A website and blog by Peter Lewis
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Eduroam: Effortless wireless networking in universities
So today I'm working not from my office in Birmingham, but from the University of York, where my girlfriend, Marla, is doing a Master's degree. Here I am sitting in the library, and I fire up my laptop. Immediately, I see Kubuntu's network manager icon whirring away, and within just a few seconds, I have two bars of wi-fi signal, connecting me to the Eduroam network, a service which currently allows me to log on to wireless networks at universities all across Europe and Australia, using my home university's credentials. Well, until today, that was the theory, but I'd had so much trouble just connecting to the wireless network at my home institution that I never expected it to be this easy. I wasn't even looking to get online today (in fact, I was looking forward to the lack of distraction), but here we are, and I thought it worth a mention.
This is IT done right.
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Cycling
I was recently given a bike by my parents for my birthday. I know that this makes me sound like I'm about 12, but hey ho, they knew that I'd been wanting one for a while and I hadn't got around to buying one. I'm actually really pleased with it.
By most standards, I probably live in one of the best places in the country for cycling (unless you're really into mountain biking or BMX or something else). I live within about a 2 minute ride of a route on the national cycle network and about 5 minutes from the national canal network, which from Bournville, not only goes to university (where I work), but also beyond to the city centre and ultimately the rest of the country.
The ride into university takes about 15 to 20 minutes, which is basically how long it had been taking me by train, given that I usually end up waiting about 5 minutes or so for one.
Now the decision of whether to ride or go by train now seems to me to be an easy decision. As an example of mechanism design, this is how I see it: Each day I get paid £1.80 (the train fare) to exercise for half an hour. It takes up no more time out of my day, and there's none of the expense (and in my opinion boredom) associated with going to a gym.
So, the picture above shows my new route to work. And, as if the benefits already were not enough, instead of being advertised at by the omnipresent telescreens on the train, I instead get to enjoy the drifting smell of chocolate being made at the Cadbury factory, and to watch the ducks and geese flapping and hissing at me as I ride past.
Now I'm just waiting for my first rainy day...
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University removes right to freedom of speech on campus
I was just about to blog about this, when I realised that my friend Zeth has already done a fantastic job of summing up the recent changes to university policy in this post. Thanks to the joys of the Creative Commons Licence, I can make his comments available here...
I often receive emails from various online services saying there has been a change in their privacy policy, which almost always means you have less privacy than before, and they are now going to share your personal information with another third party. So the real purpose of privacy policies is often to take away your privacy rather than to give you privacy.
This time I received a controversial email from my University that had been forwarded from the centre down eventually to my little corner of geekdom. The email explained that there had been a change in the 'Freedom of Speech' policy (I didn't know we had one), so now anyone from outside the University must be given written permission to speak on campus. So the 'Freedom of Speech' policy now restricts freedom of speech.
Without a lot of careful steering, Universities always tend to drift into ivory tower mode, now we are pulling up the drawbridge too. Here is the email:
Colleagues,
I have attached for your information and subsequent action the revised policy on the Code of the Practice on Freedom of Speech on Campus which was approved by Council on 19 September 2007 to be implemented from 30 September 2007. The Authorising Officer for Freedom of Speech is [Senator McCarthy], Director of [Big Brother] who has nominated me to act on his behalf.
I have also attached a PDF speaker request form which includes a section from the policy regarding conduct of meetings on university premises to be given to people making an application for an outside speaker. I would be grateful if all requests were made on this form with immediate effect.
The Code of Practice defines Outside Speakers as persons who are not students, employees or other members of the University, who are invited to speak on University premises on occasions other than as a normal part of an existing academic programme of study authorised by the relevant budget centre, or as a normal part of a regular careers exhibition or similar event.
I would be grateful if you would cascade this policy and new speaker request form within your School to staff and students who are involved in booking outside speakers.
If you require any further information please let me know.
Thank you
[Corporate Drone X]
So it is a classic bit of Orwellian doublethink where 'Freedom' of speech requires an application form to be submitted three weeks before to obtain permission from a central bureaucrat, thus not actually being free any more but a privilege handed down by a neo-monarchy.
I'm sure the changes to the (un)freedom of speech policy comes from people with seemingly good motives, i.e. to protect us all from those dirty and scary common real people outside the campus gates. Like the British Empire was created with seemingly good motives or those who set up Guantanamo Bay had seemingly good motives. The problem with the British Empire, like a 'Freedom of Speech' policy, is that it is paternalistic.
The British did not trust the 'natives' to run their own affairs; even though the native cultures were thousands of years old, they did not have the signs and symbols of the Western world, so therefore they must be inferior and Western control and Western signs and symbols must be introduced. Likewise, even though dozens of events involving the public have been held on our campus, on almost every week for over 100 years, the Council does not trust academics and students to run their own events involving 'outsiders'. Common sense and good manners must be replaced with the signs and symbols of bureaucracy.
I find it very unlikely that all our academics and students are secretly harbouring subversive ideologies; I find it very unlikely that our academics are secretly communist revolutionaries, Islamic fundamentalists or members of the national front (though I hear the Masons do quite well here). Perhaps even if a minority are, then engagement is surely the correct policy. If the universities stop believing in the power of free thought and open discussion, then why is society funding the universities at all?. If there were radical elements on campus who refuse to discuss with rational academia, then we would need to do a lot more than email a couple of PDFs to combat them.
The most bizarre thing is that the people tasked with implementing this policy are not academics, but the department that deals with accommodation, gardening, postal services, cleaning and so on. I have no idea who [Senator McCarthy] is, but we could (in theory) have someone who started as a gardener or porter telling professors and lecturers who can and cannot speak at their events. University cleaners are the latest recruits in George W. Bush's war on terror.
Even if we put the censorship issues aside for a moment, the required three weeks notice is just not practical for many of the events, including the most dynamic and interesting ones, so it either means the policy will just be ignored or outsiders will be invited onto campus less often. There is a grandfather clause for some existing events, but in general this extra layer of red-tape means the University becomes even more cut off from the public who fund the whole University. British Universities are almost exclusively financed by the tax-paying public. There is an elaborate dance of quangos and bureaucrats between to help burn a bit more cash, but it is the tax-payer who foots all the bills. Research Councils == tax-payers. HEFCE == tax-payers. The grants and subsidised loans that students use to pay their fees == tax-payers.
So in return for all their support, the public, who are paying for the whole thing, need written permission and at least three weeks notice to open their mouths on campus. Charming. Even though I benefit a little from all this tax-payers money, I find this lack of respect for the public somewhat tasteless.
Recently someone was found to have gambled away 4 million pounds of the University's money, i.e. tax-payers' money, no one in the senior administration resigned or lost their job over it; even though the senior administration was responsible for overseeing and reforming the structure that allowed this to happen. If the university's senior administration and council would spend a bit more attention on their core role as custodians of other people's money and therefore know where this money is, then maybe they would have less time to waste on censoring invited guests who speak at University events.
Thanks, Zeth. Though I'm really not surprised. I'm not quite sure what exactly the problem is, which they are attempting to solve with this new policy, but presumably it has something to do with the odd person who came to campus and made them feel a little uncomfortable. However, Albert Einstein quite famously said that for every problem there is a solution which is simple, obvious, and wrong, and I'm convinced that is what's going on here.
Similarly, I've also recently become involved in the Young Greens, an environmental group on campus, affiliated to the Green Party. One of our planned activities for the early part of this semester was to have a stall on campus, handing out some free food as a bit of a gimmick, along with fliers about some upcoming events. However, even to carry out this innocuous activity and even though we are all students, required three week's notice. We were also handed regulations requiring the brand names of all food on the stall to be submitted to the university authorities, along with written recipes. We were also prohibited from using any nuts or eggs. Now, I have a bit of experience of the relationship between university administrations and students, and rather than based on anything useful, this appears to me to be nothing more than an attempt at disincentivising students from carrying out such activities.
But, as a previous senior university colleague of mine frequently used to remind those with whom he came in contact, universities in the 21st century are businesses. I'm extrapolating now, but as such, mustn't any activity which might potentially have a negative impact on the efficiency of the multinational-company's-graduate-training-programme-participant-production-machine be discouraged, shut down or banned? Operating within its current market environment (the inevitable outcome of the sadly unstoppable move towards ever increasing tuition fees in higher education - the issue which first motivated me to get involved in politics by the way), can anything else be expected of universities? University administrations are, I would argue, caught between the rock of failure (and therefore replacement of the management) and the hardplace of their current approach.
The answer? More to come later I guess from me on that, but a refocus on the role of education in today's society at the very least...
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On synchronisation
For a while now I've been faced with a problem which really should have had quite a simple solution in today's internet-enabled computing world: file synchronisation.
Like many people, I'm sure, I do a large amount of work on the desktop PC in my office. I also do increasingly more on my laptop. (In actual fact, I tend to do more on my laptop, but that's another story). I then have the problem of where my files are kept. Years ago, the answer would have been fairly straightforward: a floppy disk. As time moved on, perhaps a zip disk or USB pen-drive would have been used, but to be honest, I now have such a lot of data that I'd need an external hard drive to keep it all on, and that isn't always practical to carry around. Added to this, it wouldn't feel a very secure system to me, even if I did back it up regularly, and sometimes I'd like to be able to read the same file on more than one PC. Perhaps in this networked world I've grown to expect too much from my computer(s), perhaps not.
Email is something which has got the whole problem pretty well sorted. Probably the majority of people in the world now use webmail systems of one sort or another. Those, like me, who prefer to have a copy of the emails on their own systems often make use of the IMAP protocol to allow our mail clients to automatically synchronise between multiple locations. And IMAP has worked remarkably well for me for over ten years. KDE quite niftily also allows me to store my contacts and calendar in IMAP folders, so that they are too accessible from anywhere with internet access or a local copy. Great stuff.
So, why is it so difficult with files? I remember vaguely there being something called "My Briefcase" on an old version of Windows I used to use, but I never really needed to back then or spent any time getting to grips with it, but I've found nothing similar on any linux system, and I'm told the functionality has now disappeared from Windows too. (Perhaps it's been replaced with something else... I don't know.)
A few months back, looking around for a solution to my file synchronisation problem, I discovered rsync, a fairly old tool, developed for creating mirrors of things such as FTP servers. I played around for a while with rsync, and found it quite useful, but the main problem was that it was only really intended for uni-directional syncing. This is fine for backing up one computer to another, but when I often work on both, I need something which can deal with the fact that changes could have occurred on either machine.
I asked around on a few mailing lists, and it was suggested that I try Coda. Rather than being just a tool, Coda is a filesystem, a bit like NFS, but offering "disconnected operation for mobile computing" according to their website. Great, I thought, sounds just like IMAP, and what's more, it's been around since 1987. Unfortunately, Coda proved to me to be an enormous headache, and after quite a lot of wasted time, I still didn't have a functioning implementation of it (its configuration is most definitely not for the faint-hearted). It appears to me that the idea of Coda has been around since 1987, but in practice it is, again according to its website, merely "promising".
So, I was back to rsync. A few months ago, I settled on the use of a few hand-written and easily breakable shell scripts which called rsync to mirror my files in either direction at a time. The scripts relied on some flags, set by the scripts, to determine which machine had the 'current' copy of the files. In essence, I was able to check files in and out of the desktop machine (which was behaving like a server) to my laptop. It just relied on me knowing which one I was supposed to be working on! A lapse of memory on my part would unfortunately lead to the updates on the non-current machine being wiped at the next sync.
This week, thanks to my friend Edd, I have discovered something which I'm hoping will be the end to my woes: Unison. Unison appears to be a kind of hybrid of rsync and CVS, and claims to allow updates to take place on either machine (providing that they're not on the same file), and then merged together. It's free software, in the Ubuntu repositories and even has a nice little GTK+ GUI as well as a command line interface. So, I'm suspending use of my rsync scripts for a bit, have backed up my files, and will give Unison a whirl. So far, it seems very easy to use. Though frankly, why this kind of functionality isn't completely standard by now, I don't know.
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UCE -> Birmingham City University
I wasn't quite sure that I'd read this properly at first, but the University of Central England (UCE) has now become Birmingham City University. Shocking. I know that they've been looking at a name change for a while now, but it's now official, and this is what they chose. They've even got a blue logo and everything.
Right, the only thing left for us decent Brummies to do is to petition to get the University of Birmingham (my university) renamed to the Aston Villa University, with all associated claret and blue livery. Who's with me? (Okay, I suppose that Aston University has a headstart on that one, but that would be less fun for me...)
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PhD: The Thesis Proposal
This week marks the twelve month point from which, if I had started my PhD at the beginning of the academic year, I would have begun.
However, despite my slightly late starting, this week was therefore also the point at which I was required to make use of the knowledge I have been diligently absorbing for the best part of the last year and submit what's known as a thesis proposal. My proposal was a roughly 12,000 word document laying out what I've learnt, how this has led me to a particular topic and what my plan of action will be for investigating this topic over the remaining two to three years. When I begun writing the proposal, it felt like quite a daunting task, though the requirement has actually been an opportunity to take a step back, focus and make a few decisions. It's also required me to actually write up about a lot of the literature which I've been reading; something long overdue. The result was presented to the school and my industrial sponsor yesterday, and with the addition of a few suggestions, was accepted. In case anyone is interested, the document can in fact be found here.
So, I'm now officially a second year PhD student, with a topic. The relief of having this part completed is actually quite significant. Now, onwards!
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Neck injury and houses
It's not been an eventful week, except for a couple of things.
Firstly, I woke up yesterday morning to an incredibly sharp pain in the back of my neck. Not really able to move it much all morning, and being in quite a lot of pain, I stayed home and tried to stay as still as possible. Movements seemed to cause cramp-like spasms, which felt like someone was stabbing the back of my head. NHS Direct revealed that in fact I had torticollis, a condition which doesn't seem to be too well understood, but usually clears up in a few days. Well, I still can't move my neck too well today, though the spasms have mainly stopped. I think it'll be a while until my full range of movement returns.
Reading around the common causes of torticollis, I noticed that amongst them were stress and poor posture. I have been spending quite a bit of time arched over a computer this last week, and I wonder if that was a trigger. Well, I'd do almost anything to avoid having this thing again, so perhaps in addition to sitting up straighter, I should take up yoga or something.
Satisfied that my house sale is going through well, I went to see another house this week. I've expressed an interest in a few houses around Stirchley in the last couple of weeks, but am not in a big rush. The one this week needs a lot of work doing to it - and this is reflected in the price. I'm quite excited by the prospect of being able to put in a new kitchen, bathroom, redecorate everywhere etc. but I wonder if this is really the wisest thing to do, considering how busy I am with my PhD research and teaching at the moment. I'm currently trying to gather information about just how much the work would cost... and have yet to make up my mind what I think.
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New desk
Wahey, I've managed to land myself a nice new desk in the School of Computer Science. My previous one was not particularly conducive to work, being pretty much squeezed in along a wall.
I am now in room 121, for those who are around the school, and have this nice view across the concourse of the building. I'm actually working here quite a lot now too, rather than trying to work from home, as I'd previously been doing.
Oh, and I inherited this nice yucca too!
