Blog

July 5, 2006

Independence Is Good, But We Need to Know Why

Just in time for the 4th of July, Kevin Shockey of Tux Magazine encourages users to “declare their independence from proprietary software.”  By comparing the “revolution” of open source software, and desktop Linux in particular, to the American Revolution, he…
July 3, 2006

UVM grantee jailed for false research

Well, here’s something you don’t see often: a federal grantee has been thrown in the slammer for falsifying research in order to secure $3 million in federal funding! NIH’s own Dr. Sally Rockey said, ’ ”science itself is compromised” when a researcher falsifies…
May 8, 2006

Bomb, not Bombs?

On April 19, the Washington Post ran an article about a major renovation to the National Museum of American History. Included in the renovation is “a large devotional space for the Star-Spangled Banner, the flag that inspired the national anthem.” Next…
May 3, 2006

CPAN (Net::FTP) for Perl Hangs on Cygwin

CPAN is an essential tool for Perl developers.  With the “cpan” command, you can install whole Perl libraries effortlessly.  However, on many default installations of cygwin, cpan simply hangs: cpan> install LWP CPAN: Storable loaded ok Going to read /root/.cpan/MetadataDatabase…
April 12, 2006

Recovering RAID on Linux in Rescue Mode

The software RAID on Linux works very well.  Our backup machine (still using Red Hat 9) uses a RAID‑5 with 6 drives: 4 hot and 2 reserve.  When a main drive fails, a reserve is auto-magically brought in (thanks to the “md” daemon). But last Sunday…
March 2, 2006

Biosecurity & Biodefense Organizations Resource — Federation of American Scientists

[Via FCW’s Blogs] I see that the Federation of American Scientists has set up the Biosecurity & Biodefense Organizations Resource, “an internet resource for biosecurity policy, bioterrorism information, and biodefense research. The organizations listed here represent various perspectives on what actions individual…

Fort Detrick Neighbors Jittery Over Expansion

Following up from the increasing concern over BU’s BL‑4 facility, residents around Fort Detrick are starting to get nervous about the Interagency Biodefense Campus that’s planned there. Technorati : Interagency Biodefense Campus, USAMRIID, biosafety, bl‑4, fort detrick…
February 28, 2006

Little data about response grants

GovExec has reported on GAO’s finding that Federal agencies don’t know enough about how well their emegency preparedness grants are performing. It includes a quote that really is applicable to every grant program on the face of the planet: Federal, state…
February 27, 2006

Job available: Chief, Financial Standards and Grants Branch at OMB

I see that OMB has posted an announcement an announcement for the position of Branch Chief of the Financial Standards and Grants Branch. There’s an ongoing debate about the relationship between financial management and grants management, and this position is…
February 24, 2006

Malcolm Gladwell’s started blogging

[Via BoingBoing] Malcolm Gladwell’s books, The Tipping Point and Blink, were extremely compelling, well-informed writing that I think should be mandatory for anyone interested in social change and better decision-making. He’s now started a blog to, as he puts it, “elaborate and…