CERN map
So we already said that the LHC did not succeed to destroy the world, but if it was successful how it would had happen?
Here an idea 🙂
Category: English
Situation point. And I mean today.
So it looks like there is a lot of stuff going on. We have a possible Vice Prime Minister Sarah Paulin that has answered to the possibility to engage a war with the Russia in the case Georgia is in the NATO:
“Perhaps so. I mean, that is the agreement when you are a Nato ally, if another country is attacked, you’re going to be expected to be called upon and help.”
The best one is when she said going in Iraq was a mission of God. Now tell me, what is the difference between this kind of idea and the one from the terrorism that is doing an “holy war” as a justification?
If the bombs is in on a backpack or is dropping from the sky who is going to die is always a human being.
It looks like the Venezuelan President Chavez, the prime minister of the Venezuela is really happy to have two airplains from Russia in his country when he said the us ambassador has to leave the country.
The Yankee ambassador to Caracas has 72 hours to leave Venezuela, in solidarity with Bolivia, with the Bolivian people, and with the Bolivian government
Putin has said that he was a right reaction to fight back the Geogiarn. On the other end there is the Russian President Dmitry Medvedev asking for a reinforcement of the alley to fight terrorism with the US.
If it looks like a big mess also to you, I think we have an agreement…
Of course all of this are just technicals tests for the very big important new piece of land, full of petrol that nobody can claim. Yet.
And Europe what is doing in the meantime?
Shutting down flying companies. Neither the train looks good today…
The answer about the question on the LHC
Has the lhc destroyed the earth?
Just click here:
http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/
Brilliant.
Mendeley: manage your papers and sync them
If you are in research you read a huge amount of papers, which you would like to retrieve later according to a keyword, author name, or any other method that works for you.
Right now it’s plenty of this tool around, starting from Papers, to Referencer which is my choice right now. However having your papers available when you don’t have your laptop and having them from an on-line resources is also a good idea and CiteUlike is my solution for now.
One thing that I am really keen to have is a synchronized way to manage this two worlds. Right now SyncUThink is a tool developed to do just that. We even have interviewed the developer some time ago.
Today a new guy is coming up and it’s called Mendeley. One of the innovative features that this software is able to offer is the automatic synchronization between the offline and the online world.
The software consist of two part, the desktop client and the website. On the website you can have the classical social soul and on the desktop you can use the software to search your papers and find that piece of information that you are looking for.
The Desktop client (Qt based in my case) has a pretty neat interface and the search for authors is one of my favourite tool to search the articles. And the synchronization is only one click away. Pretty slick, isn’t it?
It’s worth to give a shoot.
Note: I discovered this software directly from an e-mail sent to me by Victor. He found this blog when he googled for open science. This made me quite happy :).
Science is way too cool
So what is going to happen in Geneva when they are going to switch on the LHC?
Check out this video!
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j50ZssEojtM]
That’s the way we should communicate our science. Science is too cool. Science rocks! (well.. in this case.. raps! ) Science and art. The way to go.
Bioinformatics poll: first analysis
<
p style=”text-align:left;”>Bioinformatics zen has delivered the result of some first analysis on the poll that we have spoken before.
It seems we have a quite pretty happy community 🙂
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p style=”text-align:center;”>
Analysis from Michael Barton
The analysis are available from OpenWetWare
Have a look over there, or download the data and make your own!
TiddlyWiki mandatory plugins
So if you are using tiddlywiki you know everything, if you don’t you maybe want to take a look to it.
What is tiddlywiki good for?
For me is good as an advanced lab book. Yes an electronic labbook. All my biology friends have a really good fashion old school labbook, but I’m not too much into paper and I keep forgetting things.
More over is really a pain to search on the paper… I have different thoughts and ideas that are completely disconnected and only at the end they make sense (sometimes…)
So here the User Case:
- Able to write any piece of text/idea quickly in a not complicated way
- Able to tag it in a flexible way and give it an automatic datestamp
- Able to have this tool always available.
If you recognize this, you want to give a try.
Now I want to suggest you two plugins (I started to write this post because the second one was really hard to find again, so I will put the right link here. I don’t think google is going to care too much about this blog, but anyway it could help a bit)
First of the latex plugin (if you don’t know what is LaTeX … well I’m sorry..)
The second one is the listTaggedTiddlers
Give it a go.. It’s really cool.
Bioinformatics survey is over
The bioinformatics survey proposed by Bioformatics zen during july is over.
As expected the USA is the country with the numerous entries, but France in second place looks to me as a surprise.
As usual Italy is one of the last country for number of entries (but at least is there :))
Into macro regions the Europe is rocking!
Have a look the other initial charts here.
More to come.
The constant itchy: proper LaTeX GNOME editor
I have a constant itchy that I cannot get rid off: I want a smart and cool LaTeX editor for GNOME.
I would like to have something light and with a bunch of functions that could make my life easier.
Right now I use winefish which is doing a great job.
Strengths of this software:
- Integration with LaTeX tool and possibility to run them with shortcuts keys
- Wizard to introduce figures. Really useful
- Shortcuts to introduce LaTeX sections, LaTeX style and other stuff. I really love it
- Group project management. When you write with LaTeX seriuos stuff you have chapters… and I want to hit one button and get my document compiled. (E.g.: Three docs open: master.tex, chp1.tex, chp2.tex. I hit F2 and the program call pdflatex with master.tex as argument depsite which is my open document (i.e. chp2.tex.) This is one of the feature that I like most.
One big problem:
- Spellchecking is broken (LaTeX filter doesn’t really work)
It seems the way to go is enchant.
Now, winefish is written in C and it’s not really my cup of tea…
What I saw is that there is this pyenchant and the interesting bit is here
It seems there is going to be a support for the LaTeX filter soon (hopefully). This means that if there is an editor that is able to implement the pyenchant API we (if you read ’till here is also your problem…) have resolved our problem about an editor with a correct spell checking in LaTeX mode.
So looking around I stumbled to this scribes.
It seems to be under big development (infinite development?) but it seems the version 0.4 will implement the pyenchant.
Now I see two possible solutions here:
- Fix winefish. This means:
- Port somehow the enchant library to winefish. It’s in C. No, it doesn’t sound easy. Winefish is a fork of an old version of winefish. Now the development has stopped ‘casue the main developer didn’t have anymore the time.
- Fix scribes: This means:
- Test the development version. Check the spellcheck works. Contact the guy who is working on pyenchant and speed up the filtering process for LaTeX filter.
- Implement the snippet feature to insert custom text in the document (doable.. there is this possibility)
- Implement at least a wizard for the figures.
- Check out the project management
So you’re thinking that I should go for scribes. I don’t htink so, the autosave function will kill me and there is no undo function.
So maybe you said that I should look to GEDIT again and think about the LaTeX plugin… ‘Cause GEDIT will use or is going to use enchant. I’ve tried. I didn’t like it. I use GEDIT to open every txt file whatever is the content. So it should be light and quick. I said light and quick. The plugin is getting my GEDIT really slow. MKore over the spellchecker it’s not working.. So what we are talking about?
I would like to fix my first love winefish.
Or maybe stick to reality. Use winefish and run
aspell -t -c file_to_check.tex
or even use Texmaker
The spellchecker works really well, but I’m missing my powerfull shortkeys that I have in winefish.
Or maybe I should write another bloody editor in the right way (TM). (I won’t to reinvent the wheel for the n+1 time. It’s stupid and it’s not the way to do it.)
Suggestions?
Launchpad translations change license
I just discovered that all the translations in launchpad have to be under BSD license. Here is the FAQ
You have until the 31st of July to agree. If you don’t the only option is opt-off. (Yes, they are going to be removed…)