Dr Laura James's writings

A ray of hope from my old colleague Emmanuel Moll , who has helped set up SaveNabaztag.com - an effort to raise funds from the community to rescue Violet , the struggling company behind the Nabaztag internet bunny. I've blogged about the Nabaztag before , as has Michael , who even stars in a lovely YouTube video showing how CamVine kit can be controlled by RFID bunnies. We're big fans - as much of Violet for making the first real consumer products showcasing what the internet of things can be, which is a great accomplishment - as of the actual Nabaztag itself. Having made internet connected electronics products from scratch ourselves, we know exactly how challenging this must have been for Violet. It would be sad to see Violet go under when they have achieved so much, and I'm intrigued to see how crowdsourcing rescue funding from the community might work. This isn't the first attempt to crowdsource funds - it seems to be all the rage at the moment - but with an esta...

contributed to a major building project (as part of City Blocks ) as Lady Delphinia Watson, helped select the new Grand Emperor (who turned out to be a joint appointment, and half revolutionary, which will lead to trouble in the future) (thanks to Dom Camus for this pic) created a semaphore-style code and used it for team communications, beating the oppositition, whose code was much less subtle (in Semaphoria ) found the treasure by following clues (in BinoHunt ) listened carefully to M, and tracked down and unmasked a spy (winning QNTMFSLC , a twitter-based game) wore a smart jacket and tie to record a news item, and helped my team of tabloid video hacks record a great many other stories, eventually causing both Frank Gaff and Michael Portobello to appear so depraved in the public eye that the election was called off (as part of the Yellow team, scoring the moral victory in Playmakers ) was a hedgehog during some Animal Mayhem (briefly!) Michael was a cow and achieved two shiny star...

Michael and I spent today learning about the women (6000 or so!) who worked at Bletchley Park and the many amazing things which happened there and are still remembered today. We were incredibly lucky to be shown around by Jean Valentine, a Bombe operator during WWII. Despite the wonderful things we saw - an Enigma machine, the rebuilt Bombe and Colossus - and the recent successful funding for repair work, the site still needs money for capital projects to repair and maintain the buildings and therefore their contents. Some pictures from our day are here . Also check out Sue Black's picture of the appalling state of Hut 6. I was also surprised to find so many different projects at Bletchley Park - all needing your support: Bletchley Park Trust : donate Projected Picture Trust (no obvious donation link) - Enigma cinema pictures National Museum of Computing : donate Codes and Ciphers (Colossus rebuild): again, no obvious donation link, but you can buy things here

We get our groceries from the internet. This is a magic system which means we in theory never need to visit a supermarket. Usually, we get our stuff from Ocado. It's great; bags of food arrive, and it's almost always exactly what we ordered. Sometimes, alas, like last week, there's something missing - in this case, frozen croissants. Argh! So yesterday I tried Waitrose Deliver instead. Like Ocado, groceries arrive on your doorstep; unlike Ocado, there were a few substitutions and again a missing item. But the delivery guy wasn't just a driver - he was a comedian! He had a bunch of items in his van which didn't belong in any of the orders he was delivering. Did we want 5 bags of rice? Had we ordered them? We had not. Nor had we requested two loaves of sliced wholemeal. Or the box of cocoa puffs (although perhaps I should have claimed them for M). We were thrilled to have the chance to opt in to random items. When we went through our order after he had left, we foun...

It's been a long time since I got a new phone. My Nokia N73 served me well, but it's been time for a proper smart phone (on an unlimited data contract rather than pay as you go) for some time. I thought about an iPhone, which would seem a logical choice given I have Macs everywhere; but Michael beat me to it, and I felt I should have something different, partly so that we'd be on different networks (increasing the chance of getting a signal in remote areas) and partly so we could compare and contrast two devices. So he's been on the iPhone 3G for a while, and I've been lagging behind with occasional use of the (actually quite usable) Opera browser on my N73 and of course a quality camera that takes good pictures (unlike the iPhone's). When the Android G1 came out, I was optimistic that this might be the smart phone I'd been waiting for, but I was hugely disappointed when I played with one in a T-mobile store. I like physical keyboards, but this one, althou...

I spoke at the Arcadia seminar this week on Scholarly Networking. The talk seemed to go down well, and you can download an mp3 of it here . Many thanks to John Naughton for the invitation to speak, and Michelle Heydon for the logistics. The Arcadia programme at Cambridge is an exciting one, exploring the place of libraries in the digital age, and considering their impact on teaching and research in the future. I'm helping on the Fellowship support group this term, and very much looking forward to following the activities of the programme as a whole.

Today is Ada Lovelace Day . I should be blogging about a woman I admire in technology to support and publicise the efforts of innovative and amazing women in computing worldwide, but I'm not going to. I've always struggled with the idea of role models; sure, there are people I admire (mostly those I've worked with myself, not far-off celebrity figures) and whom I might wish to emulate. But mostly they are deeply personal to me, and the reasons I respect them are not necessarily helpful to others with different career ideas to me, or who don't know them personally. And my role models are both men and women; I cannot in all honesty say the women outnumber or outrank the men, although I have known some incredible women in technology, including Karen Sparck-Jones (already written about by others today). The women are just, sadly, few and far between compared to the number of men I have worked with, and some of the men have been damn good. I don't feel able to single ...

I nearly crashed my bike into a bollard when I spotted this light show. I assume it's because of " the 800 ", as it's called in the University. I'm looking forward to more fun and unexpected events to celebrate, although I am also a little sad that I (thus far) have not received a lovely 800 fleece, unlike my colleagues in the Communications Office. But what does it all mean?

The University of Cambridge is 800 years old this year. There are many things happening to commemorate the occasion. For example, today I have been upgraded to a brand new shiny phone! This replaces the old ways of doing things in Cambridge (paper). Although I suspect that in reality there is still a great deal of paper in my future. Luckily my desk has space for both. The famous University messengers are also being upgraded, from their old royal blue bicycles, to - err - new ones. Good to have the right blue on them at last, I guess.

This morning I heard about a terrifying incident in Lincolnshire, on the Today programme (just before a piece about ghosts - really!). Apparently a large wind turbine has been severely damaged (one blade removed, one severely bent) by some sort of large object. Glowing lights were seen in the area, and also glowing tentacles. I think there can be no doubt that this was perpetrated by a giant space octopus. For some time now, pictures of a tiny piglet squid (deemed particularly cute for his smiley face) have been all over the internet . We can only assume that these are a small relation of the giant space octopus, which has arrived to defend the squid from the embarrassment of having naked pictures broadcast to all and sundry. The octopus has begun the destruction of our electricity generation system, without which the internet cannot operate. We must defend our lands against this glowing tentacular menace.

It's been quiet here of late, but I've been keeping busy otherwhere. CARET has a splendid new website , and if you are reading this within a fortnight of me posting it, we are currently hiring . SeriousChange also has a revised website , and I'm looking forward to working on a much richer and more informative version in the coming weeks. I still pine on occasion for electronics, and setting up our Nabaztag at home (along with some RFID bits and bobs, including a Mir:ror and adorable Nano:ztags ) was fun. I'm looking forward to controlling our home energy consumption more in 2009, although I still have doubts as to whether purchasing gadgetry is a helpful solution to this for most people. Our reliable and simple central heating and hot water timer, for which we had been gradually calibrating the timings to give adequate heat without excessive boiler operation, at some point in the autumn suffered a power cut. We didn't realise this for a while, until we realised t...

It's a little over 3 years since I submitted my PhD thesis. It seems so long ago! This beautiful summary is provided by Wordle . Ah, those were the days.

I realised this week that I am juggling multiple projects more than ever before. At work at CARET , I am managing a range of nascent (and production!) software and strategic projects, from CamTools and Talks.cam , to newer JISC projects on curriculum design, technology to support teaching administration, and more. I'm also working on a business plan for a possible startup company; why stop just because the global economy is falling apart? If you have contacts in health or social care in the UK public sector, or have money you would like to remove from a bank and put to work growing a company, get in touch! I'm also helping out with Serious Change - a campaign to lobby for rational government responses to climate change. Sign up! We're going to try to save the world. You should also read David MacKay 's book, Sustainable energy without the hot air , which is now out, and downloadable (and free) here : a very pragmatic analysis of where energy comes from and where it g...

Holidays are great. I recently returned from this one.

One often spots display screens, particularly in railway stations, which have suffered from peculiar Microsoft faults and are displaying error windows on top of the information one is trying to read, or which have abandoned informing altogether and are showing just a blue screen of error codes. I was, therefore, perversely satisfied to spot this giant iPhone model with a "which WiFi network would you like?" popup window, illustrating that even OS X can fall prey to this kind of thing. Good thin clients must be the right solution here...

Our office coffee machine has had a bad week. It broke; wanting always to be rinsed, not being any happier after rinsing, and never making coffee. The repairman visited and told us off for abusing the machine. He fixed it up and left, and the coffee machine worked for about 40 minutes. Then the machine got taken away for repairs. In its place was our warning sign for when the machine is busy with other things and cannot make coffee; gradually, people added magnetic poetry. This morning the machine was back, complete with shiny new pump, and an admission from the workshop that they do not know what was wrong with it. It is still working. For now.

We spent last weekend relaxing on the Wirral and catching up with my parents. The Klimt exhibition at Tate Liverpool was impressive, although the high tech audio guides (iPod Touches) suffered a variety of failure modes on our visit, at the end of the penultimate day of the exhibition, so we had to make do without. Michael has put some pics up, of a walk at West Kirby Marine Lake and beach, attempts to find superlambananas (not as successful as we had hoped), a rather wet walk up Caldy Hill, and a tricycle we spotted at the M6 toll road services en route back to Cambridge.

This was on Botolph Lane this lunchtime. I've spotted a few similar things around the area; earlier this week there were boards near the Pitt Building on Trumpington Street with cryptic phrases and some maths concepts.

This, in Corpus Christi College on the corner of Kings Parade and Bene't Street, will soon be the home of the new Clock, part of the Library Court project . This clock will be incredible in a number of ways, but mostly stands out at the moment as a monument to the pre-web age, because I can't find any reference to it online. I remember that I read an article about it on paper some time ago, talking about the traditional mechanism and amazing art that will surround it, and now I can see where it's going to be, I'm really excited.

Before the intense rain and thunder last night, Dominic and I sat outside at the Pickerel in the sunshine. He was sporting the new AlertMe customer support team fleece - very smart! We managed to stay outside under the nice green umbrella through most of the storm, and I didn't get too wet cycling home afterwards. It sounds as if Dominic, and James (who joined us later) and everyone else are doing a great job. Thanks to all for the (rather belated) leaving present, too!