• LyX: A frontend for LaTeX,  specially designed for people who don’t like LaTeX. You could consider it “training wheels for LaTeX”, but if you learn it well you’ll probably never need to learn full-on LaTeX.
• JabREF: A reference manager for making Bibtex bibliographies. It plays nice with LyX, and you can use it to organise all those papers you read just for fun.
• Inkscape: A vector graphics program (SVG). Super useful for making diagrams to put into LaTeX. If you’re using LyX, the best option is to save your files as PDF when you want to insert them into LyX.

These are all free, and cross-platform. Note that for LyX, you’ll need to download TeX as well. Just follow the instructions on the lyx download page and you should be fine. The only other thing you’ll need is a graphing program: I’d recommend Mathematica, MATLAB and OriginPro (note: not free).

A few hot tips:

• Press Ctrl + L to manually enter LaTeX, whenever you can’t do it out-of-the-box
• Press Ctrl + M to enter maths mode
• Learn all the maths shortcut key combinations (e.g. press Alt + M, then F to input a fraction)
• Watch some youtube videos, like this one, to help you get up to speed

Good luck…

Download LyX template »

## Open a connection to the VNA
VNA = visa.instrument("GPIB::06")

## Select a channel
VNA.write("CH1")

## Get frequency data
freq = VNA.ask_for_values("OFV")

## Get channel data
S11 = VNA.ask_for_values("OFD")

If you’re lazy just run the grabData script and voila. If you’re not, try editing the grabData() function to your needs and script away.

To get this to work, you’ll need Python 2.5, pyVisa and the relevant NI drivers (488.2 and for me the ones for the UBS-GPIB thing). There’s some useful documentation on the Anritsu site here. Kudos to Oliver King for his help .

As far as colonists go, China knew about Australia before the Dutch, who sailed here on the Duyfken and landed on the Cape York peninsula in 1606 (navigated by Willem Janszoon). In 1616 Dirk Hartog got to Shark Bay and left a pewter plate. No-one in Europe really cared enough to make a settlement, until James Cook decided to claim the Eastern States: he sailed over on the Endeavor and landed at Botany Bay on 29th April 1770. After he left, tried to take the Hawaiian king Kalaniopu’u hostage, but miscalculated and instead, got stabbed to death.

The only reason the Brits actually bothered colonising was to get rid of prisoners (and possibly to look for replacement tea after the Boston Tea Party, December 16, 1773). Captain Arthur Phillip led the First Fleet (11 ships) over, they left on the 13 May 1787 and reached Botany Bay on 18 January 1788. They waited until 1829 to claim the West Coast and then founded the Swan River Colony, now known as Perth.

That’s it in a nutshell. Thank you Wikipedia.

Using this, it only takes a few seconds to make a custom contract between you and a client. It should also only take a few minutes to customise it to your own styles and formatting.  If you’re even crapper at Word than me, then you might want to read up about user forms, bookmarks and form fields. The word MVP site is a killer resource for all that jazz. A quick MS Word tip: use ALT+F9 to toggle field view, and turn bookmarks viewing on in tools > options > views. Finally: IANAL, so YMMV. Good luck and enjoy!

Download contract template (zipped)

• Hyperconnectivity Impact – David Martel. A quick look at why hyperconnectivity is inevitable.
• Journalism in a Hyperconnected World – Stilgherrian. “Hyperconnected” social networking sites send news faster than news sites – how will journalism adapt? A good read.
• Scary Stuff - Robert Ellis Smith. An eloquent and truly scary look at how privacy may fall by the wayside in a hyperconnected world.

I’ll be posting more on this sort of thing in the future. Stay tuned.

I’m not going to discuss the huge body of privacy concerns in this post. What I would like to discuss is the possible extension of this machine into a marketing device, and the impacts that this would have upon going out, night-clubbing and society.

Welcome to the machine

Consider, if you will, the manager of a savvy club with Nightkey installed on the front doors. At the end of the night, she has a look at how many people came through the door: “Hmm. only 278 tonight, we’ll have to get some better bands next Saturday. And out of those 278, 178 were male – we need more females to keep the guys happy! I’ll contact my ad guy and get him to come up with some female-oriented ads. The problem is, it looks like girls under 25 spend on average $15 less than guys aged over 25. I’ll get my stats guy to find the ideal ratio and age for maximum profit.”

I hope the above monologue illustrates my point: something like the Nightkey system could easily turn you into a statistic. I’m not sure how much stat-crunching Nightkey can do out-of-the-box, but  even a little will give businesses a huge advantage in terms of clientele tracking. Is this a good thing, or a bad thing? I’ll let you decide.

Fancy meeting you here

Here’s a simple mash-up one could do: linking your Nightkey details to your Facebook account. And here’s a way around the privacy laws: “Add our application to your facebook profile and we’ll give you a free beer and VIP entry!”. Very tempting. The devil is of course in the EULA. Almost instantly, you have complete demographic information about your punters. Then it’s just up to advertising. You can play god with your own club (and get that power trip that the bouncers get when they turn someone away). Not that club owner’s don’t try and do all this already.

What I’m trying to get at is that this type of  technology means that you could build communties through statistical analysis. Hyperconnectivity could soon mould our physical social interactions. We could be entering the next social paradigm shift, the next renaissance. A Brave New World. If we could steer this in the right direction: minority groups could prosper, culture would be fortified, people could be connected to their perfect matches. In the wrong hands: I won’t go there.

Today I was delighted to find out that one of my favorite photos from my 2005 Japan trip has been used to promote green building practices on Green By Design. I released it free for use on sxc.hu along with a few other photos I thought might be useful for stock photography. While some of the photos I uploaded have been used for more unusual designs, I’ve generally been amazed by the pieces people have managed to create. And amazed at who uses the site: my photos have been used by KLM airlines, Harper-Collins and the World Health Organisation. It’s great to see them being used – which they wouldn’t have been, if they weren’t free. Viva la freedom of information, I say. But don’t get me started on privacy.

I’m excited because I just found the missing piece: a nifty add-on to Picasa to link it up to Flickr’s Upload tool – picasa2flickr. With this and Picasa’s inbuilt integration with Snapfish (I wonder how much HP paid for the endorsement …), Picasa is very good-in-the-mix. The next step is getting all this working on Linux…

I’m 3/4 the way through “The Cosmic Blueprint”, by Paul Davies, which is a good read although I haven’t been digesting it properly. I’ve already finished the web design mag I bought. I have a New Scientist left to read, which I hope yields a better reading-to-price ratio.

I got an emergency exit seat for the short trip, but have a killer 18hr leg left. Turns out the emergency exit isn’t thermally shielded so is a good place to cool down your water bottle. Think the flight attendant noticed me laughing to myself about how cookie cutter the buildings were. Hope I didn’t offend.

Saw a guy sleeping with his mouth closed but lips open. Thought that was strange. The Oreos on the plane seemed more salty than usual. Will investigate further if 491mg of Sodium is a lot. Main meal was dissapointing, canneloni was a bad choice.

Still have 2 hours to kill. Coffee bean guy keeps calling peoples names in a high pitch voice “Sir Steve? Sir Steve?” Planning on knocking myself out at exactly the right time to have a good first day in England.

Love you all
Dan