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I got fed up of forgetting to start the Tecplot license manager on my laptop (laptops are rebooted more often that desktop computers usually) so I decided to write an init script to have it done automatically. As my laptop runs Kubuntu, it’s a debian style init script. You can download it from here, put it into “/etc/init.d/” and make it executable. The syntax is very simple and self explanatory:

sudo /etc/init.d/tecplotlm start
sudo /etc/init.d/tecplotlm stop
sudo /etc/init.d/tecplotlm restart


You might want to customize the location of the Tecplot directory before using it. I cannot remember if /usr/local/tec360 is the default or not…
After having tested the script and making sure it works, you can add it to the relevant runlevel to have it started at boot. On (K)ubuntu (and probably other debian derivatives), just issue:

sudo update-rc.d tecplotlm defaults


Et voilà.

I am very new to writing things like this so the script can probably be improved. However, I believe that it is better that the hack-ish solution described in the Tecplot 360 Installation guide…

I have just started my online publications library on CiteULike. More information in the publications page.

It is a bookmarking site “à la” del.icio.us but adapted for Academia. My only gripe with it so far is that I do not understand how to make the papers appear in chronological or alphabetical order… Also, there seem to be few hydrologists on CiteULike so far but hopefully, that will change in the future.

It’s such a new and powerful idea that Nature recently launched a similar tool called Connotea.

Well CiteULike is actually more community based so I chose it over a “publisher’s take on the subject”. “Why?” I hear you say… Well, publishers are intrinsically biased as they depend on sales. Therefore, Connotea is likely to follow a different evolution path than other tools such as CiteULike which is more likely to evolve according to the community needs rather a company’s bottom line…

I have never been really convinced by the peer-review process in academic journals. It’s just that having been an author and a reviewer a few times, the system falls short on many fronts I believe. Therefore it was interesting to read this article in Wired Magazine (yes, I know, I am a geek…). Although tongue in cheek, it pretty much summarises my thoughts. That’s probably why I am so bad at getting anything published :-). A good example is a comment to a paper I submitted to Water Resources Research, the comment was sent in May, the editor seemed to agree that it was a valid comment, he then forwarded it to the author and has now received a reply, both the comment and reply are now with external (anonymous) reviewers … and it’s now mid-September!!!

The same day, Arstechnica has an article about a debate between Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia and Dale Hoilberg of Encyclopaedia Britannica in the Wall Street Journal. This time it is more about the qualitry of the peer review in a closed and open environment. I favour the open environment and actually, I should try to get something out in one of these open access journals next time.

Then coincidence or not, Linux Weekly News has this article (subscribers only for one week) entitled “Where have all the reviewers gone?”. It’s basically about the fact that in open source development, the code might not actually get reviewed that much before it goes out … or conversely that sometimes, code is held back for too long because nobody (or wants to) can review it.

Oh well…

Last week, I was in Nice for the 7h Hydroinformatics conference. It is always difficult to say whether a conference trip was productive or not, you have to go through your notes, read some papers etc… before making your own judgement. At least they gave us the proceedings (all 4 kg of them) and I managed to get a CD with a PDF for each talk so I have a lot reading to go through.

What is sure, is that it was much more hydraulics than hydrology, well at least the talks I went to. I was also surprised to see so few presentations about uncertainty. At the spring EGU fall, pretty much all hydrolocal talk mentioned uncertainty of some sort. Not quite so for engineers or so it seems.

My talk went well and as the next speaker was absent, there was plenty of time for questions which was good as often, the standard “15 minutes plus 5 minutes for questions” is not much at all.

Sogreah had a nice display showcasing the Telemac system and it was nice to see that they put us as a collaborating university on their brochure poster.