It's good to be back at All Hands and catch up with all the Old Hands, and shake New Hands as well.
As usual it is necessary to clone oneself for the parallel sessions, keep track of all the discussions, keep the todo list up to date, sniff around for new things, while simultaneously keeping up with email back home, other projects ticking along at home, documents, proposals, reports, arrangements. The mental equivalent of an octopus. All in a day's work. Hey ho.

Seen at All Hands

The All Hands meeting exists so that those involved in one branch of e-Intrastructure / e-Science / e-Research / e-Social-Science / e-Whatever can see what those in the other e-*s are up to.

One project that particularly caught my eye was BlogMyData.

Much academic research takes place in corridors, pubs and even - occasionally - in the loo. Researchers will discuss their latest discoveries with colleagues when they bump into one another on the way to somewhere else - and get a new perspective or a new idea as they do so. Call it serendipity at work - or possibly serendipity in the bar of the Dog and Duck.

This is the kind of material that occasionally appears as `Bloggs, Fred (Personal Communcation)' in papers.

BlogMyData extends this chatter about the work to researchers who are in different institutions and so - unless they happen to be at All Hands - are very unlikely to be in the same coffee room, or pub, at the same time.

It allows researchers to post visualisations of the data they are working on blogs which can be read - and commented on - by collaborators. It combines two projects: the Godiva 2 visualisation package from Reading and the LabBlog blogging tool from platform.

This has the big advantage that the data and the conversation will be recorded for future reference unlike, say, a chat in the bar or an unexpected encounter in the gents...

Time has not yet run out

If you were thinking about submitting an abstract to the UK All Hands Meeting but hadn't quite got round to submitting anything then time is still on your side!

The deadline has been extended to the 7th of June so there is still time to work on an abstract. This will be the 9th AHM meeting and every year more and more NGS users come to present their work.

As well as being an opportunity to meet the e-infrastructure providers, AHM also gives users the opportunity to feedback directly to tool developers and see what the latest developments are in e-infrastructure - basically the tools that they will be using in the future.

As if you needed another incentive, authors of selected abstracts will be invited to submit full papers (after the conference) to be considered for inclusion in a special edition of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A (the conference proceedings will not be published).

So if you'd like to join us in Cardiff this September, make sure you get your abstract in by the 7th of June!

Condor workshop open for registration

Our colleagues at the Advanced Research Computing Division (ARCCA - no I 'm not sure how they got that acronym either...) have announced a Condor Workshop at Cardiff University on the 16th September 2009.

The target audience for this event is both administrators (and potential administrators) and end users of Condor with the event split into two parts. The morning session will explore best practices of service provision and future developments. The afternoon session will showcase the research that Condor is enabling.

Registration for the workshop is now open with registration available from the event website.