Windows and Missions

Finally, we have windows in the office. Before that it was just a room with walls, and it looked a little claustrophobic. It took a good deal of time (4 months) to get these works done, but I think the result is worth it. At least the whole room looks a little more human, now. I will be spending tomorrow’s work day analyzing data with an extremely bad piece of software, at least design-wise (the algorithm used inside it’s very solid, instead).

April 1, 2006

Upgrades

I’ve upgraded the theme (now it uses a non-hacked version of Regulus), the image gallery with the new Gallery v2.1, and also the new[ WPG]({{ site.url }}/wpg.galleryembedded.com) 2.0. Everything should work smoothly, according to the tests I made. Also, I added a direct link to the gallery, now that I found out how to do it properly.

March 30, 2006

Mixed entry (yet again)

I haven’t been writing on this blog as much as I wanted, partly because of tiredness, partly because of my always-present tiredness. Today I delivered the receipts from the Bertinoro school and also from Trieste: I hope I get a refund fairly quickly (although usually “fairly quickly” means around 3-4 months if I’m lucky). Also, these days I’m working on the DNAcopy package from Bioconductor (a series of add-on packages for R) to see if I can use the data from Affymetrix’s Chromosome Copy Number Analysis Tool to get a genome-wide view on copy number aberrations (CNAT only permits you to see one chromosome at a time).

March 22, 2006

Bertinoro - Day 4

Talks, talks, talks. That’s all about this day. Some were also extremely difficult to understand, and I’m not sure I took good notes. Talks went on from 8.30 to 18.00 (excluding lunch break) and then a workshop until 19.30. I’m really beat. I retired to my room while the others wanted to play karaoke, but I was too tired. Tomorrow is the last day, thank goodness! I’m tired of waking up at 6.

March 21, 2006

Bertinoro - Day 3

I just came home and I’m terribly tired, so I’ll be rather brief. This morning we had four lectures, including two interesting ones on protein structure prediction, though one speaker was too fast and I almost couldn’t take notes. Then we went in the afternoon to Ravenna. I took some pictures during the sightseeing and I’ll post them when I get home. We visited the “Mausoleo of Teodorico”, the “Basilica di S.

March 20, 2006

Bertinoro - Day 2

Today was much more tiring than yesterday. It was a full day with courses, and especially the ones in the afternoon were rather heavy on the subjects. First of all there were some talks on networks and promoter site prediction (I liked a lot the second one) , followed by some talks on microarray data analysis (I knew a bit already of this stuff). The afternoon talks featured more statistics for bioinformatics (ugghhhh) followed by a nearly non-understandable talk that lasted for almost two hours and really drained the life out of me.

March 19, 2006

Bertinoro - Arrival & Day 1

Finally I got hold of a stable Internet connection so I can post about my experience in Bertinoro di Romagna so far.

March 16, 2006

Random entry

I haven’t blogged in a while, mostly because I’m either doing something else, or when I want to, I find out I’m really tired (this and the past week have been very tiring for me). In any case, I’ll make a big, random entry. I’ll start saying that I’m amazed at how badly software can be written. In the life sciences field you see very clear examples. Horrible UIs and poor documentation mostly (while the algorithms and methods implemented are usually very solid).

March 11, 2006

Trento, March 7th-8th

Finally I have some time to give an insight of what happened Tuesday and Friday, when I left for Trento to attend to the ITC-irst’s meeting called “Biobanks for functional genomics”. The trip was mostly uneventful, though we had to wait a lot once we arrived at the ITC-irst because we were way earlier than expected. I spent time talking to some people there, they work in an interesting field: applying computational methods to microarray expression data.

March 5, 2006

Migrating

I’ve been migrating settings and files from the old router to the new one (check my brother’s blog to understand better what I’m talking about). I noticed the free space already dropped significantly, as you can see from this: [code] lb@hari:~$ df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/hda1 9,2G 859M 7,9G 10% / tmpfs 43M 0 43M 0% /dev/shm tmpfs 43M 13M 30M 30% /lib/modules/2.6.12-10-386/volatile /dev/hda6 83G 8,5G 70G 11% /home