I really enjoyed the day off yesterday - spent mostly sitting in the sun, enjoying the warm, balmy spring air, and reading. And now it's back to all those things that wait for me to do them - including a full backup of my current data on the computer, and then migrating the contents of the computer to a new (and much larger) internal disk drive.

And all this because I am running out of space, and I started to shift some files to external disk drives - until a while ago I realised that there are pictures missing from the internal drive. Pictures that I knew must be there, and that seem to be (hopefully all of them) on a backup drive from quite a while ago. I have no clue how that could have happened, but it's not filling me with delight, quite the contrary. So I did what everyone with not enough space on the disk does: I ordered a new, bigger one. Once this is all finished, I will have an internal terabyte (Yay! Space!) which, judging by my current migration process to bigger disks, should last at least two years... or quite a bit more.

These were the news from pallia's IT department. Stay tuned for news from the Customer Service department and the Research Facilities... they are due soon.

This landed in my email inbox yesterday:

Dear all,

We are glad to inform you that it will be possible to follow the international workshop An integration of use-wear and residues analysis for the identification of the function of archaeological stone tools, “La Sapienza” University of Rome, 5th – 7th March 2012  live on the website www.archaeologicaltraces.org.

Everybody is welcome to participate, actively or not, in the discussion sessions using the chat.

So in case you read this in time, you can have a look. In case you are too late (or not interested in stone tool use wear analysis), you can still join me in thinking this a really awesome and really cool thing. Live streaming and interactive discussion on conferences! Welcome to the future! Yay!

Since I had some more little troubles with xmgrace yesterday, I used the Phone-a-Friend Lifeline and did just that. And thus got myself a nice little one-on-one, flesh-and-blood Grace tutorial.

Where I learned the following Two Rules for Getting Grace:
Rule one: If plotting or importing data does not work, you probably have a dumb user problem and screwed up your dataset. Which is easy to do - just add a line break at the wrong place, or leave a string in.
Rule two: When working with grace, pretend it's a jump-and-run game or an egoshooter - save early, save often, save lots of different versions. Grace has no undo function, and hitting the wrong button (or even the right button) at the wrong time can permanently screw up things.

I'm not sure whether there's a third rule - insist on grace being totally cool and a very good tool no matter how much trouble it can make - but I will find that out (probably).

For now, though, I know how to get stuff like this:


so I'm perfectly content.

My computer has now successfully turned into a schizophreniac computer - it can run Windows and emulate UNIX too.
Now I only need to get xmgrace running properly (there are still some issues with my data import), and I can finally get those graphs with Gauss fits that I need for finishing my evaluation, and thus my article, and thus my preparation for the next paper (I will speak at the 3000 years of colour conference).

It's probably best that I have no clue at all anymore as to how much time I have invested in the spinning experiment. When I started out with this, I did not believe this would become such a huge item in my life. (I know what I would do if I had to decide again whether to do it or not, knowing how much would come after it. I would say... YES.)

So... please excuse me while I reboot my computer and try to find out where the issue is... and then hopefully finally get those histograms.

In the (admittedly very small) team of Textile Forum organisers, I am the techie person. Which means that website stuff - making, updating, and so on - and mailing stuff is my job. And that, of course, includes the newsletter.

I have been using a small freeware newsletter programme these past years that is easy to use and generally very nice - apart from one thing: It has a tendency to mangle word wraps in the email. Now this could be fixed easily by some more care on my part (it's partly a dumb-user-problem), but I tend to forget to look out for that, and I have planned to do a pallia.net newsletter as well in the future, so I went out to search for a successor to my old prog.

And I found one. It looked nice, it sounded nice, it installed like a breeze (since I now know how to generate a new sql-database and which values to jot down for the server), it imported all my addresses nicely, and it has a bunch of nice features that are just what I need. And it's open source.

However, I have now run into a few bugs that ... bug me. Nothing totally serious, nothing that I could not work around, but irksome. And hey, I changed from my old programme to get rid of irksome! Not believing that this irksomeness had to be there, I went to look at the documentation. And then it dawned on me... this thing I installed? Has help files from 2008. Last update of the thing was also 2008. I downloaded and installed a zombie.

And this, my friends, is why one should always (always!) check for: a) latest update of the thing and b) check if there is proper documentation, FAQ, and (if available) help forums before installing a programme, and c) check when the last entries on the help forums were. Before installing. Because once you have an issue with the rampant zombie on your system... it's too late.

Now please excuse me while I put that undead body back to where it belongs and find myself a live one. With proper docs and support.

Internet is good. Well, since you read this blog, you will know that I think the internet is good. But sometimes, it comes back to me just how good it is - and then I have to say it again.

The internet helps me to connect with my friends. To find out when favourite musicians play somewhere I can go. It enables me to buy strange and useful things, like my new spinning wheel (yes, I have a new one). It continuously provides me with new programmes that are good to use and totally free for most private purposes (like Anti-Twin, a wonderful tool to find duplicate files, or Sequoia View, a programme that shows you how big a file is on your hard disk). It is a wonderful place to do research for writing and working.*

And it makes it possible to collaborate with people who live on the other side of the planet. All the way around, with no delay whatsoever, I can send things and messages and pictures, and we can discuss what is good and what is okay and what is not so good. And that, I think, is absolutely amazing.


*And yes, it also provides me with endless opportunities to get side-tracked, procrastinate, and waste time and money. But hey, that's the Internet for everybody, right?

I am one of those persons who uses tabs in the browser window. A lot. I keep tabs open to remind me of things, to check things out later, to blog about them one of the next days, to have something handy to look up that I suspect I will need later that day or tomorrow, and so on.

I try to keep the tab flood down and under control, and mostly I don't need more tabs than fit in one row once across the screen on my computer. (Though occasionally, there will be much more of them. For a while.) I have tried other methods of working with fewer tabs, or getting organised in a different way, but this one just suits me best. I have that nasty habit of forgetting about bookmarks, for example. Or forgetting to actually get back to those "to read" lists that some add-ons offer, and they just grow and grow and grow.

So generally, this system of tabs to check and close down when finished works very well for me. But sometimes, Firefox crashes. Or there's a system update. Or I have a second browser window open by accident and close the wrong one first... and gone are all my tabs. I hate when that happens. And guess what happened today? Yes, right. All my tabs were gone (and miraculously, so has the browsing history of the last few days). Fortunately there was nothing utterly important open as a reminder - at least not that I'd remember - so it's not too bad. Still, I hate when that happens...