Zotero

Thought I'd take this oppourtunity to share Zotero (http://www.zotero.org/) with y'all, as a number of the research group have asked me about it individually before now.

Zotero is a citation index manager, kind of like endnote. It works as a plug-in to the firefox web browser (i.e. it won't work on internet explorer). It has a few rather nifty features:

• It's totally free
• Downloading the 2.0 beta version lets you sync your citation index on the web... this is the cloud computing thing Soi mentioned. You have one central store of references which syncs from any computer.
  
• You can create notes, annotations and attach relevant documents (such as pdfs of the papers) very easily.
• You can add key words to the entries to help with searching through them when you get a big library.
  
• A lot of the main journal search engines (google scholar, web of science etc.) will create an entire citation with just one click.

I've found it really useful not having to copy and paste my list of references onto a USB stick and carry them around to use on any computer.

One important thing to note is that while you can access Zotero from any web based computer, you'll need to have firefox with the zotero plugin installed on each of them. A second disclaimer is that if you go for the cloud computing 2.0 version, then Zotero advise you to back it up occasionally, as it is still a beta version and may have the occasional bug. If you're very paranoid about such things, go for the totally stable 1.0 version (but then you're missing out on a very cool feature!)

If you're interested then check out the Zotero page for a demonstration of how it works. Any general questions, ask me and I'll try to answer.

First Work Experience with Sponsors

Today, I had a real taster of what it was like to work at one of the Capgemini offices in London. As my project is related to Data Centres my supervisor thought it would be a very good idea to meet the person who knows everything about them and so he sent me to one of our team members called Les.

After a brief introduction I got on with doing more researching into Cloud Computing (CC). CC is the latest trend word floating around the Internet. The base of CC, the technology infrastructure, is provided as a service over the Internet and the end user is able to set up their own scalable virtual servers and development platforms at a very cheap price. But why would someone want that? Well, running your own Data Centre and buying the equipment for it is very expensive. If your business demands increase so will your equipment cost as you add more hardware to cope with it. Let's not forget about the actual building, air conditioning systems and constant supply of electricity too ;)

Some organisations like Amazon Web Services have already established a capable infrastructure that they offer to the public in which the consumer is able to "purchase/rent" the resources at an hourly rate depending on how much processor, memory and hard drive space you need. This totally eliminates the need for an organisation to maintain their own DC infrastructure.

Could Cloud Computing replace the traditional Data Centres? Will this help tackle carbon emissions and reduce the overall energy consumptions from DC's? :D

Making Buildings Work

Not sure where I found this, might have been sent by Hazim?

Its on the 9th December 9.00 - 3.00
The Royal Society
6-9 Carlton House Terrace
London, SW1Y 5AG
United Kingdom

Ok, so I do want to go to the conference, but the Neal Stephenson geek in me just wants an excuse to go to the Royal Society. If your not familiar with the baroque cycle find out why here

Green IT Expo 10/11th Nov 09

I visited the Green IT Expo last week! I was part of the Microsoft crew who had an environmental sustainability stand. It was quite intimidating at times due to the abuse that some MS haters were bringing with them but I was quickly reassured by my MS colleagues that this is a regular occurrence when you wear the MS badge. Apart from the haters, it was a great experience to be part of the MS movement.

The Green IT Expo was aimed at businesses and not consumers, so I got to talk to a variety of business people that were also interested in the environment. It did strike me however that a lot of people at the expo were mostly focused upon money saving and using the environment badge as a marketing tool. This didn’t really surprise me, and i kind of agree that to make businesses more environmental we must find ways to make the green movement make money! [Who agrees disagrees??? Comments below pls. :-) ]

Most of the speakers and stands at the expo were focused around power management, something that’s been around for a while now – but surprisingly a lot of people i had spoken to thought it too complicated to set up on PC’s and servers. One of the MS messages was that Windows 7 offers a power saving over Windows Vista! I can vouch for this as my laptop battery now lasts an extra 40ish mins! Amazing!

Overall a useful expo!

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