Monthly Archives: August 2009

Linux on a Toshiba NB200

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Thanks to Ultim8Fury, Leesa and Nick255 for the following.

Presumably as it’s a fairly new model, after setting up linux (Ubuntu Netbook Remix in this case) on a Toshiba NB200 I ran into a few little problems.  Most of the smaller ones were solved/mitigated by Ultim8Fury’s excellent Setup Guide here.  However if, like me, you had windows off and linux on faster than ** then you may have run into the ‘enabling wifi’ problem.

The drivers suggested by Ultim8Fury cannot turn the card on and windows XP will not reinstall without some very advanced ‘slipstreaming’ technique due to a lack of drivers for the RAID interface.  So if you forgot to enable wireless before removing XP and do not own a copy of Vista (presumably this may work, I don’t actually know) how do you enable the card?

It was Leesa’s explaination of how to enable bluetooth and Nick255’s adaptation of it that provided the answer.

Originally Posted by Leesa
Bluetooth is working with omnibook module:

  1. Get sources from http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/362618/om…1217-1_all.deb
  2. Make sure Bluetooth is enabled in Windows
  3. sudo apt-get install module-assistant build-essential
  4. sudo m-a a-i omnibook-source
  5. Try it: sudo modprobe omnibook ectype=14
  6. Make it autoload:
  • sudo nano /etc/modules
  • Put “omnibook” at the latest line
  • sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/omnibook.conf:

options omnibook ectype=14 userset=0 lcd=0 display=0 blank=0 battery=0 ac=0 bluetooth=1

Works fine for my NB200, even enabling/disabling bluetooth via /proc/omnibook/bluetooth
You should use ectype=12 instead of ectype=14. That way you can enable or disable wifi without needing to boot Windows. Unfortunately, the hotkeys don’t work, so you have to manually echo either 1 or 0 to /proc/omnibook/wifi (or if you prefer, just disable it in the bios when you want to be sure it is disabled).
To summarise (in Ubuntu):
  1. Download http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/362618/om…1217-1_all.deb
  2. Install the omnibook-source .deb file, module-assistant and build-essential.
  3. Run module-assistant on the omnibook-source package.
  4. Load the module with ectype=12.
  5. Turn the Wifi on and off with /proc/omnibook/wifi

As root:

# This will install any dependencies not already on the system:
apt-get install bzip2 debhelper dpatch kernel-package make module-assistant build-essential
mkdir /tmp/omnibook
cd /tmp/omnibook
wget http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/362618/omnibook-source_2.20070211%2Bsvn20071217-1_all.deb
dpkg -i omnibook-source_2.20070211+svn20071217-1_all.deb
m-a a-i omnibook-source
modprobe omnibook ectype=12
echo 1 > /proc/omnibook/wifi

If this works as advertised, go ahead and add “omnibook” to the end of /etc/modules and “options omnibook ectype=12” to /etc/modprobe.d/omnibook.conf.

To disable the wireless adapter just use the command “echo 0 > /proc/omnibook/wifi”. To enable it, replace the “0” with “1”.

Writeslike.us project meeting to generate ideas about the project approach

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As a result of a recent meeting we have come up with the following  ideas in one way or another related to the Writeslike.us project. The meeting was all about ‘name disambiguation’.
First we discussed names: does the existence of two documents by an author or authors with the same name, but published in different places, indicate that there are two people with the same name? Or does this represent one author publishing with two publishers?
2 publications from one person - does it mean 2 people (with the same name) or it is one person?

2 publications from one person - does it mean 2 people (with the same name) or it is one person?

The problem is unsolvable without additional information identifying the person. But for the case when this information is unavailable, there is a suggestion to apply pure statistics. In other words, evaluate for a testing (sample) data set what error level is linked to both possibilities – two different persons or one, just publishing in two places.

Then we switched to looking at practical methods to use within the Writeslike.us project, to identify individuals who write similarly or about similar topics.

Person identity dimensions + table organization for mapping

Person identity dimensions + table organization for mapping

This lovely diagram displays how the system we’re building will do the ‘magic’. Since none of the dimensions available to us are able to discriminate identity alone, we need to bring several onto the stage. The result will be an approximation incorporating evidence from several sources, which will hopefully make it more precise.

The table is just a representation of the way in which the heap of raw data will be mapped into something useful.

Welcoming Wei Jiang to writeslike.us

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A new staff member (casual staff) has just begun work, specifically on the Writeslike.us project. He is very experienced in designing and implementing web portals, familiar with machine learning concepts and enthusiastic about project research area – constructing a graph of relations between researchers based on analysis of their papers.

Here is his home page

http://wei-jiang.com

Created a mind map for the Writeslike.us project direction

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Here is a mind map of system architecture and idea. How to read it:

  • From the Repo extract the metainformation
  • save it to the internal database
  • then use a process to determine, who else is in this author’s community?
  • the process may have a variety of interfaces (a gadget for Repository Interface – a list of authors in the same community; or it could be search engine saying: Authors from the same community also wrote those papers)

Documents are analysed by a number of dimensions (could be weighted) like used keywords, bibliographical references and social tags.

Here is a data model, let’s say documents are related to others by those dimensions (draw with different colours in the diagram), then the process calculate relation ‘value’ by browsing particular document links.

Remembering Rachel Heery

I originally joined UKOLN as an ‘Interoperability Focus Officer’, the sort of job title which the recent reform in the University pay structure has more or less rendered extinct. Then I met Rachel – who, I will state for the record, scared the socks off me. It did not take long before she discovered that I had a background in Java programming, and shortly thereafter, I found myself working on her metadata schema registry. It was challenging. But it was also a lot of fun.

The project still contains within it the reminder of its defining conflict, which could perhaps be termed ‘idealists versus pragmatists’. Beyond all else, Rachel was a pragmatist. She was entirely able to accept and recognise the beauty of the elaborate, but never hesitated to point out its weaknesses, and so for me she is fondly remembered as a strong, forceful realist who stood for no nonsense. With Rachel, you knew exactly where you stood, which was wonderful, even though for many it took a bit of getting used to. Oh yes – and those who have added that she was funny are entirely right, too. She was sharply intelligent, vital, impatient, inspiring and a rock of stability.

Very few of the people now working on IEMSR have ever met her, which surprises me every time I think about it. Here on level 5 of Wessex House, surrounded with a project and a national and international community that was so very Rachel, it always seemed as though she had never entirely left UKOLN. I am very lucky to have been able to work with her, even for a little while. My condolences go to her family and friends.

Although this is not a personal blog, this is a personal post, and because it’s within my power to choose whatever closing remarks I prefer, I’d like to finish by proposing a toast to the memory of not one but two outstanding people, who would I believe have shared largely similar opinions about the concept of blogging, who are fondly remembered, inspiring, and more deeply missed than I am sure they would ever believe:
Rachel Heery
Professor Patrick Squire

–Emma