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Each time I reinstall linux or change machines, I find myself having to add a bunch of latex packages and style files. I quite often forget exactly how to do this, so here’s a quick guide to installing latex packages for anyone else struggling with the details and also for my future self, next time I upgrade. Get the package that you want from the Comprehensive Tex Archive Network CTAN http://ctan.org/; for example, if you want the remarkably useful package multibib (allows multiple bibliographies in one document) go here http://ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/multibib. Download and unzip the zip file containing the entire package Run latex on the .insRead More →

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I got a new phone with my xmas bounty (Thanks Mum & Dad!) and it’s great. A Samsung Google Nexus S it’s an android dream with a curved screen and buckets of charisma (yes OK it’s a phone). The device itself is thus far a complete success – I love it. And it was half price in carphone whorehouse so a real bargain to boot. But … (yes, of course there’s a but) … The first thing you do with an Android device is to link it to your Google account. About half a day later I received an email inviting me to register myRead More →

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On Friday 7 October, BCSWomen and the organisers of Ada Lovelace Day put on a couple of events in London. The aim of these was to celebrate women in tech by having a women presenters doing lots of cool geeky stuff – this is the second blog post about the evening and you can read all about the Android dev stuff here. In the evening of 7 October, the Ada Lovelace Day events really started to warm up. We sold out so there were 90 people there, and there was an amazing buzz right from the start. Lots of the daytime attendees had chosen toRead More →

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On Friday 7 October, BCSWomen and the organisers of Ada Lovelace Day put on a couple of events in London. The aim of these was to celebrate women in tech by having women presenters doing lots of cool geeky stuff. This is the first of a pair of blog posts talking about what we got up to. During the day, Karen Petrie (of Dundee University) and I ran an Android workshop – this was a mixture of talk & play, with the attendees building apps using AppInventor and learning about the basics of Android development. I was in charge of the talky bits (five shortRead More →

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This post details the steps I had to go through to get my eee-pad transformer Android tablet to talk to a linux machine running Ubuntu for development purposes. In particular, I’m trying to get it to run with AppInventor (a draggy-block-style easy programming environment). There are lots of FAQs and HOWTOs on the net out there, but the straightforward instructions didn’t work for me so I’m putting the things I’ve learned up here, in case someone else can benefit. I’m guessing this post won’t be of interest to you unless you’re trying to mess about with android, running Linux, and haven’t managed to get developmentRead More →

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On the Welsh Crucible course last week we investigated engagement with media and the public, and twitter was one of the channels we discussed. A few of the other participants expressed an interest in getting into (or more into) twitter but we didn’t have time to talk it through at any length so I thought I’d write a general “Engaging with people on Twitter for beginners” blog post. So if you’re an academic/scientist who wants to have a go, this post is for you. The basics Twitter is fundamentally a collection of tweets, which are just very very short blog posts. Just like normal blogs,Read More →

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One of the modules I’ve been teaching this year is called “Interactive Web Programming”, so I’ve been fairly internet-heavy in my teaching and my activities. It’s a small group (30 in the class) and I’m teaching in a computer lab, so I thought it’d be kinda fun to experiment with twitter in teaching. My slides are all written in HTML (well, specifically, HTML5/JavaScript/JQuery, as that’s what I’m teaching). This makes it trivial to include live twitter stuff (or “twitterfalls”) in a lecture for instant open-ended quiz-like goodness, or for any other kind of feedback The way I did this was to choose a hashtag (#aber_iwp)Read More →

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Thursday 14 April saw the fourth BCSWomen Undergraduate Lovelace Colloquium at The University of Birmingham. As you might know, as regular readers of this blog, I started the BCSWomen Lovelace in 2008 and ran it for the first two years. Now it moves around the country and I act as a kind of “programme chair”, organising the event alongside local staff. The talks The speakers for the day were all, without exception, brilliant. I’m not just saying that – I have read the event feedback forms and it’s true:-) We started with a keynote from Professor Angela Sasse of UCL, who talked about security andRead More →

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One of the first things I got as a new PhD student, back in ’01, was a copy of Deb Roy’s thesis. My supervisor was just back from a sabbatical at MIT and he knew Roy there. The thesis blew me away – the ideas, the new approaches, this way of learning. Remarkable. The seeds of the work he’s doing now were present then, but oh my has he moved on too. This is a great talk. Watch it to the end.