Researchers discover gene that blocks HIV - This was done in the Medical Microbiology and Immunology Deparment at the University of Alberta, I used to work there!
Friday, February 29, 2008
mmid
Researchers discover gene that blocks HIV - This was done in the Medical Microbiology and Immunology Deparment at the University of Alberta, I used to work there!
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
MIR
MIR - Music Information Retrieval - At wikipedia
music-ir.org: Virtual home of music information retrieval research
Tools used in MIR - Marsyas, yay!
MIR Titles
planet mnemomic
My Very Exciting Magic Carpet Just Sailed Under Nine Palace Elephants is the new winner of the mnemonic contest to remember the planets and dwarf planets:
Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Ceres, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto and Eris.
mysql gem on fedora 8
I was trying to install the mysql Ruby gem on Fedora 8 and got the following error message:
root.devi 38 [/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mysql-2.7] % gem install mysql
gem install mysql
Building native extensions. This could take a while...
ERROR: Error installing mysql:
ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.
/usr/bin/ruby extconf.rb install mysql
checking for mysql_query() in -lmysqlclient... no
checking for main() in -lm... yes
checking for mysql_query() in -lmysqlclient... no
checking for main() in -lz... yes
checking for mysql_query() in -lmysqlclient... no
checking for main() in -lsocket... no
checking for mysql_query() in -lmysqlclient... no
checking for main() in -lnsl... yes
checking for mysql_query() in -lmysqlclient... no
Gem files will remain installed in /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mysql-2.7 for inspection.
Results logged to /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mysql-2.7/gem_make.out
Looking in mkmf.log, I found the following at the top:
find_library: checking for mysql_query() in -lmysqlclient... -------------------- no
I found the solution on a post on rubyforums.com, which was to symlink the mysql lib directory to /usr/local/lib, like this:
ln -s /usr/lib/mysql/ /usr/local/lib/mysql
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
prozac
A new study reports that Prozac and other SSRIs don't work, or rather, work as well as a placebo sugar pill.
ternary
I'm learning to be a fan of the ternary operator.
condition ? if_true : if_false
If "condition" evaluates as true, return "if_true", otherwise, return "if_false".
I never used this in C, it just didn't feel right, but in Ruby on Rails views, it can really simplify things. I'm learning to like it.
Monday, February 25, 2008
ecmascript 4.0
What's new in ECMAScript 4.0.
But I'm going to use haXe instead, and just compile it down to ECMAScript 4.
If you haven't tried haXe, you should, it rocks.
GADT
Foundations for Structured Programming with GADTs. GADTs are Generalized Algebraic Data Types and they allow data constructors to return types of values other than the original type they were given.
rr
RR (Double Ruby) is a test double framework that features a rich selection of double techniques and a terse syntax.
chem mime types
Chemical MIME Types, with examples - The one I want is:
chemical/x-pdb
Interestingly, and strangely enough, the .pdb file extension maps to a Palm format. I'll need to set the mime type by hand.
vla
Tuning the VLA (Very Large Array) to be more sensitive by linking the telescopes together with fibre-optics.
air
Adobe Blurs Line Between PC and Web - This new Adobe Air technology sounds pretty cool. Just like AJAX changed a lot of things in the past two years, I think tech like Air is going to be big in the next couple years.
I love web applications, but in a lot of cases, I really miss having the application live on my own computer too. If we could merge the goodness of web applications with the ease and speed of running applications on my own computer, that would rock.
Sunday, February 24, 2008
rails scales
Scaling Rails to 300 million pageviews per month. This is for the "Friends for Sale" application on Facebook that I see all the time in Facebook friends updates.
ulysses
The Ulysses spacecraft, after completing three passes around the sun, and going out as far as Jupiter, is finally succumbing to the freezing cold depths of space.
It did some great work out there, on it's orbit that was outside the orbital plane of the planets, observing the North and South poles of the sun.
sqs
After investigating the ReliableMessaging Ruby gem, and having big issues with a namespace conflict where they call their main object "Queue", and this conflicts with Ruby's core "Queue" object, I've decided to do the right thing and use SQS for Ruby with Amazon's SQS (Simple Queuing System). I had great success with S3, and I've decided to try SQS for this current project I'm working on.
Saturday, February 23, 2008
ReliableMessaging
ReliableMessaging - provides reliable messaging and persistent queues for building asynchronous applications in Ruby.
command of the moment
rsync -av -P --exclude "*.txt" n:./streams .
I am using this to download a directory that I'm streaming from hbr1.com with streamripper to my server. I do this because then I can save them some bandwidth by having a local copy.
This rsync command shows the progress of your download, and excludes the .txt files that I use to keep track of the progress.
The streamripper command I use is:
streamripper http://radio.hbr1.com:19800/ambient.ogg >& h.txt &
Friday, February 22, 2008
tuscany
I'm watching Under the Tuscan Sun right now, and I'm really enjoying it. I want to read the book next, and I heard from my friend Jena that the book and the movie are almost completely different, so it be fun to see the similarities and differences.
Ah, watching that movie reminds me of the time I spent in Siena and Florence. That was a magical time.
I stayed at an old converted monastery, way up in the Tuscan hills outside of Siena, with ancient vinyards all around it. Amazing.
Thursday, February 21, 2008
capistrano version 2
I got a bit of a shock last night when I was trying to deploy a Ruby on Rails with Capistrano last night, my recipe stopped working. It turns out that I had inadvertently upgraded to Capistrano 2 when updating my gems. There are a few gotchas, I ran into these.
Fortunately, they don't look hard to solve, and Capistrano 2 looks pretty sweet.
lunar eclipse
It was a very nice lunar eclipse last night, I saw the first part and the last part, the middle was unfortunately obscured by clouds.
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
useful tail command
When you're tailing a logfile on Linux with "tail -f", the system might rename the file with a cronjob, so for long running tail jobs, you can use the --retry and --follow=name options to instruct tail to keep checking to see if the file is still current:
tail --follow=name --retry -f xferlog messages secure
lunar eclipse
A very interesting long exposure of a lunar eclipse, notice the deep red colour in the middle there, that is what you will see tonight during the total lunar eclipse.
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
indoor garden
A friend and I were talking today about growing a herb garden in a limited space, and lifehacker came in and told me about Save Money with an Indoor One-Pot Herb Garden. I'm going to miss my big garden this year, so maybe I'll have to grow some plants indoors.
Monday, February 18, 2008
git
Ok, I just watched the video of Linus Torvalds at Google talking about git, and I really need to learn git:
git tutorial
git guide
git and emacs - The package is vc-git.el, and looks like it's in emacs23.
rake backup
A Rake Task for Database Backups. Interesting, but I'm going to write one with ar_fixtures because those YAML files are much easier for humans to understand.
My plan is to write a rake task that I can use in all my Ruby on Rails projects, back up their data to yml to a local directory, then copy that back home with cron, and then put the whole directory in subversion. That way, I can checkpoint all my databases back to any date I like.
I'll let you know how it goes.
merb-core rack
So merb-core is built on rack you say? Why should I care?
Wow, rack with merb is really powerful, I should try to use it for a project so I can learn it better.
rake
err.the.blog has some great rake tips with rake around the rosie.
I'm really into the chaining of rake tasks now, I'm working on eliminating a bunch of shell scripts with some simpler rake tasks.
You see, I really liked "make", and I didn't like it that the Rails folks just replaced "make" with "rake", but the last two days have convinced me that rake rocks.
rake zsh
The completed code for fast rake task completion for zsh on Linux (Fedora 7) with coreutils-5.2.1 is:
function _rake_does_task_list_need_generating () {
if [ ! -f .rake_tasks ]; then
return 0;
else
accurate=$(stat -c%m .rake_tasks)
changed=$(stat -c%m Rakefile)
return $(expr $accurate '>=' $changed)
fi
}
function _rake () {
if [ -f Rakefile ]; then
if _rake_does_task_list_need_generating; then
echo "\nGenerating .rake_tasks..." > /dev/stderr
rake --silent --tasks | cut -d " " -f 2 > .rake_tasks
fi
reply=( `cat .rake_tasks` )
fi
}
compctl -K _rake rake
Save this as a file (I put mine in my ~/bin directory) and source it with:
. ~/bin/zsh-rake-fast-completion
rake zsh
Fast Rake Task Completion for Zsh. Neat! It's not working for me yet, I need to do some hacking on it.
rake
Railsenvy.com has an excellent tutorial on writing rake tasks.
Martin Folwer gives us Using the Rake Build Language
one, step, back tells us how to Custom Rake Applications.
Sunday, February 17, 2008
sweet adeline
My Grandma wanted to find the chords for Sweet Adeline, and unlike my earlier successes, it proved quite hard to find. I finally found some sheet music for the four piece vocal part, from the CPDL wiki, and also found the piano sheet music.
Saturday, February 16, 2008
povray 512 bytes
The winners of the povray short code contest have been released. Beautiful pictures in just 512 bytes or less. Sweet.
google farm
Mmm, the big google farm at the Dalles, Oregon, with blueprints. Located near the Columbia River for cheap electricity.
That's so cool.
Friday, February 15, 2008
ia and tufte
The Information Architects blog expresses it's displeasure with the refactoring of the iPhone interface by Edward Tufte.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
many eyes
I just recently was listening to a great podcast from the developers of Many Eyes, a website where people can put up data and the community will work on interesting ways to visualize that data.
Wow. That is so amazingly cool.
I have to do this with the data I get from the Orchive.
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
space smell
space has a smell, which is described as a rather pleasant sweet metallic sensation, like welding fumes.
Sunday, February 10, 2008
xml is 10
XML is 10 years old today. It's still an idea ahead of it's time, it's going through the phase now where the haters are all on it, but just wait another 10 years, and it'll be cool again.
I did a whole bunch of work adding XML to various crystallography programs, some of them in the CCP4 suite, and I'm hoping that in the future it will help some young programmer do something cool.
By the way, I've decided I don't have time to write struture cloud, I have some preliminary Ruby on Rails code written for it, if anyone is interested, just email me, it's all GPLed of course. It was going to be really cool, with a Ruby on Rails interface to all the crystallographic programs, jobs would be submitted to Amazon SQS, and then Amazon EC2 nodes would process the data by looking at the jobs in the SQS queue, and the results would be stored on Amazon S3.
It would be perfect for a researcher just starting out, someone who doesn't have a large computational infrastructure, they could go to a beamline and collect all their data, and then process it all on 100 computers at once.
It was going to be cool, but I've got other fish to fry now.
arc core
Paul Graham writes about the core of Arc. I have fun learning bits of elisp here and there, and Arc is another kind of Lisp that looks pretty cool.
kirk
Genius doesn't work on an assembly line basis. You can't simply say, "Today I will be brilliant."
-- Kirk, "The Ultimate Computer", stardate 4731.3
functional
Ten Years of Purely Functional Data Structures - A blog post about the book Purely Functional Data Structures.
Saturday, February 09, 2008
backup blogspot
I just read a google horror story about how this guy got his gmail account phished and lost his email, blogs and all other google things.
I use gmail, but I forward my mail from my domain to gmail and keep a copy on my server.
I also just backed up my blogger blog with the command:
wget 'http://sness.blogspot.com/search?max-results=100000'
phantasmagoria
I learned a new word today:
phantasmagoria [fan-taz-muh-gawr-ee-uh, -gohr-]
noun
1.a shifting series of phantasms, illusions, or deceptive appearances, as in a dream or as created by the imagination.
2.a changing scene made up of many elements.
3.an optical illusion produced by a magic lantern or the like in which figures increase or diminish in size, pass into each other, dissolve, etc.
assembly, gathering; see -ia][Origin: 1795-1805; F fantasmagorie, compound based on fantasme phantasm; second element perh. repr. Gk agor
Friday, February 08, 2008
get fit
17 Fitness Truths To Get You In Great Shape. Some great tips here. One really important one that I found worked for me was:
12. Focus on your diet first.
This is so essential, working out is really important, it is what gives me so much clarity and makes me feel so good, but to lose weight, you have to eat less. You just don't burn that many calories at the gym, so I've reduced the amount of food I eat by a lot, and have given up the foods that I was addicted to, like chips. It's hard, I know, but believe me, it is so much more fun to be in good shape than eating snacks that you won't miss those treats at all.
impossibl
Clarke's Second Law
The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
Thursday, February 07, 2008
firefox
If you want to downgrade your firefox for some reason, you can get any version at the firefox releases page.
guitar rising
Guitar Rising brings some of the elements of Guitar Hero into learning to play an actual guitar. Great idea.
Wednesday, February 06, 2008
embedding fonts
[haXe] Embedded fonts in Flash 9 target?
After watching the Helvetica Movie, I'm thinking about fonts a lot, and it's really cool that Flash lets you embed whatever font you like right in the file.
I'm really digging Flash lately, it has a lot of power. It's awesome writing it with haXe, because I get all the goodness of Linux and GPLed code, but still get to write some very powerful display applications.
The language count is going up and up, for my new project I'm going to be writing code in:
haXe
Actionscript 3.0
Flash
swfmill XML
C++
Ruby (on Rails)
MySQL
XHTML/CSS
Sweeeeeet!
embed bitmap in haxe
I wanted to use swfmill to generate a library of images and then display them in haXe. Krzysztof Rozalski came up with a solution on the haXe mailing list. Thanks Christopher, this was really helpful!
The code I wrote ended up looking like:
swflib.xml:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1" ?>
<movie version="9" width="320" height="240" framerate="12">
<background color="#ffffff"/>
<frame>
<library>
<bitmap id="MyBitmapData" name="MyBitmapData" import="library/play.png" />
</library>
</frame>
</movie>
And the haXe code:
import flash.display.BitmapData;
class MyBitmapData extends BitmapData
{
public function new()
{
super(0,0);
}
}
class SwfImport
{
static function main ()
{
var bitmapData:BitmapData;
bitmapData = new MyBitmapData();
flash.Lib.current.addChild( new flash.display.Bitmap(
bitmapData, flash.display.PixelSnapping.AUTO, true ) );
}
}
This is all compiled with:
-main SwfImport
-swf ../swfimport.swf
-swf-version 9
-swf-lib swflib.swf
bluegene web
Wow, the IBM Blue/Gene architecture is pretty amazing, with 1024 processors per rack and theoretically up to 16,384 racks, giving you 67.1m cores with 32PB of memory.
They're using this architecture to build their own model of the internet.
iswitchb and rails
I'm learning about Icicles, which is an Emacs mode to more efficiently complete text and switch between buffers.
I've been a big fan of iswitchb since switching to it about 5 years ago, but it's being stretched with these Ruby on Rails projects that I'm working on. Rails requires you to switch back and forth between large numbers of files. I have 12 Emacs windows open, and have different source files in each one, yet I still find myself doing a lot of switching between buffers.
Tuesday, February 05, 2008
calling from the coast
callingfromthecoast.com is a website that has videos about interesting topics from the west coast of Canada. Very neat.
offspring
offspring.js is an interesting little javascript program that adds things like "nth-child" by iterating over the DOM.
It does slow down your site a bit, because it has to iterate over all the elements in the dom, but in most cases, this is less than 500ms, so not so bad.
Monday, February 04, 2008
Sunday, February 03, 2008
Friday, February 01, 2008
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