "/computing/2008/05/atom_for_moles/",
      "tag"       : "ndg, metadata, metafor",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2008-05-07",
      "excerpt"		: "As we progress with our MOLES updating, the issue of how best to serialise the MOLES content becomes rather crucial, as it impacts storage, presentation, and yes, semantic content: some buckets are better than other buckets!"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Implementing my RDFa wiki code",
      "url"			: "/computing/2008/04/implementing_my_rdfa_wiki_code/",
      "tag"       : "metadata, ndg, python, metafor",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2008-04-25",
      "excerpt"		: "I claimed it would be straightforward to add the RDFa syntax to my wiki."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "creating RDFa",
      "url"			: "/computing/2008/04/creating_rdfa/",
      "tag"       : "metadata, ndg, metafor",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2008-04-23",
      "excerpt"		: "Let’s just assume for a moment that I want to create RDFa in XHTML. Just how should I go about it? It appears that there are no html authoring tools that are “RDFa aware”!"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "First time grant holder experience",
      "url"			: "/2008/04/first_time_grant_holder_experience/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "",
      "date"      : "2008-04-21",
      "excerpt"		: "Buried in a Wall Street Journal article  (thanks Michael) about the lack of involvement of the US presidential candidates in science issues is an interesting statistic:At the National Institutes of Health, the average age of a first grant is 42 for a Ph.D. and 44 for an M.D."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "More on the windows subversion client under wine.",
      "url"			: "/computing/2008/04/more_on_the_windows_subversion_client_under_wine/",
      "tag"       : "UML",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2008-04-16",
      "excerpt"		: "I reported my problems earlier."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "On typed links.",
      "url"			: "/computing/2008/04/on_typed_links",
      "tag"       : "ndg, metadata, metafor",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2008-04-10",
      "excerpt"		: "Being a collection of links and notes."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Semis here we come",
      "url"			: "/diary/2008/04/semis_here_we_come/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "diary",
      "date"      : "2008-04-06",
      "excerpt"		: "At last some sporting good news. Semi-Finals here we come."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Notes on brief service descriptions and bindings",
      "url"			: "/computing/2008/04/notes_on_brief_service_descriptions_and_bindings/",
      "tag"       : "ndg, computing, metadata, iso19115",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2008-04-03",
      "excerpt"		: "I’m coming late1 to a discussion about representing services in feeds and catalogues.(See Sean and Jeroen, and especially Doug’s commment on Seans’ post.) I found these while trying to go back to an old post of Sean’s (which I have yet to find) about REST and WPS, because I wanted to incorporate some of the ideas into a forthcoming presentation. Anyway, a bit of retrospective googling lead me here.            I lost contact from the world for most of March. One day I’ll explain why here. Some will know. ↩      "
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Subversion under WINE",
      "url"			: "/computing/2008/04/subversion_under_wine/",
      "tag"       : "UML",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2008-04-01",
      "excerpt"		: "Today’s task. Trying to get Enterprise Architect workingwith subversion."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "more MOLES version two thinking",
      "url"			: "/computing/2008/04/more_moles_version_two_thinking/",
      "tag"       : "ndg, metadata, iso19115, metafor, moles",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2008-04-01",
      "excerpt"		: "We’ve made some more progress with our thinking since last week … but there is more to come."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "early MOLES version two thinking",
      "url"			: "/computing/2008/03/early_moles_version_two_thinking/",
      "tag"       : "ndg, metadata, iso19115, moles",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2008-03-20",
      "excerpt"		: "Today’s task was going through MOLES V1 and trying to capture the key semantics in UML."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "The Scope of ISO19115",
      "url"			: "/computing/2008/03/the_scope_of_iso19115/",
      "tag"       : "metadata, ndg, iso19115",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2008-03-19",
      "excerpt"		: "We’re taking the first steps towards refactoring our Metadata Objects for Linking Environmental Sciences (MOLES) schema to be more easily understood and implementable and to support (if not conform with) the new Observations and Measurements OGC specification. In doing so it became obvious to me that I need to think about the relationship between MOLES entities and ISO discovery metadata."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Online Resources in ISO19115 and MOLES",
      "url"			: "/computing/2008/03/online_resources_in_iso19115_and_moles/",
      "tag"       : "ndg, metadata, iso19115, moles",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2008-03-19",
      "excerpt"		: "ISO19115 is a brave attempt to classify metadata. I think some aspects of it are fatally flawed in an RDF world, but some are not, and we’re likely to support it for some time to come. But, let’s face it, ISO19115 isn’t all inclusive, sohow do we reference external information? This posting is all questions. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll provide answers!"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "More quotations - Static Maps, Public Trusts, and Bad Processes",
      "url"			: "/computing/2008/02/more_quotations_-_static_maps-2C_public_trusts-2C_and_bad_processes/",
      "tag"       : "ndg, environment, computing",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2008-02-22",
      "excerpt"		: "I’m so limited to time at the moment that I’m limited to quoting, but the three snippets I’ve got today resonate as much as the last ones …"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "authkit and pylons don't quite fit",
      "url"			: "/computing/2008/02/authkit_and_pylons_don-27t_quite_fit/",
      "tag"       : "pyleo, python",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2008-02-17",
      "excerpt"		: "Background - I’m using genshi as my templating engine in pylons 0.9.6.1 and I want to authkit to do access controland authentication. This is in the context of pyleo."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "on global warming urgency",
      "url"			: "/environment/2008/02/on_global_warming_urgency/",
      "tag"       : "climate, environment",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2008-02-15",
      "excerpt"		: "Steven Sherwood (in a Science letter), with respect the urgency for action in response to global warming:Greater urgency comes from the rapid growth rate (especially in the developing world) of the very infrastructure that is so problematic. Mitigating climate change is often compared to turning the Titanic away from an iceberg. But this "Titanic" is getting bigger and less maneuverable as we wait--and that causes prospects to deteriorate nonlinearly, and on a time scale potentially much shorter than the time scale on which the system itself responds."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Finding is not enough",
      "url"			: "/computing/2008/02/finding_is_not_enough/",
      "tag"       : "ndg",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2008-02-15",
      "excerpt"		: "It seems to be my day for wanting to quote folk:"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Data Publication",
      "url"			: "/computing/2008/02/data_publication/",
      "tag"       : "curation, claddier",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2008-02-01",
      "excerpt"		: "As part of the claddier project, we have been working on a number of issues associated with how one publishes data (as opposed to journal articles which may or may not describe data)."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Moving Modelling Forward ... in small steps",
      "url"			: "/environment/2008/01/moving_modelling_forward_in_small_steps/",
      "tag"       : "climate, modelling_futures",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2008-01-29",
      "excerpt"		: "I’m in the midst of a series of “interesting” meetings about technology, modelling, computing, and collaboration … Confucian times indeed."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Using more computer power, revisited",
      "url"			: "/environment/2008/01/using_more_computer_power_revisited/",
      "tag"       : "climate, modelling_futures",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2008-01-23",
      "excerpt"		: "In the comments to my post on whyclimate modelling is so hard, Michael Tobis made a few points that need a more elaborate response (in time and text) then was appropriate for the comments section, so this is my attempt to deal with them. But before, I do, let me reiterate that I don’t disagree that there are substantial things that could and should be done to improve the way we do climate modelling. Where the contention lies maybe in our expectations of what improvements we might reasonably expect, and hence perhaps in our differing definitions of what might be impressive further progress."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Whither service descriptions",
      "url"			: "/computing/2008/01/whither_service_descriptions/",
      "tag"       : "ndg, computing, xml",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2008-01-22",
      "excerpt"		: "(Warning, this is long …)"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Why is climate modelling stuck?",
      "url"			: "/environment/2008/01/why_is_climate_modelling_stuck/",
      "tag"       : "climate, resolution, modelling_futures",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2008-01-16",
      "excerpt"		: "Why is climate modelling stuck? Well, I would argue it’s not stuck, so a better question might be: “Why isclimate modelling so hard?”. Michael Tobis is arguing that a modernprogramming language and new tools will make a big difference. Me, I’mnot so sure. I’m with Gavin.So here is my perspective on why it’s hard. It is of necessitya bit of an abstract argument …  We need to start with the modelling process itself. We have a physicalsystem with components within it.  Each physical component needs to bedeveloped independently, checked independently … This is a scientific, thena computational, then a diagnostic problem.  Each component needs to talk to other components, so there needs to be acommunication infrastructure which couples components. Michael has criticisedESMF (and by implication PRISM and OASIS etc), but regardless of how you doit, you need a coupling framework. This is a computational problem. I thinkit’s harder than Michael thinks it is. Those ESMF and PRISM folks are notstupid …  All those independently checked components may behave in different ways whencoupled to other components (their interactions are nonlinear). Understandingthose interactions takes time. This is a scientific and diagnostic problem.  We need a dynamical core. It needs to be fast, efficient, mass preserving,and stable in a computational sense. Stability is a big problem, given thatthe various parameterisations will perturb it in ways that are quiteinstability inducing. This is both a mathematical and a computationalproblem.  We need to worry about memory. We need to worry a lot about memory actually.If in our discussion we’re going to get excited about scalability inmulti-core environments, then yes, I can have 80 (pick a number) cores on mychip, but can I have enough memory and memory bandwidth to exploit them? Howdo we distribute our memory around our cores?  What about I/O bandwidth? Without great care, the really big memory hungryclimate models can often get slowed up and be waiting spinning empty CPUcycles waiting for I/O. This is a computational problem."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "virtualenv",
      "url"			: "/computing/2008/01/virtualenv/",
      "tag"       : "pyleo, python",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2008-01-02",
      "excerpt"		: "One more thing to remember. I’m going to be building pyleo using pylons 0.9.6.1, but the ndg stuff (also on my laptop) is using pylons 0.9.5. Library incompatibility is scary. Fortunately, we have virtualenv to the rescue."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "the leonardo file system",
      "url"			: "/computing/2008/01/the_leonardo_file_system/",
      "tag"       : "pyleo, python",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2008-01-02",
      "excerpt"		: "The most difficult thing about porting leonardo is interfacing with the leonardo file system (lfs). The lfs was designed to allow multiple backends through a relatively simple interface … of course it’s not properly documented anywhere, so remembering how it works was a bit difficult.The following piece of code shows the general principle:~~~~~ pythonfrom filesystem import LeonardoFileSystemimport sys,os.pathdef WalkAndReport(leodir,inipath=’/’):    ‘’’ Walks a leonardo filesystem and reports the contents in the same way    as doing ls -R would do ‘’’"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "discovery and google",
      "url"			: "/computing/2007/12/discovery_and_google/",
      "tag"       : "ndg",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2007-12-19",
      "excerpt"		: "Bill de hOra1[Knol](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/encouraging-people-to-contribute.html) is a case of not so much of changing the Google mission, but the battlefield. Google now realise it's easier to organise well marked up content and have figured out a way to deal with what is known as metacrap by centralising where content is manufactured.            Bill, should you ever see this, sorry, unicode is broken in this version of Leonardo … I really need to fix it … but I suspect rewriting Leonardo might be my method and that wont be any day soon. ↩      "
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "raw and refereed data",
      "url"			: "/computing/2007/12/raw_and_refereed_data/",
      "tag"       : "claddier, curation",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2007-12-17",
      "excerpt"		: "I’m still chasing up peer review of data. My it’s hard to find anything useful in the peer reviewed literature on the subject, or indeed on the wider Internet …"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "A definition of intelligence",
      "url"			: "/environment/2007/12/a_definition_of_intelligence/",
      "tag"       : "environment",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2007-12-04",
      "excerpt"		: "This quote is apparently from Piaget, but I got it from Calvin via a comment on Jeff Fleck’s blog:intelligence is what you use when you don't know what to do, when neither innateness nor learning has prepared you for the particular situation."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "On SQL and XML",
      "url"			: "/computing/2007/09/on_sql_and_xml/",
      "tag"       : "ndg, computing, metadata",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2007-09-18",
      "excerpt"		: "I’m going to write about CouchDB sometime, there seems to be enough hype for me to record something for my own benefit (no, not you dear readers, some of this blog writing is mainly for me :-) But before I do, in some of the current furore is interesting in it’s own right, not just because of CouchDB per se. For example, Assaf Arkin:Relational databases have failed the software industry in much the same way XML, Java and client-server failed the software industry. In other words, no failure to see here, move along. Those are all excellent technologies for solving a wide range of problems. Just that there are some problems they?re particularly poor at solving."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "On Measuring Research Outputs",
      "url"			: "/academic/2007/09/on_measuring_research_outputs/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "academic",
      "date"      : "2007-09-07",
      "excerpt"		: "Our department (Space Science and Technology) within the STFC is undergoing an exercise aimed at measuring our research quality. The mechanism involves bringing together a small panel of folk who go over some metrics, listen to some presentations, and make some recommendations."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Yet More Digital Silence",
      "url"			: "/personal/2007/07/yet_more_digital_silence/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "personal",
      "date"      : "2007-07-10",
      "excerpt"		: "I’m afraid this blog will be quiet for a few weeks now, unlike my house:"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Citation and Claddier",
      "url"			: "/computing/2007/05/citation_and_claddier/",
      "tag"       : "claddier, curation",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2007-05-21",
      "excerpt"		: "For some time now, we’ve been narrowing down how best to do scientific data citations. Last week we had a workshop where we concentrated on a number of issues associated with data publication."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Interoperability is just over the horizon ... always",
      "url"			: "/computing/2007/05/interoperability_is_just_over_the_horizon_..._always/",
      "tag"       : "ndg",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2007-05-02",
      "excerpt"		: "I’m not a GIS person, yet I’ve invested quite a lot of my own time, and quite a lot of public money, into building tools based around the Geographic Markup Language (GML).  GML is essentially a toolkit designed to improve interoperability, but it’s getting a bit of  bad press right now, both in blogs ( e.g.) and mailing lists (e.g this thread)."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Spring",
      "url"			: "/diary/2007/04/spring/",
      "tag"       : "environment",
      "category"  : "diary",
      "date"      : "2007-04-23",
      "excerpt"		: "No photos can do justice to this time of the year in the Chilterns,but we try:"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Access Control",
      "url"			: "/computing/2006/12/access_control/",
      "tag"       : "ndg, python",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2006-12-19",
      "excerpt"		: "I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. If you have high volume or high value real resources on the web, you need access control!"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Service Orientated Architecture - Two Years On!",
      "url"			: "/computing/2006/12/service_orientated_architecture_-_two_years_on/",
      "tag"       : "ndg",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2006-12-07",
      "excerpt"		: "I’ve been blogging for slightly over two years. After I wrote my SOAarticle earlier today, I realised that my second ever blog post was on SOA. Then, as now, I had been reading Savas’s blog."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Service Descriptions",
      "url"			: "/computing/2006/12/service_descriptions/",
      "tag"       : "ndg, metadata, computing",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2006-12-07",
      "excerpt"		: "A little over six months ago, I introduced the thorny problem of service binding to my blog. Of course it hasn’t gone away. Last week I gave a talk (see my the SEEGRID talk on my talks page) about “Grid-OGC collision” in which I made some specific statements, amongst which were:At the moment WSDL2 is where we are investing our thinking time (ISO19119 is a meta-model for services rather than a SDL)GRID has more sophisticated service binding,  access control and authentication, workflow! The OGC community should not reinvent tooling!"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "No Silver Bullet Exists",
      "url"			: "/computing/2006/12/no_silver_bullet_exists/",
      "tag"       : "ndg, computing",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2006-12-01",
      "excerpt"		: "Another bout of web services “religious war” has broken out again. We’ve been here before! This time it’s based on one funny and accurate diatribe about SOAP. The resulting frenzy in the blogosphere has yielded some quality comments, and even some declarations of victory by those who think REST is the one true way."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Wireless Internet Blackspot - Australia",
      "url"			: "/diary/2006/11/wireless_internet_blackspot_-_australia/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "diary",
      "date"      : "2006-11-30",
      "excerpt"		: "I’ve spent most of the week in Canberra, Australia, attending three differentevents - a standards workshop, AUKEGGS and the SEEGRID III conference (programme pdf)."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "A proposal for profiling ISO19139",
      "url"			: "/computing/2006/11/a_proposal_for_profiling_iso19139/",
      "tag"       : "ndg, metadata, iso19115",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2006-11-30",
      "excerpt"		: "I’ve been flagging issues with profiling ISO19139 for some time - see  Oct 19 andAug 15 and especially the comments in the latter."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "browser crap",
      "url"			: "/computing/2006/11/browser_crap/",
      "tag"       : "ndg, computing",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2006-11-15",
      "excerpt"		: "As is fairly obvious from the range of dribble that appears on this website, I dabble in many of the technologies my team work with. One of the things I’ve been doing is developing the interface to the new NDG discovery service (this is the sort of thing I find I can do on the train home from meetings when my brain is too addled to think properly as it’s kind of mechanical: make mistake, fix it, move slowly on - it beats sudoku and patience and the other stuff I see tired folk do at the end of the day)."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "climate change speed",
      "url"			: "/environment/2006/11/climate_change_speed/",
      "tag"       : "climate, environment",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2006-11-12",
      "excerpt"		: "Climate change is one of those (many) phrases that every reader/listener interprets in their own way. James Annan has interpretted it in one way in a discussion which I’ll summarise as “the a priori1 position that climate change would be detrimental has no scientific/logical underpinning”. (Well, actually I think he’s really expressing the converse: “that no change is the best possible outcome, is not necessarily wrong”; but it amounts to the same thing.)            Here my definition (and I think that of James) is that a priori means “before we do/did any calculations that actually show the expected climate change would be detrimental” ↩      "
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Answers.Yahoo.Com to the rescue",
      "url"			: "/diary/2006/11/answers.yahoo.com_to_the_rescue/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "diary",
      "date"      : "2006-11-12",
      "excerpt"		: "Once upon a time  I mentioned that we now have a megane estate car. I raved about it’s fuel economy."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Citing data with ISO19139",
      "url"			: "/computing/2006/10/citing_data_with_iso19139/",
      "tag"       : "iso19115, metadata, ndg, claddier",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2006-10-25",
      "excerpt"		: "I thought I might try and work out exactly what tags I might use for my previous citation example, if I was using ISO19139 (i.e. in the metadata of another dataset)."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Persistence",
      "url"			: "/computing/2006/10/persistence/",
      "tag"       : "curation, claddier",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2006-10-23",
      "excerpt"		: "Just after I wrote my last post on data citation, I found Joseph Reagle’s blog entry on bibliography and citation.  He’s making a number of points, one of which was about transience. In the comments to his post, and in Joseph’s comment on my post, two solutions to deal with internet transience are mentioned: the wayback machine and webcite."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Citation, Hosting and Publication",
      "url"			: "/computing/2006/10/citation_hosting_and_publication/",
      "tag"       : "claddier, metadata, ndg, curation",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2006-10-20",
      "excerpt"		: "Returning to my series on citation (parts one."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "On substitution groups and ISO19139",
      "url"			: "/computing/2006/10/on_substitution_groups_and_iso19139/",
      "tag"       : "xml, iso19115, metadata, ndg",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2006-10-19",
      "excerpt"		: "I have bleated already about the difficulties of using ISO19139 withrestrictions which introduce new tag names."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "More on citation - part three, delving",
      "url"			: "/computing/2006/09/more_on_citation_-_part_three_delving/",
      "tag"       : "curation, ndg, metadata, claddier",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2006-09-26",
      "excerpt"		: "Following on …"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "More on citation - part two, MST",
      "url"			: "/computing/2006/09/more_on_citation_-_part_two_mst/",
      "tag"       : "claddier, curation, metadata",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2006-09-22",
      "excerpt"		: "Yesterday I started talking about how I think one should cite data we hold on behalf of someone else. That discussion isn’t yet finished, issues of citing within datasets, and other “standards” for citation still need to be discussed (including how we parse and store them electronically), and I still haven’t gotten to addressing any of my points from the original blog entry. Before we go there, it’s helpful to discuss our mst radar data set."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "More on citation - part one, ashoe",
      "url"			: "/computing/2006/09/more_on_citation/",
      "tag"       : "curation, claddier, metadata",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2006-09-21",
      "excerpt"		: "We’ve just been having an interesting conversation about the citation of datasets in the context of claddier. I think I’ve got the use of we and I correct in what follows to indicate what I think as opposed to what we discussed and agreed …"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Diesel v Petrol",
      "url"			: "/environment/2006/09/diesel_v_petrol/",
      "tag"       : "environment",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2006-09-13",
      "excerpt"		: "Over the summer we upgraded our petrol engine renault megane hatchback and replaced it with a diesel megane estate (the dCi-100 version). We’ve gone from 40 miles per gallon (sorry about the imperial units) to between 55 and 60 miles per gallon. (Our first full tank did 59.5 mpg.)"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "to extend or not to extend ...",
      "url"			: "/computing/2006/08/to_extend_or_not_to_extend_",
      "tag"       : "iso19115, metadata, ndg",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2006-08-15",
      "excerpt"		: "A few months ago I wrote a few words about practicalities with ISO1939. The key reason for using ISO19139 is that it is a standard for metadata interoperability. A key a priori assumption is that one has a community who have agreed to interoperate … because in practice to interoperate will require a profile of ISO19139 which defines for a community what interoperability means to them."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "On Access Control",
      "url"			: "/computing/2006/08/on_access_control/",
      "tag"       : "ndg",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2006-08-15",
      "excerpt"		: "As part of the dews project, we need to deliver access control for OGC Web Services. In particular, we’re planning on limiting access to resources delivered by geoserver. The current concept for dealing with this is displayed in some simple UML:"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Granule Concepts",
      "url"			: "/computing/2006/08/granule_concepts/",
      "tag"       : "ndg, metadata, moles",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2006-08-11",
      "excerpt"		: "We’ve been struggling with a few concepts in mapping how we want variables and datasets to be related. The struggle, as in most technical discussions is that one needs to be very exact about what one is saying. To try and simplify our discussions (and maybe yours), I’ve tried to produce some UML which relates concepts like datasets and files to thing we actually deal with."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "what is bt up to this time?",
      "url"			: "/diary/2006/08/what_is_bt_up_to_this_time-3F/",
      "tag"       : "broadband",
      "category"  : "diary",
      "date"      : "2006-08-09",
      "excerpt"		: "For the last three nights (including tonight), konqueror has been misbehaving on both my home linux systems (one running Suse, one kubuntu). Neither O/S has been modified for a long time …"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Affording Interfaces",
      "url"			: "/computing/2006/07/affording_interfaces/",
      "tag"       : "ndg",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2006-07-28",
      "excerpt"		: "… and I don’t mean how much it costs :-)"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "On Processing Affordance",
      "url"			: "/computing/2006/07/on_processing_affordance/",
      "tag"       : "ndg",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2006-07-27",
      "excerpt"		: "When we produced the Exeter Communique, we spent a lot of time talking about something that Simon Cox has termed “processing affordance”. A processing affordance is a property of a feature[^1] type which expresses “what can be done to or with it”."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Curious as to how this forecast goes.",
      "url"			: "/environment/2006/07/curious_as_to_how_this_forecast_goes",
      "tag"       : "environment, weather",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2006-07-16",
      "excerpt"		: "The met office via the BBC is forecasting another hot week:it’ll be interesting to see how this one goes …"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "What does a forecast icon mean?",
      "url"			: "/environment/2006/07/what_does_a_forecast_icon_mean-3F/",
      "tag"       : "weather",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2006-07-05",
      "excerpt"		: "Well, the forecast is beginning to go pear-shaped, although notthrough lack of heat … or perhaps not. Here are four MetOffice via BBC weather forecast snapshots, but I’m not really sure what they mean …"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "The Great British Summer",
      "url"			: "/diary/2006/07/the_great_british_summer/",
      "tag"       : "environment",
      "category"  : "diary",
      "date"      : "2006-07-03",
      "excerpt"		: "The great British summer gets a pretty bad press from folks who come from my part of the world, but in my experience it’s pretty unjustified. I think British weather gets its crap reputation (deservedly) from the other seasons, when it’s not to unusual to go weeks without seeing even a glimpse of the sun. Having said that, occasionally, summer does go awol here in some years, but those years are getting fewer and further between …"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "RDF and Ontology Workshop",
      "url"			: "/talks/2006/06/NDG_SemanticEdinburgh06/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "talks",
      "date"      : "2006-06-08",
      "excerpt"		: "Distributed Data, Distributed Governance, Distributed Vocabularies: The NERC DataGridPresentation: pdf ( 6 MB).The workshop page is available here!"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Service Binding",
      "url"			: "/computing/2006/05/service_binding/",
      "tag"       : "metadata, ndg",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2006-05-19",
      "excerpt"		: "One of the things we have grappled with rather unsatisfactorily in the NDG is how to declare in discovery and browse metadata  that specific services are available to manipulate the described data entities  and, for a given service, what the binding between the service and data id is to invoke a service instance."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "More on Data Citation",
      "url"			: "/computing/2006/04/more_on_data_citation/",
      "tag"       : "claddier",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2006-04-28",
      "excerpt"		: "There was a lot interest at the e-science meeting about a throw away comment I made about our claddier project."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "NERC e-Science All-Hands-Meeting",
      "url"			: "/talks/2006/04/nerc-escience-ahm/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "talks",
      "date"      : "2006-04-26",
      "excerpt"		: "NERC DataGrid StatusPresentation: pdf (5 MB).In this presentation, I present some of the motivation for the NERC DataGrid development (the key points being that we want semantic access to distributed data with no centralised user management), link it to the ISO TC211 standards work, and take the listener through a tour of some of the NDG products as they are now. There is a slightly more detailed look at the Climate Sciences Modelling Language, and I conclude with an overview of the NDG roadmap."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "More Meteorological Time",
      "url"			: "/computing/2006/04/more_meteorological_time/",
      "tag"       : "badc, curation, ndg",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2006-04-13",
      "excerpt"		: "My first post at describing the time issues for meteorological metadata led to some confusion, so I’m trying again. I think it helps to consider a diagram:"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Some practicalities with ISO19139",
      "url"			: "/computing/2006/03/some_practicalities_with_iso19139/",
      "tag"       : "metadata, ndg, iso19115",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2006-03-28",
      "excerpt"		: "A number of us in the met community are rushing towards implementing anumber of standards that should improve interoperability across the environmentalsciences. One of those is ISO19139 which (we hope) will soon be standard xmlimplementation of ISO19115 (the content standard for discoverymetadata)."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "The Lockin results in the Exeter Communique",
      "url"			: "/computing/2006/03/the_lockin_results_in_the_exeter_communique/",
      "tag"       : "ndg, metadata",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2006-03-20",
      "excerpt"		: "A few weeks ago I went quiet for a week while I attended a workshop at the Met Office. We called our workshop “the lock-in”, as the original proposal was that we would be fed pizzas through a locked door until we came out with a GML application schema for operational meteorology.  Well, we were allowed out, but being the Met Office we had no effective internet connection, and we were too knackered for anything in the evenings …"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Journals and Blogging",
      "url"			: "/academic/2006/03/journals_and_blogging/",
      "tag"       : "curation, ndg",
      "category"  : "academic",
      "date"      : "2006-03-20",
      "excerpt"		: "On Thursday I gave my seminar at Oxford.  Of course I wrote the abstract months before the talk, so I didn’t cover half the things I said I would in any detail, but for the record, the presentation itself is on my Talks page."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Meteorological Time",
      "url"			: "/computing/2006/03/meteorological_time/",
      "tag"       : "curation, badc",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2006-03-07",
      "excerpt"		: "One of the problems with producing standard ways of encoding time is that in meteorology we have a lot of times to choose from. This leads to a lot of confusion in the meteorological community as to which time(s) to use in existing metadata standards, and even claims that existing standards cannot cope with meteorological time."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Some Trackback code",
      "url"			: "/computing/2006/03/some_trackback_code/",
      "tag"       : "ndg, computing, claddier",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2006-03-01",
      "excerpt"		: "So I’ve joined up to the trackback working group, and I decided I’d better have a proper trackback implementation to play with … given this is all very important for claddier the time investment was worth it."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "web service wars",
      "url"			: "/computing/2006/02/web_service_wars/",
      "tag"       : "ndg, computing",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2006-02-24",
      "excerpt"		: "The web-service wars have broken out again. Tim Bray has a nice summary. The bottom line is well captured by  Dare Obasanjo thus:At best WS-* means you don't have to reinvent the building blocks when building a service that has some claims around reliability and security. However the specifications and tooling aren't mature yet. In the meantime, many of us have services to build.    "
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Might trackback grow up?",
      "url"			: "/computing/2006/02/might-trackback-growup/",
      "tag"       : "computing, claddier",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2006-02-24",
      "excerpt"		: "I’ve been interested in trackback since before I started blogging. I have mused about it in the past, and still think it has significant potential. Our claddier project will exploit a modified version of trackback to explicitly make citation links between repositories."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Merging Metadata Always Lowers Quality",
      "url"			: "/computing/2006/01/merging_metadata_always_lowers_quality/",
      "tag"       : "ndg, metadata, curation",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2006-01-22",
      "excerpt"		: "I just found Stefano Mazzocchi’s Blog via Dare Obasanjo.  It looks like Stefano doesn’t blog very frequently, but what he does write is well worth reading. His latest, entitled “On the quality of Metadata” makes the assertion thatmerging two (or more) datasets with high quality metadata results in a new dataset with much lower quality metadata. "
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Bibliographic References, ISO19115 and NumSim",
      "url"			: "/computing/2006/01/bibliographic_references_iso19115_and_numsim/",
      "tag"       : "curation, ndg, claddier, metadata, iso19115",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2006-01-20",
      "excerpt"		: "One of the things one can imagine our NumSim discovery metadata to support is the ability for someone to identify that a particular model component (say the atmosphere) has a bibliographic reference associated with it that describes some part of the system. Having done that, to find all other simulation datasets for which the atmosphere is associated with the same citation. What this implies is that  We need to support bibliographic references associated with particular parts of the NumSim extension (as opposed to simply listing them as part of the parent DIF), and  We should describe such references in a standards compliant manner, and in such a way that we can format the reference both for automatic discovery and for humans to view on the screen (or paper)."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "New version of NumSim available",
      "url"			: "/computing/2006/01/new_version_of_numsim_available/",
      "tag"       : "metafor",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2006-01-13",
      "excerpt"		: "A new version of the NumSim metadata schema, along with documentation is now available. NumSim has been designed as a package module to add to standard metadata discovery records to discriminate between data sets which have resulted from simulations."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Oxford Seminar in March",
      "url"			: "/computing/2006/01/oxford-seminar-in-march/",
      "tag"       : "ndg, badc, curation",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2006-01-05",
      "excerpt"		: "I’ve been invited back to Oxford AOPP to give a seminar in March. The seminar coordinator tells me it’ll be over ten years since I last gave a seminar there. Last time it was on gravity waves (no, not gravitational waves!).This time it wont be directly about atmospheric science research, but about very relevant technologies:"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Whither parameters in metadata",
      "url"			: "/computing/2006/01/whither_parameters_in_metadata/",
      "tag"       : "ndg, metadata, iso19115",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2006-01-03",
      "excerpt"		: "Last year, there was considerable chatter  on the metadata mailing list about where the right place was to put which parameters were measured  in an ISO19115 metadata record."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Data Citation",
      "url"			: "/computing/2005/12/data_citation/",
      "tag"       : "badc, curation, claddier, metadata",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2005-12-22",
      "excerpt"		: "One of the aims of CLADDIER is to establish methodologies for data citation.  There are a lot of issues, some of which have been addressed before, by projects, like for example a German pilot experiment. The way I see it, things we haveto address include:  How do we deal with dataset transience? My first reaction to this question was to say that one has to make dataset publication final - if one wants to change the dataset, one should publish a new version. However, it doesn’t take long to realise that while that might make sense for datasets that are in some way canonical, it isn’t a general solution. Many scientific datasets are subject to more or less continual revision as more data is collected (for example, covering a wider spatial or temporal domain), or data is revised as quality control is improved.  In the case of most of our data, the latter situation should result in revised datasets - which was the situation I had envisaged - but in a gene database for example, that doesn’t make nearly as much sense if one plans to cite the database, which one expects to change as new sequences are added and old ones revised. This leads us to  How do we cite something within a database/dataset? Here I think the answer is that database contents should be thought of consisting of features in the OGC/ISO sense; that is, of objects which are instances of some named class which is well defined (with the class definition being well described and lodged in some registry). In that case, all such instance objects should be described by a unique identifier and thus citeable in some way. However, it is important that as such instances are revised/improved/replaced, not only do the new instances carry new identifiers, but the old instances must carry information that they are obsolete.  What metadata is needed to publish a dataset (as opposed to, say, a book)?In the ndg project, we have been investigating metadata, and we think there are at least four categories of metadata, one needs to deal with, which we have briefly summarised as:          A (for Archive): what you need to understand the format and direct content (i.e. what quantities are actually stored).      B (for Browse): what you need to understand the context of the data, and to allow you to choose between otherwise similar datasets (hence Browse).      C (for Character or Citation): what you need to support annotation of the data.      D (For Discovery): what you need to find the datasets  - broadly similar to the catalogue records in a library, but enhanced because we’re dealing with data.        If substantial amounts of metadata are needed, how do we deal with the definition of authorship for datasets? In the four categories above, one might expect the data originator to supply A, and some of the B metadata, but in reality it is rare for a dataset collector to provide enough B metadata … they have too much institutional wisdom which they fail to encode. Hence, to my mind, dataset publication will involve significant efforts from third parties (not the collector, nor necessarily, the publisher), and that effort will be in the form of material which were it in a standalone document, would be reflected with coauthorship … I think however, for data, we need a recognised categories of authorship which clearly delineate between the collector/compiler, and the metadata creators, but which reflect the academic aspirations of both.  If we want reputable data citation systems, how do we deal with refereeing?Clearly we (the BADC) could publish datasets ourselves, and indeed, we intend to do so, however, what guarantee of quality will our users get? Obviously we can do internal quality control, but that can only deal with compliance of the data to some schema, e.g. it has the right metadata, the numbers are within bounds, etc. What we can’t do, and what we need refereeing for is to comment authoritatively on, for examples:          the suitability of using a particular instrument to make a specific measurement, or      the suitability of a particular algorithm for combining data.        How do we deal with persistence of the digital objects that we cite?This is a whole topic in itself, but all objects which we expect to be citable, have to have identifiers which are live as long as the objects, and in particular, are independent of the storage mechanism, or the interfaces."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Hemel Hempstead Fire",
      "url"			: "/environment/2005/12/hemel_hempstead_fire/",
      "tag"       : "environment",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2005-12-13",
      "excerpt"		: "Here is a low resolution copy of an AATSR image of southern England for sunday morning …"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Solar Irradiance and Sunspot Cycles",
      "url"			: "/environment/2005/12/solar_irradiance_and_sunspot_cycles/",
      "tag"       : "climate",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2005-12-08",
      "excerpt"		: "For once I’m reading some real scientific literature. I’ve been pretty appalling lately, with my RSS aggregator telling me there are about 1400 items from Science and Nature alone that I should have a quick look at (As well as telling me that I’m not spending enough time keeping abreast of developments, I think this also tells me that I need to use some different software - something that does keyword parsing)."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Self Contradiction",
      "url"			: "/environment/2005/12/self_contradiction/",
      "tag"       : "weather",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2005-12-07",
      "excerpt"		: "Here are two five day forecasts for Oxford issued by the Met Office - both were downloaded this afternoon. The first is via the BBC, the second from the Met Office site itself:   Is it going to rain on Friday or not? Ostensibly these are forecasts issued around the same time (although one can’t see obviously when the forecast was issued for the BBC one) …  and as far as I know, both are issued automagically from the same input data. No wonder weather forecasts sometimes have a bad rep."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "On Moores Law",
      "url"			: "/computing/2005/11/on_moores_law/",
      "tag"       : "computing",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2005-11-14",
      "excerpt"		: "Last week I was involved in a conversation where I was explaining how the BADC deals with storage costs. It’s not a complicated scheme, we basically work on the assumption that as long as we can store the next four years data, we can probably store the entire previous archive as a marginal activity."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Trajectory Support for campaigns",
      "url"			: "/computing/2005/11/trajectory_support_for_campaigns/",
      "tag"       : "badc",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2005-11-10",
      "excerpt"		: "The BADC provides support for field campaigns in a number of ways. One of those is to provide information about the history of air parcels, and information about their future trajectories. We do this using a code we developed ourselves based on code from John Methven at the University of Reading. We are in the process of considering updating how we provide support, so are developing a use case.    Any feedback we can get is welcome, either to me directly, or via this web page.  (You can find a pdf of the above jpg here)."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Beijing Beauty",
      "url"			: "/personal/2005/10/beijing_beauty/",
      "tag"       : "meetings",
      "category"  : "personal",
      "date"      : "2005-10-10",
      "excerpt"		: "I’ve had a week in Beijing attending a WMO metadata workshop, and a week off, during which my only use of a computer was to play with photographs!"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Service Chaining",
      "url"			: "/computing/2005/08/service_chaining/",
      "tag"       : "computing, ndg",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2005-08-21",
      "excerpt"		: "Having spent the last four years as part of the UK e-science community, and buying into the wonders of what “the grid” can do for me, I’ve just spent a bit of time looking into exactly what is in the ISO19119 standard for geographic information services. Despite my colleague Andrew Woolf telling me how important this was, I’ve never really looked into this standard (despite running round banging on about how important standards are, and going on about how good they are in the metadata world, I hadn’t had time to read this one …). Anyway, it turns out to describe what most of the e-science world has been reinventing, and redocumenting in an adhoc manner for the last few years. Oh why oh why do standards organisations hide their wonderful products so successfully that no one uses them?"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Nature DOI Failure",
      "url"			: "/academic/2005/08/nature_doi_failure/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "academic",
      "date"      : "2005-08-11",
      "excerpt"		: "I don’t know what it is with Nature, but yet  again, when I use their RSS feed to browse the table of contents of the current issue, not one of the doi links to the complete story resolves!"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Metadata, XML and Deja Vu",
      "url"			: "/computing/2005/08/metadata_xml_and_dejavu/",
      "tag"       : "curation, badc, xml, ndg, metadata, iso19115, metafor",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2005-08-11",
      "excerpt"		: "It’s funny how some concepts and issues are repeated in multiple communities.Recently I attended a meeting called “Activating Metadata” (agenda,talks) held at NIEeS. The sharp eyed amongst you will have noted that the link for the talks is …/metadata2 … talks from an earlier event are here.There have been other meetings on a similar theme which don’t seem to be archived."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Solar Influence on Recent Climate",
      "url"			: "/environment/2005/08/solar_influence_on_recent_climate/",
      "tag"       : "climate",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2005-08-01",
      "excerpt"		: "There is a tiny war of words in Nature this week about reconstructions of solar influences on climate. Muscheler et.al. (2005) claim that current solar activity is not particularly unusual in a criticism of Solanki et.al. (2004) (who themselves claim that the last few decades are unusual with respect to the previous 11,000 years).  There is a reply by Solanki et.al which essentially states that Muscheler et al have used an inappropriate normalisation to get large amounts of historical activity. It’s only a tiny war though, because all parties agree with  Solanki and Krivova (2003) who demonstrate that even if the last few decades are unusual, they can’t explain the recent warming."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Business Models and Curation",
      "url"			: "/computing/2005/07/business_models_and_curation/",
      "tag"       : "curation, badc, management",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2005-07-28",
      "excerpt"		: "While up in Edinburgh, I visited the National Digital Curation Centre. Amongst the many interesting things we talked about was the pesky difficulty of applying business models to curation. Chris Rusbridge at the DCC differentiates between curation and preservation as:  Preservation: something you do for the future, and  Curation: something you do for both now and the future."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "ERA40 Precipitation and Antarctic Ice",
      "url"			: "/environment/2005/07/AntarcticIce/",
      "tag"       : "climate",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2005-07-01",
      "excerpt"		: "There is a fascinating article by Davis et.al. in Science on Antarctic Ice thickness. There is also a perspective piece by David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey. The gist of the substantive article is that some parts of the Antarctic land mass are thickening while others are thinning (the results are based on radar altimetry measurements over eleven years). Not surprisingly, they link the thickening versus thinning to precipitation changes. Leaving aside the implications (evidence for climate change and concommitant sea level rise which are the main thrust of the paper [^1]), one of the things I find most interesting is how good the ERA40 precipitation measurements are! The following image shows the ERA40 snow precipitation (left) and ERS elevation changes (reds more precip, snowmass increasing, blues, less precip, less snowmass):"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Terms and Conditions",
      "url"			: "/computing/2005/06/terms_and_conditions/",
      "tag"       : "badc, curation",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2005-06-30",
      "excerpt"		: "eliterate librarian has drawn my attention to the LexisNexis website and their terms and conditions, which are a joke."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Dual Core Opterons",
      "url"			: "/computing/2005/05/dual_core_opterons/",
      "tag"       : "computing",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2005-05-24",
      "excerpt"		: "In general I try and avoid being a hardware geek, but it appears that I’m going to have to understand the relative performance issues between dual-core opterons and normal ones and xeons …"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Grid Architecture",
      "url"			: "/computing/2005/05/grid_architecture/",
      "tag"       : "ndg",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2005-05-16",
      "excerpt"		: "In the NDG we’re grappling with exactly how we deploy the components we’ve designed and started building. There is a nice simplified view of the way these things have to work in theSAKAI EVALUATION EXERCISE report by Crouchley et.al. (pdf):"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Citation Decay Rate",
      "url"			: "/computing/2005/05/citation_decay_rate/",
      "tag"       : "curation",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2005-05-11",
      "excerpt"		: "I found out via the Digital-Preservation Mailing List about this article about the decay rate for online citations."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Glaciers Indicate Temperature Increase",
      "url"			: "/environment/2005/04/glaciers_indicate_temperature_increase/",
      "tag"       : "climate",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2005-04-29",
      "excerpt"		: "Back when I started criticising Michael Crichton, I commented on glacial length from what I freely admitted was a state of ignorance."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Copyright, Blogs and Fair Use",
      "url"			: "/academic/2005/04/fairuse/",
      "tag"       : "blogging",
      "category"  : "academic",
      "date"      : "2005-04-29",
      "excerpt"		: "One of the things I want to do with my blog is often cite research articles, and I often want to include a figure or text from those articles. There is obviously then an issue of copyright that I need to address."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Managing Action Items",
      "url"			: "/management/2005/04/managing_action_items/",
      "tag"       : "management",
      "category"  : "management",
      "date"      : "2005-04-28",
      "excerpt"		: "43 folders (via dirtsimple) has a nice discussion of how to manage one’s action items, particularly in the context of categorising things into “next actions”. I liked the following key points about action item lists (paraphrased):  Actions need to be atomic (if not, put them on a project to-do list)  Make them physical actions (not “think about”, but “write notes” etc)  Make sure that any dependencies are resolved  If it’s not something one is committed to (i.e. learn about something), then put on a different sort of list (e.g. on-hold, learning list, etc).  Make them well defined (begin with a physical verb, e.g. email, call, recode, visit etc).  Make sure the items are complete enough that you know what needs doing and why tomorrow, or next week, when you actually get to doing it."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Sleepless in Oxfordshire",
      "url"			: "/personal/2005/04/sleepless_in_oxfordshire/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "personal",
      "date"      : "2005-04-26",
      "excerpt"		: "Like all new parents, I’m not getting enough sleep, but I’m back at work, sort of."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Fine Excuse for Digital Silence",
      "url"			: "/personal/2005/04/fine_excuse_for_digital_silence/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "personal",
      "date"      : "2005-04-14",
      "excerpt"		: "This blog will go silent for a couple of weeks now, as our first child arrived a couple of days ago, and will be home from the hospital shortly. Everyone tells me I’ll be too tired to do anything. I believe them."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Satellite Temperature Trends",
      "url"			: "/environment/2005/04/satellite_temperature_trends/",
      "tag"       : "climate",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2005-04-11",
      "excerpt"		: "There has been some contention over exactly what the satellite data tells us about temperature trends. In particular, analysis of data from the MSUinstruments aboard the NOAA satellites has been interpretted ina number of ways."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Function Creep and Institutional Repositories",
      "url"			: "/computing/2005/03/function_creep_and_institutional_repositories/",
      "tag"       : "curation",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2005-03-31",
      "excerpt"		: "The case for institutional repositories (IRs) is well made in Crow et.al.: The Case for Institutional Repositories: A SPARC Position Paper (link)… as long as the definition of “digital collections capturing and preserving the intellectual output of a single or multi-university community” is appropriate."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Attention Deficit Trait",
      "url"			: "/management/2005/03/attention_deficit_trait/",
      "tag"       : "management",
      "category"  : "management",
      "date"      : "2005-03-30",
      "excerpt"		: "eliterate librarian has an article describing this “disorder”, defined asyou've become so busy attending to so many inputs and outputs that you become increasingly distracted, irritable, impulsive, restless and, over the long term, underachieving. In other words, it costs you efficiency because you're doing so much or trying to do so much, it's as if you're juggling one more ball than you possibly can."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Debunking Crichton Done for Me",
      "url"			: "/diary/2005/03/debunking_crichton_done_for_me/",
      "tag"       : "crichton, environment",
      "category"  : "diary",
      "date"      : "2005-03-28",
      "excerpt"		: "I haven’t finished with my comments on Crichton’s book. I have finished reading it, and it sits on my desk with a few bits of paper marking things I want to pick up on … but other things intrude :-)"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "JISC Digital Rights Meeting",
      "url"			: "/computing/2005/03/jisc_digital_rights_meeting/",
      "tag"       : "curation",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2005-03-24",
      "excerpt"		: "On Tuesday I attended a JISC Consultation Workshop  on Rights in Digital Environments. While the emphasis of this meeting was on rights management issues in a learning environment, and on documents etc, there was some interesting discussion on data rights issues. Among a number of interesting discussions and presentations were two that I found especially interesting: one by Charles Oppenheim on IPR issues in general, and one by Podromos Tsiavos on Commons UK."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "P2PGIS",
      "url"			: "/computing/2005/03/p2pgis/",
      "tag"       : "ndg",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2005-03-23",
      "excerpt"		: "I’ve just had my attention drawn (by the good folks at EDINA) to the Peer-to-peer GIS project and the OPen Use Server (OPUS).The link refers to their implementation being based on Java, Apache, PHP and MapServer. It also says that it is based on RoMap.net (Rapid Online Mapping Network), and they say thatRoMap is a set of peer-to-peer protocols and network infrastructure to allow compliant GIS applications to work together over a network."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Linus spoof letter to Bill Gates",
      "url"			: "/computing/2005/03/linus_spoof_letter_to_bill_gates/",
      "tag"       : "computing",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2005-03-23",
      "excerpt"		: "This is absolutely brilliant!"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "ICSU Recommendations",
      "url"			: "/computing/2005/03/icsu_recommendations/",
      "tag"       : "curation, badc",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2005-03-23",
      "excerpt"		: "Yesterday, while on a train to a JISC meeting in Bristol on Rights in a Digital Environment (of which more later), I found time to read through theICSU Report of the CSPR Assessment Panel on Scientific Data and Information (pdf)."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Python Eggs",
      "url"			: "/computing/2005/03/python_eggs/",
      "tag"       : "python",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2005-03-22",
      "excerpt"		: "One of the main complaints new users of python give is that the library dependency issue is not as clearly dealt with as it is in the perl and java communities. Today, I found out about the python eggs project via this. In the latter, eggs were described asAn egg is to a Python as a jar is to Java"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "SOA Design Principles",
      "url"			: "/computing/2005/03/soa_design_principles/",
      "tag"       : "ndg",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2005-03-20",
      "excerpt"		: "John Crupi (via Tim Bray) has this to say about the design of Service Orientated Architectures:...for SOA to be successful, it must be a "top-down" approach. And top-down, means problem to architecture to solution. It does not mean, working from what we have and just wrapping it with new technologies just because we can. This bottom-up approach is quite natural and easy and is the perfect recipe for a SOA failure. "
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Sea Level Rise Predictions",
      "url"			: "/environment/2005/03/sea_level_rise_predictions/",
      "tag"       : "climate",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2005-03-20",
      "excerpt"		: "Well, I’m clearly not an oceanographer, but given my recent interest in assertions by Michael Crichton (there is more to come on that subject), I thought this might be interestingfor occasional readers."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "DDT and Malaria",
      "url"			: "/diary/2005/03/ddt_and_malaria/",
      "tag"       : "crichton, environment, computing",
      "category"  : "diary",
      "date"      : "2005-03-16",
      "excerpt"		: "I started my series of responses to State of Fear (SOF) thinking that I was going to be commenting on climate change issues alone. However, Crichton goes off on a lot of tangents, and I now understand why, having understood that State Of Fear is essentially a novel written around a speech where he makes a fairly strong pitch that environmentalism is a new religion. Much of what he says is very fair, not least:Because in the end, science offers us the only way out of politics. And if we allow science to become politicized, then we are lost."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Peopleware",
      "url"			: "/management/2005/03/peopleware/",
      "tag"       : "management",
      "category"  : "management",
      "date"      : "2005-03-15",
      "excerpt"		: "A few weeks ago, various blogs I read started praising “Pragmatic Version Control using Subversion” by Mike Mason. One thing led to another, and I found this with a list of three seminal books, only one of which I had read (the Mythical Man Month). So, I bit the bullet and bought the other two and the Pragmatic Version Control book as well. One of the ones I bought was “Peopleware - Productive Projects and Teams” by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister. It’s fascinating …"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Cloud Feedbacks",
      "url"			: "/environment/2005/03/cloud_feedbacks/",
      "tag"       : "climate, crichton, clouds",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2005-03-15",
      "excerpt"		: "In my ongoing criticism of Michael Crichton’s book, I made the point that parameterisation links small and large scales, and I emphasised the IPCC point that clouds and humidity remain sources of significant uncertainty."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "When is a webservice a grid service?",
      "url"			: "/computing/2005/03/when_is_a_webservice_a_grid_service/",
      "tag"       : "computing, ndg",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2005-03-10",
      "excerpt"		: "I often get asked what is this thing called a grid. Soon after, I get asked, so what is the difference between a web service and a grid service. The short answer is nothing … the slightly longer answer is a grid service is a web service packaged up to deal with state, notification, and pointers to objects with state. The following schematic outlines a model of a possible transaction I could have with some data."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Your website really does need to be current",
      "url"			: "/computing/2005/03/your_website_really_does_need_to_be_current/",
      "tag"       : "curation",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2005-03-09",
      "excerpt"		: "A lesson from NZ on why an out of date website can be a legal and financial problem.Operators who put up a website and then forget about minding it have been given a sharp reminder by the court that, in some cases, those old prices and specials could constitute violations of the Fair Trading Act ..."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Why blogging is good for you (and yes we need a policy)",
      "url"			: "/computing/2005/03/why_blogging_is_good_for_you/",
      "tag"       : "badc, blogging",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2005-03-09",
      "excerpt"		: "Tim Bray and Sam Ruby on why blogging is a “Good Thing (TM)”"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Meteorological RSS Feeds",
      "url"			: "/computing/2005/03/meteorological_dinosaurs/",
      "tag"       : "badc",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2005-03-08",
      "excerpt"		: "I’ve just spent a frustrating hour trying to find rss feedsfor the table of contents of atmospheric and climate journals. I’vefound plenty of websites, and even email notification pages, but all I wantis RSS. Given our discipline really stretches computational abilityat the top end, why can’t I find such a service, when even lawyers do it?"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "More State of Fear",
      "url"			: "/environment/2005/03/more_state_of_fear/",
      "tag"       : "climate, crichton",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2005-03-05",
      "excerpt"		: "Another installment in my (seems likely weekly) discussion of Michael Crichton’s work of fiction. Before I get started, I can highly recommend the essay entitled “Dangerous Fiction” by Jeremy Leggett in New Scientist (5th March Edition)."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Content Management, Wikis, Blogging etc",
      "url"			: "/computing/2005/03/_content_management-2C_wikis-2C_blogging_etc_/",
      "tag"       : "badc, blogging",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2005-03-02",
      "excerpt"		: "A number of threads are banging around in my mind. Here at the BADC we are running a number of bits of software that all do a bit of the sametask. We run  Leonardo for blogging.  BSCW (Basic Support for Cooperative Working], for collaboratory activities, including private workspaces and file sharing.  A number of kwiki based wikis,  and of course we have our comprehensive (and complicated) web site."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "HinesParameterisation",
      "url"			: "/environment/2005/03/HinesParameterisation/",
      "tag"       : "climate",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2005-03-02",
      "excerpt"		: "Alison has just pointed out that Colin Hines has a new paper on his Doppler Spread Parameterisation. The abstract states that:An embryo Lagrangian DST is introduced and employed to assess the original DST. Earlier results near the Eulerian spectral peak are found to be reasonably valid, whereas those at greater vertical wavenumber are confirmed to have produced too much spreading. The earlier DSP is found to need little if any change, though specific values are suggested for its two most important "fudge factors"."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "What is a Web Service",
      "url"			: "/computing/2005/02/_what_is_a_web_service_/",
      "tag"       : "computing, ndg",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2005-02-28",
      "excerpt"		: "Last week I gave a kick off talk at the National Institute for Environmental e-Science (niees) on “What is a Web Service”. This was in a meeting on “Developing applications for real-time environmental data” (DARTED)."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Internet Explorer REALLY Sucks",
      "url"			: "/computing/2005/02/_internet_explorer_really_sucks_/",
      "tag"       : "computing",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2005-02-28",
      "excerpt"		: "I’ve been aware that my blog didn’t render properly on internet explorer.I thought it was probably because my CSS and/or my XHTML weren’t standardscompliant. So, I’ve done some testing. My new wikiBNL code and my style sheed have been tested with  An XHTML validator  A CSS validator"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Matplotlib",
      "url"			: "/computing/2005/02/Matplotlib/",
      "tag"       : "python",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2005-02-27",
      "excerpt"		: "In my last post, I produced a figure of temperature data. As an exercise in learning something new, I produced it with python and matplotlib. I have to say I was pretty impressed with matplotlib. Although I only playedwith the tkinter gui and the postscript and png backends, it looks likethere are lots of other interesting output types including SVG. I’m certainly going to play with it some more."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "State of Fear, pick my timeseries",
      "url"			: "/environment/2005/02/state_of_fear_pick_my_timeseries/",
      "tag"       : "crichton",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2005-02-26",
      "excerpt"		: "Following on from this."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "M2Crypto Woes",
      "url"			: "/computing/2005/02/M2CryptoWoes/",
      "tag"       : "python, computing",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2005-02-25",
      "excerpt"		: "Guido (he of python fame), has a rant about M2Crypto. This is a worry from an NDG point of view. In it he alsomakes the following comment about SWIG as well:... I've yet to see an extension module using SWIG that doesn't make me think it was a mistake to use SWIG instead of manually written wrappers. The extra time paid upfront to create hand-crafted wrappers is gained back hundredfold by time saved debugging the SWIG-generated code later."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Orographic cloud in a GCM - the missing cirrus",
      "url"			: "/environment/2005/02/_orographic_cloud_in_a_gcm-3A_the_missing_cirrus_/",
      "tag"       : "climate, papers",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2005-02-24",
      "excerpt"		: "At last a chance to talk about real science: Sam Dean, myself, Don Grainger, and Darlene Heuff (Dean et. al.) have had a paper on orographic cirrus accepted by Climate Dynamics. The abstract is:Observations from the International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project (ISCCP) are used to demonstrate that the 19-level HadAM3 version of the UK Met Office Unified Model does not simulate sufficient high cloud over land. By using low-altitude winds from the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF) Re-Analysis from 1979-1994 (ERA-15) to predict theareas of maximum likelihood of orographic wave generation, it is shown that much of the deficiency is likely to be due to the lack ofa representation of the orographic cirrus generated by sub-grid scale orography. It is probable that this is a problem in most GCMs."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Broadband Frustration",
      "url"			: "/personal/2005/02/BroadbandFrustration/",
      "tag"       : "broadband",
      "category"  : "personal",
      "date"      : "2005-02-24",
      "excerpt"		: "“Broadband Britain” is a wonderful but empty phrase. I work at home a lot, but it isn’t always easy …"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "State of Fear, the beginning",
      "url"			: "/environment/2005/02/state_of_fear_the_beginning/",
      "tag"       : "crichton",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2005-02-19",
      "excerpt"		: "Well, I threatened to post my thoughts about Michael Crichton’s State of Fear. I finally got to start the book last night,and it’s immediately apparent it’s going to annoy me as I read it. This bookhas 170+ references in a bibliography, so he’s trying to assert somesort of psuedo-scientific credibility. I have a choice now, just read the book, and give an overall opinion, or try and do a piece by piece critique. The former has been done, so I’ll attempt the latter, although I doubt that I will have the time or patience to be very complete …"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "DataDeluge",
      "url"			: "/computing/bigdata/2005/02/DataDeluge/",
      "tag"       : "curation",
      "category"  : "computingbigdata",
      "date"      : "2005-02-14",
      "excerpt"		: "I have just got a hard copy of the JISC briefing paperon the Data Deluge: Preparing for the explosion in Data."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Testing, Extreme Programming and Demos",
      "url"			: "/computing/2005/02/_testing-2C_extreme_programming_and_demos_/",
      "tag"       : "computing",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2005-02-13",
      "excerpt"		: "Patrick Logan has some really good thoughts on how to do designa demo so that it doesn’t break …"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Sunday Morning Procrastination",
      "url"			: "/computing/2005/02/_sunday_morning_procrastination_/",
      "tag"       : "curation, xml",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2005-02-13",
      "excerpt"		: "It’s Sunday morning, and outside can’t make up it’s mind whether it is a hailstorm, a gale, rain, or sunshine … clearly time to do something useful. So I’m procrastinating and catching up on blogs and such."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Upgraded to v166",
      "url"			: "/computing/2005/02/_upgraded_to_v166_/",
      "tag"       : "blogging",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2005-02-12",
      "excerpt"		: "This web site is now running a very slightly modified rev 166 versionof leonardo. I only had to make a few changes:  modify my menu page to use the new calendar insert option  copy my modified wiki04 over top of James …  add one line to the page template to get an image  copied my version of static.py (which handles a few more mime types andslightly different default file locations) over top of the svn version.  fix a whole heap of bugs in my wiki code. (A revised version isat corewiki.tgz)."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "there is no such thing as a foolish question",
      "url"			: "/academic/2005/02/no_such_thing_as_a_foolish_question/",
      "tag"       : "teaching",
      "category"  : "academic",
      "date"      : "2005-02-03",
      "excerpt"		: "Generations of young children have been admonished with variations of a quote typically attributed to Mark Twain:Better to keep your mouth closed and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "FreeAccess",
      "url"			: "/computing/2005/01/FreeAccess/",
      "tag"       : "curation",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2005-01-31",
      "excerpt"		: "From JISC:The University of Southampton is to make all its academic and scientific research output freely available. A decision by the University to provide core funding for its Institutional Repository establishes it as a central part of its research infrastructure, marking a new era for Open Access to academic research in the UK. The repository provides a publications database with full text, multimedia and research data."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "State of Fear, Part 1",
      "url"			: "/diary/2005/01/StateOfFear1/",
      "tag"       : "crichton, environment",
      "category"  : "diary",
      "date"      : "2005-01-27",
      "excerpt"		: "A colleague has sent me a copy of The State of Fear by Michael Crichton for my comment. I should hasten to add this colleague is not one ofmy atmospheric science colleagues, who I suspect would all agree withMyles Allen’s review in Nature."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Atomic content in NCAS",
      "url"			: "/computing/2005/01/rss_and_or_atom_in_ncas/",
      "tag"       : "badc",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2005-01-25",
      "excerpt"		: "The NERC Centres of Atmospheric Science, NCAS, consists of a number of centres and facilities that have their own life and web presences. Today some of us had a brief discussion about whether it would be feasible to utilise RSS and/or Atom to improve the connections between the centres, the ncas website itself, and the wider world."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Internet Explorer Sucks",
      "url"			: "/computing/2005/01/IESucks/",
      "tag"       : "computing",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2005-01-25",
      "excerpt"		: "I’ve just discovered that Internet Explorer has been rendering the menu for this site with nothing readable in the menu … for three months! (I checked it out on firefox, konqueror, and safari …). The menu used to look like this:"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Model Resolution, Ensembles and Physics",
      "url"			: "/environment/2005/01/Model_Resolution/",
      "tag"       : "climate, resolution, modelling_futures",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2005-01-24",
      "excerpt"		: "Last Wednesday I attended a meeting of the Royal Met Society on Perfecting Imperfect Models."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "generateDS",
      "url"			: "/computing/2005/01/generateDS/",
      "tag"       : "python, xml",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2005-01-21",
      "excerpt"		: "I’ve just discovered generateDS (via Uche Ogbuj’s column).generateDS.py generates Python data structures (for example, class definitions) from an XML Schema document. These data structures represent the elements in an XML document described by the XML Schema. It also generates parsers that load an XML document into those data structures. In addition, a separate file containing subclasses (stubs) is optionally generated. The user can add methods to the subclasses in order to process the contents of an XML document."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Massachusetts Contributes to easier Document Curation",
      "url"			: "/computing/2005/01/massachusetts_contributes_to_easier_document_curation/",
      "tag"       : "msxml",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2005-01-18",
      "excerpt"		: "Groklaw reports that the (US) State of Massachusetts is going to require all agencies to store public documents in nonproprietary formats such as HTML or PDF.Acceptable formats, according to the state's Information Technology Division, are now Rich Text Format v. 1.7 (.rtf); Plain Text Format (.txt); Hypertext Document Format (.htm); Portable Document Format (.pdf) - Reference version 1.5; Extensible Markup Language (XML) v. 1.0 (Third Edition) or v 1.1 "when necessary"."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Python Gui Kits",
      "url"			: "/computing/2005/01/gui_kits_for_python/",
      "tag"       : "python",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2005-01-13",
      "excerpt"		: "jkx@home has a brief review of his experiencewith python gui toolkits. I’ve been flirting briefly with all of theseexcept glade based kits, so it’s interesting he recommended it."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "A view of an iceberg/glacier collision from Space",
      "url"			: "/environment/2005/01/colliding_icebergs_from_space/",
      "tag"       : "environment",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2005-01-13",
      "excerpt"		: "NASA have released a news article showing images from space of a large iceberg (about the size of Long Island, NY) moving towards the Drygalski Ice Tongue. The article speculates the collision is due within a few days, but even if it doesn’t happen, the mpg movie that shows the comparative sizes of Long Island and the iceberg and then the movement of the iceberg is well worth a look."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Open Source Licenses",
      "url"			: "/computing/2005/01/open_source_licenses/",
      "tag"       : "badc, curation",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2005-01-08",
      "excerpt"		: "We’re in the curation business. That means we’re in the business of keeping our data for a very long time … the reality of data is that it’s always accompanied by software to use it. If we’re serious about longevity of the data we’re forced to be serious about longevity of the accompanying software. In practice, given the way companies can be bought and sold, and rights to software might change, we are required to be very careful about whether our software has legal longevity as well as technical longevity."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Searching Techniques",
      "url"			: "/computing/2005/01/searching_techniques/",
      "tag"       : "ndg",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2005-01-07",
      "excerpt"		: "Serendipity is a strange thing. Two days ago we started a discussion on the internal NDG mailing list about what should or shouldn’t be in our B metadata elements (the schema is nearly fixed, but would we allow XHTML markup within some elements?). The discussion broadened into what B metadata is for (B is browse metadata in our NDG lexicion). We were discussing what belonged inthe browse metadata and what belonged in extra (E) metadata held alongside the data. This morning, I came across Derek’s blog on Search is not Search, which prompted me to a) read the paper it refers to (of which more below), and b) organise my own thinking a bit more."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "On Energy Supplies",
      "url"			: "/environment/2005/01/energy/",
      "tag"       : "environment",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2005-01-05",
      "excerpt"		: "Despite the content of most of my blog entries, I am fundamentally an atmospheric physicist, and only a computer geek by proxy. I’ve resolved as a new years resolution (yet again) to spend more time actually thinking about atmospheric physics. I’m resolved to live up to this by having at least one blog entry a week on atmospheric science (setting little targets does seem to work for me). However, in an act of pseudo-procrastination, I’m avoiding “atmospheric” physics for “environmental” physics first up."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "On Binary XML",
      "url"			: "/computing/2005/01/BinaryXML/",
      "tag"       : "xml, ndg",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2005-01-04",
      "excerpt"		: "NDG reviewers the first time around suggested we would need binary XML. I think they thought we would put all our data in XML, not just the metadata."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Verifyable Statements",
      "url"			: "/computing/management/2004/12/VerifyableStatements/",
      "tag"       : "computing, management",
      "category"  : "computingmanagement",
      "date"      : "2004-12-22",
      "excerpt"		: "I have just had my attention drawn to  hacknot where I found an excellent article on “Basic Critical Thinking for Software Developers”. In the article “Mr Ed” makes clear the importance of making verifyable statements if you wantto contribute any information to discussion about software engineeringpractices. I think however, the article has much wider applicability, and applies to just about any discourse. If one wants to minimise wastingtime, being very clear about exactly what you are talking about isabsolutely crucial. James Tauber made much the same point in his blog onSuccessful Technical Discussions."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Meteorology versus Money",
      "url"			: "/environment/2004/12/MetVMoney/",
      "tag"       : "environment",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2004-12-21",
      "excerpt"		: "It’s a known problem that “big-money” doesn’t always care about the environment. We all understand about physical pollution (oil in the sea, PM10 in the atmosphere etc), but this one is a little different: The BBC has reportedthe problems that occur with “frequency pollution”."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Service Orientated Architecture",
      "url"			: "/computing/2004/12/SOA/",
      "tag"       : "ndg",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2004-12-20",
      "excerpt"		: "The NERC DataGrid concept is built around scalability and a service orientated architecture. We’ve gone very much for the minimum central control of anything, and very much a bunch of services that are not all integralto getting things done. As you might expect, the more of the NDG services one deploys, the less you have to do yourself, but we hope that we are imposing the minimum on the user of the system (and data). In fact, I think at the minimum, we are imposing only:  the use of a browser to find data (if they don’t already know where it is).  the user to login somewhere which is “ndg-enabled”. In practice this  requires the user to have their own digital certificate and/or their ndg“login-supplier” to generate a proxy on their behalf."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Elements and Attributes",
      "url"			: "/computing/2004/12/ElementsAndAttributes/",
      "tag"       : "xml, ndg",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2004-12-20",
      "excerpt"		: "Reminder:    <element has-attribute=”something”> stuff </element>"
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Nice review of RSS and scientific publishing",
      "url"			: "/computing/2004/12/rssreview/",
      "tag"       : "computing, curation",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2004-12-17",
      "excerpt"		: "See Hammond et.al.(2004) for a nice review of the current state of RSS and it’s existing role in scientificpublishing (in dlib)."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "xml databases",
      "url"			: "/computing/2004/12/dbxml2/",
      "tag"       : "xml, ndg",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2004-12-16",
      "excerpt"		: "NDG is currently being developed around eXist, but we’ve had problems with scalability and reliability. It’s not yet obvious why … but as a consequence we’ve had to have some backup plans for whatwould happen if eXist failed to deliver for us. One of our backup planswas to keep an eye on the Berkely DB XML project. We didn’t use it initially because we wanted to exploitxquery. Well, now, with version 2.07 announced (see previous link), it supports xquery, so no doubt we’ll be testing it in the coming months.It’s very pleasing that there are already suse rpms."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Why Python?",
      "url"			: "/computing/2004/12/WhyPython/",
      "tag"       : "python, ndg",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2004-12-16",
      "excerpt"		: "I have spent most of today writing a response to the various reviewers about our extension to the NDG activities."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "renewables",
      "url"			: "/environment/2004/12/renewables/",
      "tag"       : "environment",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2004-12-11",
      "excerpt"		: "Not sure one should confess to reading slashdot, but theypointed me to this in the Houston Chronicle, basically, the bottom line is that a company (“Green Mountain Energy”) is providing Texan electricity consumers with electric power from a mix of hydroelectric and wind generation at prices competitive with fossil fuel suppliers!! In Texas of all places. There is hope yet."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "More on Trackbacks",
      "url"			: "/computing/2004/12/moreontrackback/",
      "tag"       : "xml, computing, ndg",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2004-12-10",
      "excerpt"		: "Yesterday I spent some time implementing thetrackback spec in python. Iknow there are other implementationsin python, but I wanted to really understand this stuff.  I’ll put myimplementation up here soon (it’s intended for use in Leonardo andother places), but for now I want to record some of the things thatit got me thinking about.  The key thing I discovered were someinconsistencies in the spec  why does the trackback have (uri,excerpt) but the rss response have(link,description)?  how extensible is it? I want to put some semantics in my trackbackping … to tell the target what sort of trackback is coming in (it might notbe a blog, it might be an analysis programme, or a formal citation).Thinking this must be a bit of old hat for the semantic web folks, I went off on a bit of a google on trackback and semantics."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Climate Change",
      "url"			: "/environment/2004/12/ClimateChange/",
      "tag"       : "climate",
      "category"  : "environment",
      "date"      : "2004-12-08",
      "excerpt"		: "Science has an article that makes it clear that there is no dissension in the scientific community about human impacts of climate change."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Citation",
      "url"			: "/environment/computing/2004/12/Citation/",
      "tag"       : "climate, curation",
      "category"  : "environmentcomputing",
      "date"      : "2004-12-07",
      "excerpt"		: "I recently had to make a statement on the impact of publishing in a particular journal. I did it, but didn’t like doing it. Most scientists probably have a subliminal hierarchy of journals, something like (for me):  Wow (Nature)  Impressive (Tellus, J.Atmos.Sci., Q. J.Roy.Met.Soc, J. Climate. Climate Dynamics)  Very Good (J. Geophys. Res., Geophys. Res. Letters., Annales Geophysicae)  Good (J. Atmos. Terr. Phys.)  Worth Doing (Weather, Bull. Am. Met. Soc)  Not worth it (censored :-) )."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Trackback",
      "url"			: "/computing/2004/12/trackback/",
      "tag"       : "computing",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2004-12-06",
      "excerpt"		: "Every day I learn something more about blogging, and every day I can see how utterly useful it will be in a real atmospheric science application, not just as a means of communication amongst computer geeks (myself included I suppose)."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "forecast xml",
      "url"			: "/computing/environment/2004/12/_forecast_xml_/",
      "tag"       : "xml, climate",
      "category"  : "computingenvironment",
      "date"      : "2004-12-06",
      "excerpt"		: "The U.S. National Weather service provide forecast data (apparently just for the continental US) via a SOAP service. It looksvery simple and very easy to use, with a simple syntax. I only found out about it today, even though from the look of the site it has been around a while (the docs date from 2003, and the “trial” was supposed to end on the 1st of August)."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Python and Java",
      "url"			: "/computing/2004/12/_python_and_java_/",
      "tag"       : "python",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2004-12-04",
      "excerpt"		: "There have been a number of posts in the blogs that I follow about Python is Not Javaby Phillip Eby."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Digital Signatures and Digital Preservation",
      "url"			: "/computing/2004/12/_digital_signatures_and_digital_preservation_/",
      "tag"       : "xml, ndg",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2004-12-01",
      "excerpt"		: "Those who saw my xmlsec blog will know we are moving to the use of digital signatures in NDG (and BADC) authorisation."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "b-schema",
      "url"			: "/computing/2004/11/b-schema/",
      "tag"       : "ndg, metadata, moles",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2004-11-30",
      "excerpt"		: "The NDG b-schema is the heart of how we plan to support data browsing (as opposed to searching)."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "xmlsec",
      "url"			: "/computing/2004/11/_xmlsec_/",
      "tag"       : "ndg, xml, python",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2004-11-26",
      "excerpt"		: "Yesterday and today I got to spend some substantial time on trains (a trip toLiverpool actually) … and spent the time learning about pyxmlsec (and by implication xmlsec).  I was most interested in theapplication of digitally signing xml documents (and the subsequentverification). We need to do this for NDG authorisation."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Is Access Grid worth it?",
      "url"			: "/computing/environment/2004/11/_is_access_grid_worth_it_/",
      "tag"       : "computing, environment",
      "category"  : "computingenvironment",
      "date"      : "2004-11-24",
      "excerpt"		: "At a meeting I attended yesterday, there was some discussion as to whether expenditure on supporting access grid was cost effective."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Maths and Blogging",
      "url"			: "/academic/2004/11/_maths_and_blogging_/",
      "tag"       : "blogging",
      "category"  : "academic",
      "date"      : "2004-11-23",
      "excerpt"		: "Inevitably I’m going to want to put maths in this blog, and if not here, on scientific wikis to support the CF (and other) projects."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Knowledge Management Horizon",
      "url"			: "/computing/2004/11/_knowledge_management_horizon_/",
      "tag"       : "curation",
      "category"  : "computing",
      "date"      : "2004-11-22",
      "excerpt"		: "Today I attended a workshop “on “Towards Integrated Knowledge Management”, organised as part of a DEFRA horizons scanning project. These horizon projects are meant to give DEFRA a chance (!) of being ready for the next environmental crisis, instead of always being in reactive mode. A totally laudable aim."
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Inaugural Post",
      "url"			: "/academic/2004/11/inaugural_post/",
      "tag"       : "blogging",
      "category"  : "academic",
      "date"      : "2004-11-21",
      "excerpt"		: "I’ve been interested in blogs, and blogging software for a long while. I run the KDE akregator on my laptop, and find that i have learnt a lot from other folks ruminations (as well as having been apalled and amused to various degrees).For a long time I’ve also tried various ways of keeping notes, many of which I want to make public to my friends and colleagues. I’ve finally found a piece of software that meets most of my requirements, and because it’s written in python, I can add the functionality that I need as I require it.Thanks to James Tauber ([http://jtauber.com]), I have now got his [http://jtauber.com/leonardo leonardo] software working with a modified wiki handler. This is my first blog entry …"
    }
  



  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "ISO690",
      "url"			: "/notes/ISO690/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "",
      "date" : "",
      "excerpt"		: ""
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "About",
      "url"			: "/about/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "",
      "date" : "",
      "excerpt"		: ""
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Academic",
      "url"			: "/academic/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "",
      "date" : "",
      "excerpt"		: ""
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Big Data",
      "url"			: "/bigdata/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "",
      "date" : "",
      "excerpt"		: ""
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Blog",
      "url"			: "/blog/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "",
      "date" : "",
      "excerpt"		: ""
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "CLADDIER",
      "url"			: "/projects/claddier/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "",
      "date" : "",
      "excerpt"		: ""
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Computing",
      "url"			: "/computing/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "",
      "date" : "",
      "excerpt"		: ""
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "The Evolution of this Blog",
      "url"			: "/construction/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "",
      "date" : "",
      "excerpt"		: ""
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Short CV",
      "url"			: "/cv/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "",
      "date" : "",
      "excerpt"		: ""
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Diary",
      "url"			: "/diary/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "",
      "date" : "",
      "excerpt"		: ""
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Ecolife",
      "url"			: "/ecolife/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "",
      "date" : "",
      "excerpt"		: ""
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Environment",
      "url"			: "/environment/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "",
      "date" : "",
      "excerpt"		: ""
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "ESiWACE -  The Centre of Excellence in Simulation of Weather and Climate in Europe",
      "url"			: "/projects/esiwace",
      "tag"       : "exascale esiwace",
      "category"  : "",
      "date" : "",
      "excerpt"		: ""
    }
  

  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Categories",
      "url"			: "/categories/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "",
      "date" : "",
      "excerpt"		: ""
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Welcome",
      "url"			: "/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "",
      "date" : "",
      "excerpt"		: ""
    }
  

  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Management",
      "url"			: "/management/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "",
      "date" : "",
      "excerpt"		: ""
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Personal",
      "url"			: "/personal/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "",
      "date" : "",
      "excerpt"		: ""
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Projects",
      "url"			: "/projects/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "",
      "date" : "",
      "excerpt"		: ""
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Academic Contributions",
      "url"			: "/publications/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "",
      "date" : "",
      "excerpt"		: ""
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Research",
      "url"			: "/research/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "",
      "date" : "",
      "excerpt"		: ""
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Science",
      "url"			: "/science/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "",
      "date" : "",
      "excerpt"		: ""
    }
  

  

  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Graduate Students",
      "url"			: "/teaching/students/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "",
      "date" : "",
      "excerpt"		: ""
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Talks and Seminars",
      "url"			: "/talks/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "",
      "date" : "",
      "excerpt"		: ""
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Talks and Seminars",
      "url"			: "/talks/summary/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "",
      "date" : "",
      "excerpt"		: ""
    }
  

  
    ,{
      "title"			: "Teaching",
      "url"			: "/teaching/",
      "tag"       : "",
      "category"  : "",
      "date" : "",
      "excerpt"		: ""
    }
  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

]