Gutsy Gibbon Beta

After some thought, I’ve joined the fray and installed the beta version of Kubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) on one of my computers. It hasn’t too recent hardware (AMD Thunderbird 2100+, 512 Mb RAM and a motherboard with a Nforce 2 chipset), and it is my test system for distributions. It ran Feisty Fawn, so I tried to use the upgrader tool, which crashed when removing unsupported packages. Oh well, it was a beta, so nothing to worry about (the only worry was that it didn’t output anything at all).

September 28, 2007

The Internet lynch mob

I was thinking about writing something on the line of what I announced in the past entry, but what has happened recently surrounding the artist who does the work for The S.T.E.A.L. Saga, that is Too, made me change my mind.

September 26, 2007

An update

Recently I haven’t had the time to write any decent entries. That is due to the fact that my Ph.D. thesis needs to be completed by Oct 18th, and while I’m (hopefully) on track I still have to finish correcting the Introduction and completing the Discussion section (lots of scientific literature to study…). As I’m working on that even on weekends, it means I really have little free time. Not all’s lost.

September 22, 2007

New Wings of the Goddess trailer

As most people know already, Square Enix has put a new trailer of Wings of the Goddess on their web page, which has been updated as well. Unlike Treasures of Aht Urghan, it looks that story-driven content will be more present. Also, the trailer shows much more of the story than ToAU’s (and apparently, new weapon skills!): I hope it is an indication that Square Enix has learnt from the problems of the previous expansions.

September 19, 2007

The tower of Babel of bioinformatics

The title of this post tries to give some insight on a problem that I’ve stumbled upon a lot of problems when doing microarray data analysis: the plethora of different file formats. In “conventional” (as I call it) bioinformatics this is less problematic, as FASTA or PDB are quite standardized by now.

September 17, 2007

Idiocy at its maximum

Yesterday I got word that the FFXI Encyclopedia, a wiki that I often go to read up on information and occasionally contribute, had been defaced. Apparently someone named “Taj” had hijacked the administrator account to change the main page to a short, anger-filled post that pointed to a discussion to the web site of Taj’s linkshell, the extremely famous “Urdr of the Blue Gartr”.

September 16, 2007

Treasures of Aht Urghan Mission 44

At last, I’ve made it! Last Wednesday my group took on the last mission of this expansion, “Nashmeira’s Plea”. I was expecting something as tough as Dawn from Chains of Promathia, but that wasn’t the case.

September 11, 2007

New office

After little more than a year, I’ve been moved to a new office, because new people needed to be put in the room I was in. The new place is slightly bigger (four desks instead of six) and for now quieter. I spent most of the morning fixing things and setting up network connections. This is how it looks now: [![The desk at distance]({{ site.url }}/images/2007/09/016.thumbnail.JPG)]({{ site.url }}/images/2007/09/016.JPG) [![A closer look]({{ site.

September 7, 2007

Treasures of Aht Urghan Mission 42

It’s been a while since the update hit the servers, but I couldn’t get my static party up and in shape until last Wednesday. We had already done the introductory cutscenes, and we prepared for the fight (a Blue Mage and several Imperial Gears). My party was made up by Eithin (White Mage), Sechs (Puppetmaster), Necronemesi (Ranger), Mitsuashi (Red Mage) and Daman (Black Mage).

September 1, 2007

Science and Microsoft Word

At the time of writing, a lot of people (even in bioinformatics) uses Microsoft Word to write their papers. I personally think it’s not a good idea, and not just for the file formats (like Microsoft lobbying semi-legally to get OOXML approved by ISO), but because for scientific papers the WYSIWYG paradigm is not appropriate.