Bloody Linux

I have recently warmed to Linux.

I then immediately went off it again.

I tried to install a touchscreen. According to the webosphere it was going to be a relatively easy job. Sure it involved manually editting a few config files here and there, but no worries there.

Sadly it doesn't work.

Partially because the touchscreen isn't the model that has working Linux drivers, its a variant, so you have to download slightly different drivers for it, that have the same name, and there's no version info.

Partially because it took me a while to figure out which configuration file I was editting, (no, not XF86Config, \etc\X11\xorg.conf don't you know).

But mostly because the bloody board has jumpers on it that switch it between Windows compatability mode and Linux compatability mode, and I don't have the required diamond-edged drill bit, or ridiculously tiny alun keys that I need to break the bloody case open and remove said jumper.

A colleague, many moons ago, did get the touch screen working with the evil windows jumper in place. He doesn't remember how, and I can't figure it out, so after three days I'm doing something that I've never done before.... I'm giving up.

For an engineer to give up it typically involves threats to his/her family and an automatic weapon. Sadly, I simply can't afford to spend any more time on it.

This makes me sad and angry.

I've written an email to the manufacturers of the robot concerned explaining that the screen simply isn't responding to configuration requests, (annoyingly it is sending out info when you touch it, but I have no way of translating that info into a mouse pointer.) I'm actually begninning to think it would be easier to reverse engineer the protocol and write a decent driver for it myself.

Yey for imaginary quiche!

Despite our best efforts to avoid giving money to "the man" by spending our hard earned squid at supermarkets, h and I do occasionally raid the bargains section of our local Sainsbury's.

Today we scored a small victory for local traders by purchasing an imaginary quiche.

Two quiches that had originally been on special offer had been reduced as they were rapidly approaching their sell-by-date. They had accidentally left the original special offer in their software system, so the check out reported that I could have one quiche for 79p or two for the grand total of 78p.

I hereby conclude that the second quiche has some form of imaginary component. I'm hoping that eating it will also make me thinner.

Three cheers for imaginary quiche!

Stuff

- I am trying to cut back on caffeine again. This is largely because I'm sick of feeling like shit in the morning, as sleep is the longest I go without ingesting some form of stimulant and withdrawal is a be-atch.

- Jonh* and Emma are coming to visit this weekend. I book us a table at a yummy veggie restaurant which I am now looking forward to a lot!

- Today I supervised my final labs for a couple of weeks whilst the little buggers go and celebrate the spin on a pagan-birth festival of their choice. This means less money, but more time to work!

- I want to go campin'. Soon.


*not a typo, that's how he writes his name

Why Biology Sucks

I'm trying to put the finishing touches to my journal paper. This would be great, if two separate reviewers hadn't asked me to add a section discussing the biology of the dendritic cell, ( a part of the immune system).

There's a problem with this... have you ever heard people use analogies like "this man is the Einstein of modern art" or "the Mozart of plumbing" etc etc. Well I am the small retarded monkey, with braces, glasses and asthma, of biology. A veritable runt of the litter in the field.

I'm actually ok with it.

Aside from the fact that I resent being asked for it, (when you write a paper on neural networks do you add a section detailing the mechanisms of sodium-potassium pumps etc?) I'm totally ill-equipped to write it. My supervisors are totally ill-equipped to write it. To be honest they weren't entirely equipped to write a paper on robotics, but that's besides the point. The fact is that I'm a cyberneticist, in a computer science department, writing a paper about an algorithm, for a journal about intelligence. Did anyone see the word "biology" in any of that?

Ok, ok I might have been a bit misleading. It is a special issue on "Artificial Immune Systems" which obviously has ties to biology. But I'm still not happy with the idea. I personally think that the entire thing will further detract from a paper which if I had my time again, I would have cut other things out of to concentrate on the wonderful, wonderful maths of it all, (not my maths you understand, I speak of Monsieur Laplace's genius - but he died in 1827 so the praise will fall on deaf, if not slightly gooey, ears).