Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Phil Bull's LiveJournal:

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Friday, April 25th, 2008
8:10 pm	I'm proud to be... ...Stokeish, which is why I'll be waking up each morning from now on to the sound of our glorious City Council theme tune. (Comment on this)
Friday, March 14th, 2008
6:45 pm	You mean you're not supposed to do it all year round? Having been in labs all day I've probably reached my quota of physics-speak, but I'm sure someone out there delights in annoying their family and friends just as much as I do... Happy Talk Like A Physicist Day! (courtesy of the excellent Perry Bible Fellowship) (Comment on this)
Wednesday, March 12th, 2008
8:08 am	Save Jodrell Bank! Everyone's heard of Jodrell Bank, and those who've visited it (especially with kids) will appreciate what an interesting and inspirational place it is. There were two major events in my childhood which really inspired me to become a scientist; the first was when my Mum and Dad bought a telescope for my birthday, and the second was a visit to Jodrell. I still remember it well. If we allow the current round of senseless funding cuts affecting physics at the moment to close Jodrell, then the UK will have lost a truly world-class facility (more on this in a later post), astronomers worldwide will have lost one of the most powerful research instruments ever made, and hundreds of thousands of children will have lost one of their best chances to get interested in science and technology. Please sign the petition! Watch the Youtube Video Jodrell Bank is faced with closure? [davep] Professor Sir Bernard Lovell condemns 'disastrous' plan to close Jodrell Bank [Times Online] Boost for 'save Jodrell' campaign [MEN] Government set to 'destroy' UK radio astronomy [El Reg] (Comment on this)
Monday, January 28th, 2008
8:48 pm	The moon... mostly A couple of my friends recently completed some lab work in which they took a number of images of the moon and stitched them together. I thought I'd share the resulting image, so here it is, courtesy of Christina and Sarah*: Click the image for a more detailed view. As you can see, it was obviously part of a physics experiment - a load of useful data is missing! I'm reliably informed that the telescope was under heavy demand that night, so I'll let them off ;) There are still quite a few visible features, which you should be able to locate better in this image: Cluster of craters, which I can't quite put names to. Maybe Cavalerius and Reiner? Plato (crater). The edge of Tycho (crater). Mare Crisium (Sea of Crises). There are plenty of high-resolution maps of the moon available online, and there's a pretty decent atlas here. * The image is their copyright and so doesn't fall under my usual CC license. Please get in touch with me if you'd like permission to use the image, and I'll try and sort it out for you. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, January 21st, 2008
7:23 pm	Re: Ubuntu has a Problem Hi Johnathon, First of all, thanks for taking the time to report (and even work on) bugs in Ubuntu. I'd like to address some of the criticisms in your post, if I may: Using software from Universe This bug [in firehol] made us loose ssh connection to remote servers & desktop computers we were upgrading. Firehol is from the universe repository, which means that it is community supported. That is, there's no official support for that package in Ubuntu - it's left entirely to the community to manage as best as they can. A team of volunteers from the Ubuntu community (the MOTUs) maintain the package, along with about 18,000 other packages. According to Launchpad, there are 81 active members of the MOTU team, which equates to about 220 packages per team member. These guys are unpaid volunteers working in their spare time. Given all of this, I'd say that it was inadvisable to be relying on such semi-supported software on production machines. For systems where uptime matters, it's best to stick to the fully supported packages from the main repository, like iptables. That way, you know that a full-time developer, paid for by Canonical, will be fixing bugs and so forth. Otherwise, you're putting yourself at the mercy of other people's availability to do (often thankless) voluntary work... Even better, if your company relies on Ubuntu for anything important, why not pick up a server support package from Canonical? Bug Triage Confirmed by another reporter on the 5th. But no triager saw it, even though it was confirmed on the 5th. Most of the guys in the BugSquad are unpaid volunteers too. The bug statistics for Ubuntu are scary - around 150 bugs reported in the last 24 hours alone, along with the other 40,000 bugs which are currently open. It's a difficult problem to manage with such limited resources, and so expecting every bug to be picked up on by a triager is asking too much, especially on less commonly used packages like Firehol. The Bottom Line I understand how frustrating it can be when your bug doesn't get fixed and you feel like you've been forgotten, but we're up against a lot here! At the end of the day you're getting something for nothing, and so you shouldn't be surprised if your bug isn't fixed immediately or if your favourite unsupported package doesn't work. Them's the breaks. Ubuntu can improve the service it provides to its users, but as you say we need more contributors in order to do that. It's really easy to get involved with both the BugSquad and the MOTUs, so why not see how you can help today? Rather you spent ten minutes per week triaging two bugs than just giving up altogether, eh? (18 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, January 16th, 2008
10:35 pm	Physics Funding [This is a reasonably long post: skip to the bottom if you'd like to save yourself some eye-strain] You may have heard that the STFC, the body which funds a large number of physics research facilities (and jobs), has a budgetary shortfall of around £80m. This is seriously bad news for physics in Britain, especially astrophysics/astronomy and particle physics. The shortfall is expected to lead to the withdrawal from a number of valuable international programmes (such as Gemini North and the ILC), and could potentially result in a considerable number of job losses in physics departments across the country. Why is this important? Physics is valuable to the country on many levels. The most obvious impact is that of new technologies and innovations; LCDs, lasers, microwaves and computers are just some examples of technologies which had their genesis in applied physics research. While a great deal of this research is carried out by private companies, university research departments also have a big part to play. You only have to look at somewhere like Cambridge Science Park to see evidence of this. Less obvious, perhaps, is the importance of basic research, the type of research which is directly threatened by these budget cuts. The value of basic research is consistently underestimated by policy makers, and it's easy to see why. How could esoteric projects such as surveys of dust in the galactic plane ever yield any economic value? Well for starters, the scientists carrying out that survey may develop new imaging, modelling or data processing techniques which can be applied elsewhere. The Web is a particular example of this sort of technology transfer, developed as it was at the CERN particle physics facility at Geneva. This 88-page report details the technology transfer resulting from research at CERN alone, and CERN is just one (albeit large) facility. Physicists often cross over from research to industry too, bringing with them valuable skills and knowledge. Increasing our knowledge of the way the Universe works through fundamental research can also have longer-term benefits. In the early 20th Century, the fields of general relativity and quantum mechanics emerged. At the time these must have seemed of little practical relevance, but by the middle of the century we were using quantum mechanics to invent the laser, transistor and nuclear reactor and are now using general relativity to make the global positioning system work. It's reasonable to expect that at least some of today's "esoteric" research will eventually result in important new technologies. Don't forget the children, either. The inspirational power of physics can be tremendous; it's unlikely that I would have chosen to study Physics at university were it not for basic research into exciting things such as the origins of the universe, the centres of atoms and so forth, and I daresay the same goes for most Physics undergraduates. If the funding cuts aren't reversed, who will inspire the next generation of physicists? Come to think of it, who will teach them? What can I do? Please sign the petition below: Petition to reverse the decision to cut vital UK contributions to Particle Physics and Astronomy More info STFC funding crisis in the Press - List of links to articles in the press Ministers review physics funding - BBC article STFC funding crisis - Comprehensive background information on the crisis (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, January 3rd, 2008
8:00 pm	Firefox 3 Step 1: Install Firefox 3 (including the updated version of libnss from that repo). Step 2: Try to drag some text or an image. Step 3: Marvel. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, December 1st, 2007
4:47 pm	Bits and Bobs Reading Shockingly, the last few books that I've read haven't been textbooks. Electric Universe by David Bodanis turned out to be a reasonably entertaining popular science book, covering the development of our understanding of electricity over the last couple of hundred years. While moderately light on science (some phenomena are explained in perhaps too abstract a way to allow the reader to gain much of a sense of what's actually happening), the history of electromagnetism is brought to life by Bodanis's attention to the characters in the story. It's nice to get some kind of idea of what the people involved in the development of the field were like - it seems a shame that I know little more of greats such as Maxwell and Kelvin than their names and equations. The Scientific Outlook by Bertrand Russell is one of the most fascinating books I've ever read. Russell's thoughts on the nature of science and religion tally almost exactly with mine, and the book really helped to crystallise my opinions on such matters. Full of excellent quotes and solid reasoning, it's difficult not to agree with him in almost every instance. What's more, the negative aspects of the scientific method are addressed alongside its virtues, injecting plenty of balance into the proceedings. Not bad for 60p, but I'd recommend this at any price. Writing Plenty to do over at the Doc Team. We've seen quite a few new contributors recently, and should soon be ready to start work for the current release cycle. Qing Gan has been doing an awesome job working on the upstream documentation for deskbar-applet, and Adam Sommer has written a clever new macro for the wiki which should help us to finally implement a couple of specs we've had lying around for a while. 'rithmetic I've been using C++ quite a lot, recently. While easily more frustrating to use than Python, it's not been too difficult to learn so far, and I even managed to use it to analyse some lab data. What do you know, fitting periodic functions turns out to be more difficult than it sounds. (Comment on this)
Thursday, October 18th, 2007
9:02 am	Rocking Features? Hey Corey, that's my line! (I couldn't be bothered this release cycle, and you made a better job of it anyway...) (Comment on this)
Wednesday, October 17th, 2007
11:30 pm	Visual Effects Despite having run Gutsy for a good 2-3 months now, I've only just decided to turn on desktop effects, or visual effects as they're now known. Far from making my head explode with drop-shadowed, wobbling masses of partially-transparent burning windows on cubes, I'm finding the effects pretty sensible! I like the quick, subtle window animations and useful feedback effects (windows of frozen apps grey-out), and I'm not being slowed down by the effects as I was when I tried them while running Feisty. Of course, along with with the addition of Deskbar and Tracker by default, we've pretty much reached feature parity with Windows Vista and Mac OS X... (Comment on this)
11:05 pm	Robert Putnam I went to see a lecture by Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, on Monday. Putnam is a very engaging speaker, and I found his talk pretty insightful. I might even buy his book... The talk centred around the concept of social capital, the value in social interaction and of being part of social networks. By looking at various indicators (such as club/society membership and, humorously, picnic attendance), Putnam was able to show an apparent decline in social capital between the end of the Fifties and today. He then went on to discuss the possible causes of the decline (globalisation, technological development, suburbanisation etc.) and the negative impacts of a lack of social capital (reduced life expectancy, increased crime rates and so on). Of most interest was his discussion of what we should do about it, if anything. This yielded an interesting historical note; apparently, a similar decline in social capital occurred at the end of the 19th Century which was combated (successfully) in part by the subsequent foundation of various organisations such as the Scout Association and Rotary Clubs. For all of the ASBOs, PCSOs and other recently introduced initiatives intended to help improve society, perhaps the money would have been better spent buying everyone a tent and some hiking boots? (Comment on this)
Monday, September 17th, 2007
1:43 pm	Ubuntu Python Recipes The Ubuntu Help Wiki now has a section for Python Recipes. The intention is to build up a small library of code snippets and short guides to help people build useful Python apps for Ubuntu. The focus is not on helping people to learn Python from scratch; there are many other resources which do this very well already. The page is specifically geared towards Ubuntu rather than Python in general; there are many other snippet collections which cover Python as a whole. In the end, I'd like this to develop into a useful resource for people interested in developing modern Python applications for Ubuntu - it should cover everything from basic GTK programming and using common (but problematic) widgets like TreeViews, through using new-ish features like notifications and inhibit, up to writing documentation and packaging. If you know the basics of Python, you should be able to use the information in this section to create your first working package, with all of the quality features and usability that users expect. Here's the link: Python Recipes There are only a couple of articles at the moment, and we need contributors. Please contribute to this section! (Comment on this)
1:13 pm	What has the Doc Team been up to this release cycle? The Doc Team has been pretty busy this release cycle. Here's a summary of some of the work that has been carried out: Improvements and corrections to much of the system documentation, thanks to our team of awesome mentoring students Massively improved Internet and Networking section, courtesy of Dougie Richardson A new Hardware section, with documentation on touchpads and laptops, amongst other things The creation of a Python Recipes section on the help wiki Ubuntu-ified GNOME Desktop User Guide An updated and hopefully more useful GNOME Desktop Accessibility Guide Some long-awaited tidy-up work, mostly by Milo Casagrande and Matt East Updated Switching from Windows guide (another of Dougie's masterpieces) Corrections and updates to the Server Guide (mostly by Adam Sommer) Many other bits and pieces of work, thanks to our mentoring students All in all, the documentation for Gutsy will be the best yet. I'll have to post a full list of contributors - it couldn't have been done without them. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, September 4th, 2007
11:05 am	Welcome Centre I was looking at a spec the other day and remembered that I had some old code knocking around that might provide an interesting spin on the idea. The purpose of the Welcome Centre spec is to produce a 'first run' application which is displayed when the user first logs in to Ubuntu after installing it. This interests me because it makes documentation more visible to users, and should hopefully help people to answer their initial questions with the minimum of fuss. There have been several attempts at an implementation of something like this, but I don't think any of them hit the spot. I decided to go with a slightly more general implementation. Welcome Centre, as I've imaginatively called it, is simply an HTML browser. 'Wow'. This should make it easy to design attractive, accessible first-run documentation for users, as you would design a website. But, as you'll see from the screenshot below, there's a twist. Yep, Welcome Centre can run applications (and open documents, not just download them) at the click of a link. The code is very simple, but it should hopefully do the trick. It should also be useful for other tasks - some other use cases are covered in the documentation (just search in Yelp for 'welcome-centre'). This is the initial release, and it goes without saying that it might have horrible, horrible bugs: Download Welcome Centre 0.1 for Ubuntu Every last morsel of feedback you can offer is very greatly appreciated. Is this useful to anyone, for any purpose? (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, August 30th, 2007
9:56 am	Mail notifications So far, the source of the new mail notifications in Gutsy has eluded me. Does anyone know where they come from, please? (Comment on this)
9:54 am	Aaagh, regressions! I'm no stranger to running Ubuntu development releases, but I have to say that Gutsy has broken more things for me than any of the others so far. That's not to say that the problems won't be fixed before release, but I thought I'd have a little moan anyway. Here are my top five annoyances at the moment: Update Manager steals focus several times when installing updates (#129983) ACX wireless driver cannot be loaded (#118539) Emblems in Nautilus are too small (#126104) and all look the same (#73023) Drivel is no longer able to show the song currently being played in Rhythmbox (#135253) Gedit screws up code highlighting for DocBook (various) (Comment on this)
Tuesday, August 14th, 2007
1:04 pm	Lifestyle advice from Apple Inc. Does anyone else have a problem with Apple's new iMac advertising? Current Music: Jimmy Eat World - Pain (25 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, August 13th, 2007
11:23 pm	Finding planetary nebulae I never get around to writing about science on my blog. Being an undergraduate physicist, I spend a lot of my time reading and learning about various aspects of physics, so it seems reasonable to try my hand at writing about the subject, even if only to indulge myself. This first article is about planetary nebulae, astronomical phenomena which can look pretty amazing. I was lucky enough to get a demonstration of the technique described below recently. Let me know if I've written a load of crap or am just plain wrong, please... Finding planetary nebulae In the 18th Century, a number of strange objects were found in the night's sky. Invisible to the naked eye1, they appeared as small, fuzzy discs when viewed through a telescope. William Herschel, discoverer of Uranus, noted the similarity between such objects and his new-found planet and named them 'planetary nebulae'2. At the time, this seemed like a sensible name; the disc-like nature of the objects was very reminiscent of Uranus, and they were nebulous (fuzzy). Nowadays, we know that planetary nebulae are far from 'planetary'. In fact, they are massive shells of gas which have been ejected from dying stars which were once similar to our Sun3. As the gas expands outwards, it is heated by the radiation from the star, which causes the gas to glow. Glowing gas A characteristic of planetary nebulae is that they only glow in certain colours. This is because when gases are heated, they are only able to emit at certain wavelengths of light. These wavelengths correspond to a change in energy levels of an electron in the atoms of the gas – when the electron absorbs energy, it jumps up an energy level, sort of like jumping from one step on a flight of stairs to another. However, electrons don't like being at high energy levels, and will try to jump back down the stairs to the lowest level possible. In order to do this, they emit a small packet of light (a photon), which has an energy equal to the difference in energy between the steps. If the electron has gone from, say, the first energy level to the third, it has two ways of getting back down again. It could go straight from the third to the first level, or it could go from the third down to the second, and then on to the first. In the latter case, two photons are emitted, both with lower energies than the photon in the first case. This means that, even thought the gas may be absorbing energetic ultraviolet light from its parent star, it can re-emit this as two longer-wavelength (lower energy) photons. Detecting the nebulae The light from normal stars (such as the Sun) is made up of many colours – a continuous spectrum, like a rainbow. When you pass light from a star through a prism, it is split up into its constituent colours. These colours come out of the prism at different angles, so if you start off with a narrow beam of light, it will be spread out as it passes through the prism. On passing light from a planetary nebula through a prism, it is bent but not spread out because it is only made up of a single colour. So, if we fit a prism to a telescope eyepiece, we now have a useful tool for detecting planetary nebulae. Figure 1 Without the prism, it is often impossible to discern planetary nebulae from normal stars without seriously increasing the telescope's magnification in order to see a disc (Fig. 1). This isn't always easy (or possible). However with the prism, the planetary nebula stands out because it's the only source of light which isn't spread out (Fig. 2). Figure 2 [1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_nebula [2] - http://seds.org/messier/planetar.html [3] - Astronomy Now (July 2007) Current Music: At the Drive-In - Invalid Litter Dept. (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, August 8th, 2007
6:57 pm	Manually adding missing album art in Rhythmbox I wrote these instructions in response to a comment on a blog post from a while ago. The commenter was wondering how they could get missing album art to appear in Rhythmbox: Using Firefox, find the album on Amazon.com and click on it so you get a page something like this. Right-click the picture of the album cover and select 'Save Image As...' In the box marked Name, type ~/.gnome2/rhythmbox/covers/Artist Name - Album Name.jpg. You have to type the artist name and album name *exactly* as they appear in Rhythmbox, including punctuation and spaces e.g. John Frusciante - To Record Only Water For Ten Days.jpg Press Save. Go back into Rhythmbox and double-click on a song from the album that was missing the album art. The album cover should now be displayed if you typed the name correctly. You may have to close and then open Rhythmbox sometimes for this to take effect. It's not pretty, but it works for me. Current Music: Billy Talent - Red Flag (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, August 6th, 2007
2:44 pm	Mobile telecommunications for fun and profit ...calls [in France] cost 95p/min to make and 60p/min to receive... -- Virgin Mobile (Credit), 26th June 2007 If you use your Virgin Mobile phone abroad, we have news for you. From 30 August 2007, making a call in the EU costs just 38p/min and receiving one is 19p/min -- Virgin Mobile (Credit), 6th August 2007 Wow, a 60% discount on making calls and a 68% discount on receiving them. It's almost as if they were massively over-charging me before... Current Music: James Dean Bradfield - That's No Way To Tell A Lie (Comment on this)