I love blogging in the springtime
18 Mar 2002
Monkey magic
11:14 It's a little early to call this thought-control, but it's still quite exciting.
13 Mar 2002
Rachel
09:49 Dad, when I grow up I want to be an artist
I'm going to have to take that girl aside.
Oh, and HAPPY BIRTHDAY Fiona.
12 Mar 2002
It's good to be alive
08:38 It might not yet be officially spring, but the sun was shining, birds were coughing in the chimneys, trees are in blossom and the daffodils as I cycled up and out of the village were a riot of banana and custard.
Cambridge itself, of course, is shrouded in deep fog. Makes a change from the gale-force winds.
I am in blog so far steeped . . .
08 Mar 2002
Cold comfort
16:01 Goodness only knows why Nige thought I'd be interested in this one, but there's a salutary warning for those who might wish to freeze rather than burn.
06 Mar 2002
Row, row, row your boat
12:13 How not to take a boat under a bridge.
05 Mar 2002
Get yer trousers on, you're nicked
20:10 An entertainer, who realized the value of his vocation. Not some precious, jumped up nancy boy 'earning' a small country's GDP for an appearance.
What I do isn't earthshattering. I just want to entertain someone who comes home from a hard day's work, puts on the telly to relax and maybe forgets the gas bill for an hour. That's what I'm about.
God rest John Thaw.
05 Mar 2002
Feedback, w00t
16:58 Mark Wilkinson writes in response to
And the instinct for biology needs to be married with the ability to understand and attack problems from a computational standpoint. I am not suggesting that every biological scientist should learn C++ or even PERL, but the success of systems biology will depend on the polymath:
To some large extent I disagree with this - perhaps not *every* biologist, but certainly most molecular biologists should. I think a knowledge of how to manipulate and edit sequence data without using MS Windows Notepad, and how to do serial Blast searches and extract the most interesting results without ever looking at the Blast report itself is a *necessity* for the modern molecular biologist's toolkit. What happens, when a molecular biologist does *not* have this knowledge, is that the closest bioinformatician becomes his technician... "hey... could you run these thousand blasts for me and put the results into this microsoft excel spreadsheet?" It just cheapens the bioinformaticians role as a scientist... I find I am in a constant struggle to convince my research colleagues that bioinformatics is a branch of biological/computer science research, and not a branch of the computing services department...
05 Mar 2002
To geek, or not to geek
15:31 <sigh> Should I really get to grips with fink? Something inside tells me this is the primary reason for using X, but, I dunno . . . I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore, Toto.
If I do, perhaps I should get one of these. (Are these guys for real? Heaven help us all)
05 Mar 2002
Daddy!
14:21 A HUGE shout out to John and Laura. Well done, mates.
05 Mar 2002
Losing perspective
14:21 A good week for publishing, obviously. I've wibbled on about bioinformatics at the Science Board. Shane actually said 'Where are all the bioinformaticians?' if they haven't fixed that typo by the time you get there.
04 Mar 2002
Fame! We're gonna live forever!
16:45 For your delectation and delight, we report the solution structure of the C-terminal FG-nucleoporin binding domain of Tap/NXF1. If you have trouble with the .pdf, shout.
02 Mar 2002
I just want to make things go bang
21:20 It's been a long time, but the latest Hornet Korea update has some nice goodies. Still Classic-only, but that's OK because my F16 Fighterstick/iMate combo don't work in X :-/
The update - which is a beta, so fit that pocet-protector - adds some new textures, sounds, improved missile behaviour and makes all the textures TARGA format. W00t! This 400 MHz iMac struggles a bit with it so I'll have to do some tweaking. Chaff and flares actually work now - and a low altitude flame-out is almost unrecoverable. You don't quite go into a flat-spin, but almost. Good to see that GSC haven't given up on this yet.
02 Mar 2002
OS X fit the whatever
21:11 Been having a play with various things . . . (and realizing how annoying it gets in Classic when you have to wait for applications to open).
First up tonight - the advantages of being able to get at a command line system. Downloaded and compiled (using Project Builder) antiword. This converts MS Word docs into .ps or text. Cool. You can also get them converted (and a GUI) to PDF by using DOCtor, but the links seem to be broken.
POPmonitor looks like a useful little app - Eudora often seems to confuse one of my mailboxes, and I'll probably use it to clear the blockages when I get tired of telnetting to port 110 :)
Oh, that reminds me. Let's hear it for an old favourite - Fetch. Carbonized, so the same installation works in Classic and X, seems very fast (even over dial-up) and I don't know how I survived without the 'Edit in BBEdit' function. OK, So BBEdit does FTP wizardry, but this is cooler.
TinkerTool is fun. Not convinced about the transparent Terminal yet, but it's useful for activating all those things we Classicals got used to in OS 9, which are there in X but oddly, are not normally activatable.
Keyboard Maestro is Michael Kamprath's successor to the indispensible Program Switcher. Registered users of that only pay US$10 for Keyboard Maestro. Bargain.
02 Mar 2002
mmmBeermmm
20:55 Tonight's brew is Tanglefoot. Special offer at Tesco's.
02 Mar 2002
Poor, wee sleekit
20:53 Thanks y'all for asking. The Grants minor are responding to the antibiotics - Rachel very rapidly, in fact. We had the first unbroken sleep in a couple of weeks from Sophie last night. Of course, Grants major feel terrible . . .