Bibtex entry creation script used in anger

I've been using my Python script in anger to help convert two chapters
worth of references from plain text references to Bibtex entries.

It's a bit rough and ready and assumes quite a bit about the layout of
the references in the plain-text text, but it did a kind of 90% job
for me.

Maybe it could be helpful for others too, but you shouldn't expect too
much of it.

Of course it could be improved a lot, but at some point, faced by the
law of diminishing returns, I decided to stop improving it when it was
doing 90% OK, and the rest (the difficult cases) I've edited by hand.

Python script

I'm writing a Python script to generate Bibtex entries from more or less
free-form citations, trying to guess which parts are the author names,
article title, page numbers etc.

This is the first time I've written any Python for over a year, and I'm
a bit rusty. I keep on forgetting the colons at the end of if's and
function definitions.

Draft book chapters handed over

Yesterday and today I handed over the drafts of two chapters of a
forthcoming book to our lead editor, Shih-Chii Liu.

Capo Caccia 2011

I'm at Capo Caccia in Sardinia again (for the third year running) for the annual review of the SECO project and for the 2011 Capo Caccia Cognitive Neuromorphic Engineering Workshop.

Last year, getting home afterwards was quite a struggle due to Eyjafjallajökull. This year, getting here was quite a struggle due to Alitalia. The plan was to take the 15:09 train from Zürich to Milan, and then fly to Alghero, which is only a half hour's drive to the hotel here. We should have arrived in the late evening. The train journey was uneventful, but on the plane, having taxied out to the runway, it was discovered that there was a small problem with one of the engines. So we taxied away from the runway again. Technicians boarded. After two hours sitting on the plane it was decided, not long before midnight, that we must get off the plane again. As we walked down the steps to the buses that would return us to the terminal, we could see the no. 1 engine with cowls open, a technician sitting on the ground underneath it next to his rather domestic looking small blue toolbox. For some while in the now deserted terminal it appeared there was still a chance our flight might depart that night, but then the word cancellato was heard, and that was that. The two remaining airport check-in staff then faced the unenviable task of organising a hotel for everyone and buses to take us to the hotel, and issuing everyone with vouchers for the accomodation. After this we still had to collect all our luggage, wait for the buses, travel to the hotel, and last but not least check in, before we eventually saw our beds at around 3:15 in the morning. I set my alarm for 6:15 to ensure I had time to check out again in good time to be ready for the bus back to the airport at 7am. At least our second chance flight proceeded smoothly, but our nine hour journey had been stretched to twenty hours with only three hours of sleep.

That was all last Tuesday 26th April/Wednesday 27th April. Since then I've presented my couple of slides at the SECO review meeting on Friday 29th, and all is well.

Singing in Innsbruck

In case you didn't already know, pretty much my main hobby is choral singing, and I'm just back from a few days in Innsbruck with the ACZ (Academic Choir of Zurich) where we were rehearsing and performing Dvorak's Stabat Mater.

Whenever the choir rehearses with the orchestra for the first time in a strange hall with an acoustic you're not used to, it's a big shock how different everything is from when you're rehearsing with just a piano in a familiar setting. And this time was no different in this respect. The orchestra was loud and the room just swallowed up our voices, so we tried to sing louder. And the conductor insisted on rehearsing some of the louder passages several times over, all of which is very unforgiving on a choir. The musical style of the professional tenor soloist, who we were also meeting for the first time, was not to everyone's taste, and he also had some difficulties with his part. All in all, not an auspicious start to the weekend.

And then the church we were to perform. Another shock (or two). Firstly it was small by our standards, around 200 seats for the congregation, I would guess. Secondly, we had been promised that the church would be warm, and we wouldn't need to wrap ourselves up in winter woolies to sing there. But, It was cold. There was heating, but if obviously hadn't been turned on for very long, and because of where the heating was, and the shape of the church, it had set up a nice convection cell where the hot air rose to the ceiling where the public would sit, displacing a mass of cold air which then descended directly down the necks of the choir where we had to stand jammed in between the altar and the back wall. The 'dress' rehearsal was carried out in overcoats. I felt like a penguin on the ice, standing perched on a narrow step huddled together with other choir members for hours on end. It was also not much of a dress rehearsal, which is supposed to include a straight run through of the piece, as though for real. It turned out that a recording was to be made in this rehearsal, and this meant that it progressed only slowly, movement by movement, with quite some repetitions to try to eliminate problems with the recording. And the solo tenor was still having problems. With the last buses through the snowy streets back to our hotels leaving at 23:30, the rehearsal finally broke up at 23:20, having started at 20:15. We'd been standing most of this time. Morale was not high.

On the following day however, the concert went considerably better than anyone had expected. It was warmer in the church, and with the adrenalin pumping it was possible to stand there in shirtsleeves. The concert was sold out, with people standing at the back. The tenor sang much better than he had in rehearsal. As usual in concerts I discovered a couple of new minor mistakes to make that I'd never made before. But overall, we went home happy after a meal of goulash soup in a room at the back of the church.

We're performing the piece again in the Neumünster in Zurich on the 7th and again on the 8th of January. Let's see what happens then.

New releases

On Thursday, 23 September, openSUSE released a security and bugfix update for the Linux kernel on openSUSE 11.2. As a consequence of this I've rebuilt the gpib-linux RPM again, and also made a new release (2.41) of the pciaer driver which includes a few improvements that I've put in now and then over the past few months.

And I've made a start on pciaer 2.42, ripping out the previously deprecated debug ioctl interface (the same functionality is available via debugfs instead) and removing a few redundant initializers. The next things I want to do before the next release include deprecating a couple more ioctl calls and introducing compat_ioctl handling where necessary to ensure everything works correctly on 64 bit, which is something I never worried about up until now.

GPIB RPM again

Another reason to blog again is that someone read my post about GPIB
packaging and enquired whether he could download the package or spec
file from somewhere. I've now made the latest spec file plus some patch
files available at http://www.ini.uzh.ch/~amw/linux-gpib/
Note that it's only known to work for openSuse 11.2 at present.

Time to blog again

Shortly after my last blog entry, I was re-assigned to a new project. I didn't really feel I could blog about it, since at the time the project had no other web presence. So I stopped blogging altogether. Since then, a lot of water has flowed under the proverbial structure built to span a valley, road, body of water or other physical obstacle. Notably, for me at least:

• I met Alan Cox at a conference (he's the one with the beard, I'm the one crouching down to talk to him with my back to the camera in the bottom left hand corner);
• I moved house;
  
• I learnt Python;
• I learnt Java.

One of the things I've worked on has been the home page for that new project, CX3D, a tool for simulating the growth of cerebral cortex in 3D, so I've no more excuses for not blogging anymore. Let's see how long I go on for this time :-)

The 'Publish' checkbox

Why so long between the event (30th March) and the blog entry (18th April, see
below)? Well, I had tried to use Mail-to-Blogger feature, but I hadn't checked
the checkbox labelled 'Publish' (which reads as though it's about publishing the
'secret' Mail-to-Blogger email address, not the posts themselves) and my post
got lost. As Blogging is not the be-all and end-all of my life I was content to
leave it lost for couple of weeks, but now I've found the problem. The
undocumented 'Publish' checkbox.

Art

Something completely different. On 30th March, I went with my (ex-)art historian girlfriend (that is, she used to be an art historian, she's still my girlfriend) to the event described (in german) here.
It's good to know that even in a gathering of artists, art historians and the like, some are sometimes prompted to ask, very vociferously and incredulously "Is that art?". In this case the controversial material in question was the drawings of Pierre Klossowski.