Archive for December, 2014
Wakelet is a new content curation platform that I’ve been playing with recently and I have to say, I like it a lot! Here’s a screenshot from one of my wakes, ‘Best of WalkingRandomly’ where I’ve gathered together some of the most popular pages here.
A ‘wake’ is a collection of images, notes, comments and links. It sounds simple, and it is, but I’ve found it very useful for all kinds of stuff. For example, whenever I find an interesting article about scientific computing, I usually post it on my twitter feed – https://twitter.com/walkingrandomly. I’ve done this for hundreds of links but they are difficult to subsequently look up. With this in mind, I’ve started adding some of the best links to my Scientific Computing wake.
Wakelet is developed by a group in Manchester and I first learned about it because one of my friends is a developer there. At first, I dutifully played with it because of his involvement but I’ve continued using it’s really rather good! Read more about wakelet:
For almost 10 years now I have been working in scientific applications support at The University of Manchester. It’s been a wonderful decade in which I’ve learned a lot, made many good friends and worked on dozens of collaborations with academic and IT colleagues alike. Since I live in Sheffield, I’ve also spent just over a year of my life on public transport!
It is, however, time for me to move on and I am delighted to announce that, as of 2nd March, I will be moving to The University of Sheffield. My new position is a joint venture between Sheffield’s Corporate Information and Computing Services (CICS) department and Professor Neil Lawrence, an expert in machine learning and computational biology.
I’m really excited about this new position — there’s going to be research computing support, open data science, high performance computing, software carpentry, teaching, code consultancy, GPUs, Python, MATLAB and lots more of the hardware and software technologies that I love so much. The fact that my commute is being reduced from 4 hours a day to 30 minutes a day is just the icing on the cake!
I’d like to publicly thank everyone at The University of Manchester for making my time there so wonderful. The University of Manchester is a truly amazing place in which to work and is chock-full of the most important resource of any organisation – creative, intelligent, driven, passionate and friendly people. I’ve still got 3 months to go before I leave so let’s make sure we get together at least one more time before I go.