hannah dee

The last post contained lots of StreetView frames, and it took me a while to work out how to get them to appear properly. WordPress automatically adds <BR /> tags to the line endings, which is kind-of ok for text, but really messes things up if it chooses to do it in the middle of a block of embedded HTML.

There’s a plugin which fixes this – it’s called PS disable auto formatting. It doesn’t work quite how you’d expect though. What it does is disable auto-formatting completely, therefore changing the appearance of all your past posts, and means that for all future posts you’ll have to add the line feeds manually if you do your editing in HTML mode. The latter isn’t too much of a problem for me, but the former? Well it’s not exactly what I was hoping would happen.

Fortunately there’s a way around this. The plugin adds an option at the bottom of your settings panel (bottom left in the WordPress admin screen) for Autoformatting. If you look in this option, you’ll see that you can do “Batch formatting on past posts”. This will insert the required line endings in posts before a certain date. Set the date just after the date of the last autoformatted post, press go, and your back catalogue will be nicely autoformatted. It advises you to backup your database before using it (which is good advice, but I never heed good advice, and it worked OK for me).

Many thanks to Kieran for pointing me in the direction of this plugin.

I’ve just had a guest post published at Grenoble Life, the Anglophone website for Grenoble & environs. It’s about finding spicy ingredients in Grenoble.

Here are some Google Streetview links to the various shops, just in case you want to find out what they look like:

Saïgon Store, 6 Rue Doudart de Lagrée 38000 Grenoble has a range of mostly Vietnamese products – good range of noodles, some fresh exotic vegetables and some frozen stuff, and a huge range of spices. You can get decent hot chillis here and stuff like lemongrass, galangal, and other south east asian vegetables and spices.

Carrefour Asiatique, 88 Cours Berriat, 38000 Grenoble has a similar range to the Saïgon Store, and is handily right next to tram stop St Bruno on the A and B lines.

Rajah Bazar, 15 Avenue Felix Viallet, 38000 Grenoble is a small, packed and friendly store with a huge range of spices and a fairly impressive alcohol selection. They also open late (indeed, there is even a Facebook fan page calling them the “Oasis nocturne de Grenoble“).

World Market, 24 Avenue Felix Viallet, 38000 Grenoble is another small and packed shop, selling food from all over the world. A good range of Pataks curry sauces, Thai and Viet and Japanese and Chinese food, manioc flour, couscous, hummus, falafel… They even have instant “Pão do queijo” packet mixes if you’re after a cheesy Brazilian junkfood snack. And a surprisingly impressive line in hair extensions.

Indian Bazar (Wahey Guru Di Kirpa), Cours Berriat by the junction with Jean Jaures has a small range of Indian foodstuffs – all the dried spices you could want, dried goods, and some chutneys and pickles. This shop doesn’t have the largest range of stock, and isn’t very cheap. But they do have lots of spice!

Supermarché Siam Bangkok, 38, Avenue La Bruyère, 38100 Grenoble is a slightly out of town (on the A tram, stop La Bruyère) supermarket, which claims to be a Thai supermarket but is actually much more international, stocking fufu flour and couscous and a lot of other stuff I don’t know what to do with. The range is similar to that of the World Food Store, but the floorspace is larger and there seems to be an awful lot of dried fish. This one is a little run-down, but still an interesting place to browse.

A couple of articles in Grenoble et Moi (one of the many free magazines and newspapers distributed throughout the town) caught my eye the other day. The first is about the reaction of Algerian fans every time their national team wins a match – apparently last time this happened, a car and a scooter were torched. I’ve not seen any burning vehicles, but I have seen lots of hooting cars with young men hanging out waving Algerian flags. The police are quoted as saying:

“Nous ne sommes pas à un niveau d’alerte dun match du GF38, mais nous devons maintenant être vigilants à chaque match de l’équipe algérienne”

That is, they’re on a level of alert every time there’s an Algerian match, but not for GF38. Grenoble Foot 38 are the local team… which leads me to the second article of interest.

GF38 are in league 1, but have yet to win a match. The magazine says “sauf incroyable retournement de situation, l’avenir du GF38 se dessine en Ligue 2“. They’re currently 8 points adrift at the bottom of the table after losing 10 consecutive games. They would indeed need an incredible reversal of the situation in order to have a future in league 1. However, I’m really not surprised that the police don’t have to be on alert when they play! I’d like to try and catch a match though – apart from anything else, the stade des alpes looks really rather special.

Those of us called “Hannah”, who are from the UK, spend a lot of time saying things like this:

My name’s not “Anna”, it’s “Hannah”, with an “H”

My name’s spelled “Hannah”, with two aitches, one at the end and one at the start

Yes I do know it’s a palindrome, thanks! Yes, please tell me your favourite palindromes. Yes, I have heard the one about the canal and the plan.

I’ve always found it particularly annoying when people manage to send me email to hannah@ … but then start the message “Dear Hanna”, or “Dear Anna”. As for spoken anna-isms, I noted a marked improvement in pronunciation when I moved out of south London, land of the mockney dropped H.

But one adapts, and after 35 years of trying to get people to say my name correctly, I’ve stopped. All it took was a few months in France, and I’m no longer one of those irritating sods who corrects peoples’ pronunciation all the time. The French don’t really do the letter ‘H’, and so in conversation I’ll now answer to Anna.

I’m not sure about giving up on the spelling though. The name plate on my new office door came as a bit of a shock.





That’s a new spelling on me.

Number 5 in a series of N…

Now, having looked it up, I know that Chlamyde is the French word for a Chlamys. Which is a type of Greek cloak. But when I first passed this shop I was sure that it was an upmarket tailors called Chlamydia. Which is a type of sexually transmitted infection.

This post, whilst a bit geeky, might be useful to anyone who’s got to write documents with references in them…

I’ve recently discovered Citeulike, a website that organises your references and bibliographies for you in a nice shiny web2.0 kinda way. A colleague pointed me at it a while ago and I was sceptical – because it would be terrible to have all of your references and bibliography saved on an internet site and then for that internet site to go bust. But you can always download the database files (they export to many formats) and keep your own backups, and now they’re now sponsored by Springer so are probably a bit more stable than most web startups. And as someone who works from homes in France and the UK, and from my desk in INPG, and from lab machines in Leeds, and from cafes and trains and other places with WIFI, it is really handy being able to access my references from wherever I am.

I have only been using it seriously for a few weeks but am already very impressed. Here are the things I like about it:

1. You can install a browser button in Firefox that lets you post directly to citeulike from various online journals with one click. IEEE Xplore, ACM Digital Library, Springerlink, PubMed, DOI links… Pretty much all the major online journals and databases seem to be covered. This sucks the bibliographic information from an authoritative source directly into your bibliography. No more mis-spelled author names! No more typing anything in!
2. You can download your bibliography in loads of different formats. I’m a LaTeX person so I choose BibTeX, but you can also get the bibliographical information as RIS, BibTeX, PDF, RTF, Formatted Text, or Delicious.
3. You can import existing BibTeX files, so all those references that you HAVE typed in yourself won’t represent wasted effort.
4. You can tag each entry with keywords of your choice, and you can choose to download your entire library or just those with particular tags. So when you’re writing a paper, just tag each entry you will want to cite, then export it. Et voila! Instant bibliography.
5. You can mark your own publications as being yours. This means that you can use citeulike as a dynamic publications list with links to the right places. Here’s mine.

There are also lots of social networking type functions where you can see people who are “close” to you in terms of articles they’ve posted, and you can link to specific individuals. I’ve not really been using it long enough to evaluate these features, but it seems to me like it’s going to be a very useful tool already.