KDR

this is the latest acronym I have come up with. It stands for "Keyword Driven Research", you know, as in when people don't have a project that is interesting from a physical or engineering point of view, but they need to make it "soud cool" to sell it to the funding agency and they choose some semi-random combination of fancy keywords for the title. Example: "nanobiological imaging systems". It contains the keywords "nano", "bio", "imaging", but it actually says nothing at all.

To be honest I am starting to worry about the proliferation of this kind of projects. Lately it seems that if your project does not contain a series of fashionable keywords and an overstatement of what can be done in the time proposed with the requested funding, you don't get any funding at all. This is a trend that will damage scientific research credibility in years to come. Groups around the world keep on promising deliverables that can't be met in order to get the minimal funding necessary to "survive", while also making unnecessary use of fashionable keywords to support their proposal. Why is this necessary? The way I see it Science is about solid, hard, careful and contrastable work. That does not necessarily mean "flashy" or "fashionable" or much less, "fast" and "cheap". Good research takes time and effort and, in my humble opinion, does not necesarily follow the latest fad. I'm seen more and more how people are forced to exagerate their claims in order to get funding, and I believe this can only be damaging for science in the long term. We should be worried about producing solid results, not about sounding like we are doing great science. Solid, serious science IS great science. It is what makes us progress. It is not the keyword that makes you work great, it is the carefully put effort behind it. And sadly many people are forgetting this nowadays and trying to sell science cheap in an effort to win the funding an dpublication race. I'm not saying using this words is bad. If you are doing research in a fashionable topic, then you must use them. But please, let's try to find interesting problems to work on rather than nice keyword combinations for the next proposal...

Suse 10.0 on a Presario V2000

Well, I decided to give a new lease on life to my notebook, and I increased the RAM from 512Mb to 1Gb and substituted the old 4200rpm 40Gb HD by a Seagate 5400rpm 80Gb that also uses less than half the power. Things are looking good, and the machine is much more responsive than before (I also took the chance to take it apart completely and superglue the left hinge that broke when I dropped it a few months ago).

This notebook has worked flawlessly since I bought it, apart from the fact that the silver paint in the region where I rest my hands is completely gone. Blame it on long hours programming or on crappy finish... Anyway, I decided to install a flavor of linux to do some coding every now and then and to write my papers, since I prefer Kile to Miktex+texmaker/winedt. I've been using Suse 10 in the office (I managed to get the IT guys to leave half the space in the HD in a separate partition and then installed it. Ha! Who needs premission now to install freeware, hu?) so I decided to install it in my notebook as well. To be honest, I almost wish I had something more to report. Everything worked. The wireless card (with encryption), the 14.1" widescreen display, the audio, everything. I only have a complain with Suse 10 and it is that it always seems to hang when doing the "Online Update" that is offered right before the installation finishes. My advice: finish the installation. Try the online update some other time after rebooting.

Anyway, my notebook shows a gret improvement in usability. I'm sure CPU benchmarks will be the same, but the improved access times to the hard drive and the extra memory really help. If you are stuck wit the 4200rpm hard drive and can afford to upgrade it I strongly recommend you to do so. You won't regret it.

So now you know. If you are looking for a linux distro for a notebook, try SUSE. Oh! One last thing: install KDE as default. For some reason the Gnome 2.12 desktop is awfully slow in Suse (and it IS a suse problem becasue this doesn't happen in Fedora or Ubuntu). Night night...

disappointing Oasis concert

well, that was probably the worst concert I've ever been to. Unbelievable. The venue was great, Singapore Indoor Stadium, the first time that I go to an air-conditioned concert! But that is where the good things ended. Oasis gave an underwhelming live performance, starting from the horrible sound setup, continuing with a complete lack of ability to engage the crowd, and finishing the concert in less than an hour and a half. If you are wondering, I left about fifteen minutes before it finished. Couldn't really work myself up to shout for a couple of extra songs.

The songs from the new album left the crowd cold, and only at the sound of the classic hits Morning Glory and Wonderwall did people standup, smile, and look like they were starting to enjoy themselves. It was short lived, though. Even with an audience that was clearly getting bored the group did not try to change their tune and play some of their better known hits, even if only to warm things up. A shame. Almost feel like asking for my money back. Their new album will definitely not make it into my collection.