/ borked

The title will already give an idea of what happened to my laptop two days ago. Due to a bus problem and a forced reboot, my root partition got corrupted. Luckily no data was lost as I keep /usr and /home separated from the rest. However reinstalling proved to be a very difficult task. First of all, my DVD drive has some problems, and so it wouldn’t read the Kubuntu Feisty install disk I had brought from work.

May 28, 2007

More meta-analysis difficulty

UPDATE: Today I found out that J Brooks (the corresponding author of Zhao’s paper) has agreed to send the data I needed. Thanks a lot! When you do bioinformatics, you often test your own procedures not only on your data, but also on datasets provided by other people and publicly available. [As I stated previously]({{ site.url }}/2006/11/10/the-joy-of-meta-analysis/), that’s what meta-analysis is. I’m doing a bit of that for my thesis and recently I noticed that some datasets, while being public, are far from complete.

May 26, 2007

Lifeless people

When starting a run in Dynamis-Beaucedine, some person in charge of my brother’s Dynamis linkshell stated that over a whole Dynamis run (approximately four hours) you should not leave or be away. This statement is misguided at best, and personally I found it rather offensive for a series of reasons: Not everyone is in the same timezone: if you have other commitments that force you to stay away for a longer period (such as meals with other people) you should not be blamed for it, after all real life takes serious precedence over gaming;

May 24, 2007

tab2dokuwiki

Today I made a simple sed script that converts a tab-delimited text file to a format that can be pasted into a DokuWiki wiki. There is a plugin that permits to read CSV files directly, however: It doesn’t support tab-delimited text files; It’s incompatible with some plugins (one being DokuTexit, which I need). Hence the need for this script. To use it, just copy and paste the code (see below) into a new file, make it executable (chmod +x) and then invoke it with

May 21, 2007

Hardware upgrades

At work I’ve recently got hold of two nice hardware upgrades: a portable 60 Gb HD (useful for carrying around large data) and an 80 Gb hard disk. The latter was much needed as the 40 Gb HD inside my Acer Veriton 7500G was getting rather small, both on the Windows side (which sadly I still need to use for some things) and on the Linux side (at one point / filled up, resulting in a system that would not log into X at all).

May 18, 2007

Thesis work and wikis

I’ve been able to complete most of the analysis for my Ph.D. thesis work, at last. I need a few runs more but I am arranging to work at a location of one of our research partners, as I don’t have a powerful enough computer to handle the calculations (apparently, 1Gb of RAM isn’t enough). At least the results I have look promising. Now all it’s left (and that’s not an easy task, heh).

May 12, 2007

Final Fantasy XI - Wings of the Goddess

I did not expect it, but today Square Enix announced a new expansion for Final Fantasy XI, called Wings of the Goddess (but I like the Japanese title - something along the line of The Holy Warriors of Altana - more). There’s also a trailer available on the main PlayOnline page. From what I can see it looks like a time-warp expansion, set back in time in the Crystal War, but the images are scarce.

May 6, 2007

Useful command line tips

While working through large text files for work, I found several command line tools whose existence was unknown to me before. Their usefulness is great however, expecially if you deal with comma or tab delimited files (I do, and a great deal).

May 5, 2007

Nanoha StrikerS 4-5

As expected, I couldn’t keep up with the backlog, so I’m again posting on two episodes of Nanoha StrikerS at once. The first one is still a training/preparation one, while the second has some action in it. But let’s look at them in the proper order…

May 1, 2007

Enough with the negativity

On a recent dotKDE article about the weekly commit digest, someone brought up again the issue of Plasma, a component of KDE 4 whose object is to bring “revolution” to the current desktop paradigm. However, I think that many in the community had unrealistic expectations, so some people even started to think it was vaporware, like in some comments in the aforementioned article. I’ll say it again, people had unrealistic expectations.