Albert Orriols (for those who do not know him, a brilliant learning classifier systems researcher) defended his thesis today. The outcome: Excellent Cum Laude. Albert Orriols Ph.D. defense started at 11am at Enginyeria i Arquitectura La Salle in Barcelona. The thesis panel was presided by Prof. David E. Goldberg, and formed by members Prof. Francisco Herrera, myself, Dr. Martin Butz, and secretary Prof. Xavier Vilasís). I must say that it has been a great pleasure to read his remarkable thesis and great contributions to the Learning Classifier System field. I hope he will make it available soon, and encourage you to take a look at it. ...

LaTeX reference management is superb. However, some publisher want to have the citations arranged in some predefined manner. Yes, they are usually all different. However, if your are using LaTeX and BibTex no much need to be done to format your references right. The natbib package provides you with the tools to satisfy almost any publisher requirements.

A while ago, I wrote about “Publishing yourself online”. Among other solutions, Lulu, seemed to be a more traditional publishing method, with the twist you do it your self, and you can decide what kind of book you want (e-book, paperback, hardcover, etc.). The other day I was spending some cycles trying to find out if they provide LaTeX templates, and no, they are a Microsoft shop (with the option of dealing with Open Office). They, however allow you to upload PDFs, so you can also prepare manuscripts in LaTeX. I searched a bit, and run into and very useful post by Veta Project describing how to take your LaTeX document and make it Lulu friendly. Worth taking a look at it… ...

Last monday I tagged on the development SVN the first release candidate for the 1.4 version of the Meandre infrastructure. The new 1.4 version brings a pile of bug fixes, improves web service mechanics, provides a new HTML lightweight interface to the infrastructure, and implements a first version of the coordination facility (Meandre Distributed eXchange) used to assemble configurable single-image Meandre clusters based on Meandre servers—just to list a few of the 1.4 goodies. So far there is no firm release date, but it will definitely be before the SEASR 2009 Workshop on January 15th, 2009. ...

Yup, that time of year is coming around again. The 2009 Genetic and Evolutionary Computing Conference (GECCO 2009) is going to be held in Montreal, Canada. The paper submission dead line is January 14, 2009.