Wordpress 2.5

I have upgraded this blog to Wordpress 2.5. As a result, there are some functions, such as the image gallery, that have been disabled due to the annoying habit of the Wordpress developers of making core changes in very little time. Please report any problems you find, and notice that although the thumbnails look truncated in the new gallery, the full images are actually displayed correctly. I had to fiddle a bit wit the “new media manager”, not only because it’s in Flash, but because at least on Linux it gives odd results (apparently no one from the WP team bothered to check past Win and OSX?

March 28, 2008

Back, and movies

I haven’t posted anything in a month or so. Quite a long time, considering I used to write at least once per week. The reasons are mainly two: first of all, my work schedule has taken a turn for the worse, which means I have to do my job a lot harder than before; secondly, there wasn’t much interesting stuff to report. Let’s resume from the hiatus by writing about my latest Final Fantasy XI session.

February 28, 2008

Follow up on meta-analysis

Fourteen days since my last post. Quite a while, indeed. Mostly I’ve been stumbled with work and some health related issues. Anyway, I thought I’d follow up on the meta analysis matter I discussed in my last post. It turns out that it’s a fault of both limma and the data sets, because apparently the raw data found in the Stanford Microarray Database have different length, gene-wise (a result of not all spots on the array being good?

February 14, 2008

Meta analysis difficulty increasing

Again in the past days I’ve been banging my head thanks to the fact that doing meta-analysis with microarray data is more difficult than what it seems. The problem sometimes lies in the data, sometimes lies in the analysis software and sometimes in a combination of factors. When doing work on a public data set (Zhao et al., 2005), I had to start analysis from raw data. Now, I tried using both the limma and marray Bioconductor packages, but both of them bail out with cryptic error messages.

January 30, 2008

people.complain()

To me nowadays reading KDE Dot News is a bother. Not because of the news, which are always high quality, but the comments leave a lot to be desired. Let’s take for example the recent news about Nokia buying Trolltech: 99% of the comments talk doom and gloom. This is not bad per se, but most of them bring absolutely nothing to the discussion. Truth is, it’s too early to say, so we’ll have to wait and see.

January 27, 2008

Browser-less entries

From today on I’ll try to write posts without a browser, since I’m not that fond of such an approach. As a matter of fact, I’m using kblogger now, a blogging application for KDE 4 (I didn’t mention that I switched to that full time, more on that when I get time). If you notice something odd in the way the posts are written, please let me know. Thanks.

January 20, 2008

Okami to Koshinryo, episode 1

Interested by some promotional art and by a resemblance of the main female character to my brother’s own Yumiko, I took a look at the first episode of Ookami to Koshinryo, better known as Spice and Wolf. I’m being told it is inspired by a series of novels and that there is also a manga version.

January 20, 2008

FFXI-URUSHI-Chaos: 01-02-03

For a change, my brother has found a place (DLsite.com) that sells dojinshi even to non-Japanese people, and also found three non-hentai Final Fantasy XI dojins, which I’m going to cover in this post. For reference, they are available with these prices:

January 14, 2008

Ph.D.!

The title says it all. After all these years, I was finally able to get my Ph.D. in Molecular Medicine this morning, with my thesis “Identification of disregulated metabolic pathways by transcriptomic analysis in renal carcinoma samples” (yes, that’s a long title). The defense was a success and I admit I was surprised when the commitee actually expressed a significant interest in my work. In any case, I’m happy that it’s over, as the past period has been rather hectic.

January 11, 2008

Be free.

The word is official: KDE 4.0.0 has been released. Make sure to check out the Dot story, or the nicely done visual guide. And if you’re new to Plasma, have a look at the FAQ as well. Congratulations to all the KDE developers, translators, and coordinators for pushing forward our favorite desktop environment. Rock on!