(con)CERN trip 2006

Just got back from a four day trip to Geneva, Switzerland.
Common misconception about this trip: lots of people seem to think it was a field trip. it clearly wasn't. it was a private trip by a group of people which all happen to (once in a while at least) attend the same lecture. This mite raise concern about the level of sanity in the group but well...

we had an awesome time. Spent a whole day visiting different CERN sites. Vanish underground to see ATLAS, the anti-proton decelerator(making anti-hydrogen, featured in Dan Brown's angles&daemons, we were assured by a real scientist that anti-matter bombs are not feasible) and COMPASS (a fixed target experiment, much easier to look at the detector). Had lunch at the canteen, but i'd rather not speak about that.

on saturday strolled around town, dozed in the sun and visited the UN/league of nations.

sunday: travel back home. discovered free internet at geneva airport.

head over here and here and there for a set of pictures

the handbag that helps you remember

Coolio? This handbag is quite cool. Is this the first step to a setup like this one? There are useful/good applicatiosn of RFID tags(well mostly not but sometimes)!

Google calendar and its API

I gave google calendar a go a few days ago. It entertained me. It was fun, I thought "well its not going to be much more useful the others" (and I have tried a few other web2.0 calendars) but I was surprised. Started using it and will try and keep it up to date. Hopefully it will allow me to become a bit more organized and so on.

What seemed to be a pain tho was keeping the online version and others(offline) on handhelds and so forth synced. Was wondering if you in some way could automate uploading iCal snippets. Exporting(from gCal) is easy but getting stuff into google calendar seemed difficult. Furthermore when inviting people they receive a mail "Do you want to attend? Yes, No, Maybe." I tried it. Clicking on one of these links took me to a "Please login" page. Jeez. Can people not confirm they are coming without a google account? How about not doing evil? Why can they not respond by email? Minor things like that were bugging me. Things I was thinking about that a good calendar app should have. As I had a lot of time on my hands at the beginning of the year I have quite a long list. Mainly inspired by nigel and his ideas of a perfect calendar and "Intelligent agents"(little programs that can collaborate and take action on there own) in it.
If for example you are planning an outdoor event(Golf, motorbike ride, swimming, sipping coffee in the park) then a computer can go and check the weather and tell everyone "Its bloody manchester, event is off" or "Its probably going to rain, reschedule?". Sounds useful to me. Especially if it tells everyone who is on the guestlist. If it sees that I'm going on a long distance flight it could go and do a predefined amazon search for "airport novel" and suggest a few books for me to take/buy(in time!) or even something about where I am going. The possibilities are endless,]]

With this it seems as if we can do a lot of that. People can respond by email.
Hell we could write a completly different interface for it.

I'll keep it short for now and will look into this later on(I am meant to be writing lab reports rite now). If you are interested in constructing a python lib or even better an erlang one tell me, but I'm quite sure it will only take a few hours till someone has hacked a Atom library to support gCalender.

Update[Apr 21 14:08]: maybe knock up a quick script that adds all the academy gigs to a public calendar. Also started a public "Physics at manchester calendar"(RSS iCal). email me if you want to be put on the list of people allowed to add events

For future generations

I've been digging in the past! Earliest recorded contribution to the internet by yours truly was made in Feb 2001, to a suse security mailing list. This means there had been DSL available where I used to live for lets say 6 months by then. Before that there was only a 14.4 modem available and a lot of people were wondering why it was always engaged at home...lalala...it wasn't me.

not that long is it? Learned a lot since then, especially to keep my mouth shut and not post if i don't know what I'm talking about. *coughcough*

podcasts and IN and OUT

Some German german guy and spiegel.de think podcasting is just a big hype. Just because its "American". Sometimes I think they could be a bit more worldly, like the English sometimes could be a little less "English". Jeez.
What is this all about? Sometimes the German "bloggers" are just a bit behind. I'm sorry but its true.

Aside: google related turns out to be crap, therefore it has been removed.

Google related links

This is an experiment. Google now offers a little bit of js to put on your page that will show related webpages and news. Head over to google.com/related to see for yourself. I'll have it sitting in the bottom right hand corner and see what happens. Have a feeling that this mite not be as good as I hope it will be.

flickr x-posting

dsc00152
Originally uploaded by betatim.

you can post entries to your blog from your flickr. Did you know that?

Alive!

I'm still alive! Believe it or not. Been very quiet since sometime December last year. Somehow nothing to interesting happens when I'm at uni, more precisely I never get round to blogging about anything.
so what HAS happened? Went home for Christmas, went skiing, spent about 3 weeks in hospital. Huh? Seems that I got myself an inflammation in my hip. Quite a painful thing to have. It is all good now, almost.
A result of the hospital stay is that I missed all my exams, so I'll have to be back to Manchester in the summer, well this sucks!
what's been happening at uni? Not much. Writing a fair amount of Matlab code, learning MuPAD, learning about optics, atoms&nuclei and thermo dynamics(this is just chemistry until you get to the stats bit).
Our new housemate for next year is Pete(very empty like most of our sites...), he is a clever c/c++ guru. bbrrr.
It is Easter now. Holidays! Seems I only blog when on holidays or working for someone during the summer.
Going to spend a week in good old Germany catching up and saying thank you to all the people that visited me in hospital, afterwards a week in Combe with the family/grandparents, hopefully including a trip to the Science Museum, 20 years of Pixar.
Last week will be spent in Manchester, quite probably a visit to Coventry, if not week before Easter.
Lots and lots of reading ey? Has anyone bothered to read until here?