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Google e i dati personali

September 3, 2008 / / 0 Comments

Interessantissimo questo post di stormy riguarda alla EULA di chrome e alla cosidetta bontà di google ed il loro motto “don’t be evil”

Riassumendo le compagnie sono compagnie, non hanno volontà o altro. Hanno semplicemente un possessore e possono cambiare la loro idea di come condurre gli affari a seconda del management.

La EULA di chrome gli permette di fare tutto quello che vogliono con quei dati dato il lassissismo del linguaggio usato che la apra a qualsivoglia interpretazione..

Quindi pensateci un attimo. Un attimino solo….

E allora Chrome ma non per linux

September 3, 2008 / / 1 Comment
chrome logo

chrome logo

Se non vivete sotto ad un sasso oramai sapete che google ha rilasciato chrome. Per linux ancora non c’è la release e questo non mi permette di provarlo.

Le considerazioni di TechCrunch sul vero scopo del browser mi sembrano chiare e lucide e ritengo che sia un ottima idea dare un occhio a questo bell’articolo di wired.

Io penso che qualcuno riesca a trovare il modo di renderlo funzionale su linux per stasera tardi (orario del Pacifico.)

Per ora s’attende fiduciosi con firefox che, con i suoi onesti 20 tabs sempre aperti, continua a fare il suo sporco lavoro.

Se gears prende piede (nota che è embedded in chrome) sarebbe paragonabile al salto che c’è stato quando si è passati da browser testuali come lynx a qualcosa come mosaic.

Da notare che è opensource. C’è da dire che usano Webkit per reinderizzare le pagine, quindi erano in qualche modo forzati.

Facebook ed i gradi di conoscenza

August 26, 2008 / / 3 Comments

Facebook pone un problema. Il problema è specifico nel caso di facebook, ma è generalizzabile a livello di social networking. Linkedin può esserne un altro esempio.

Il numero di persone conosciuto è più dovuto alla febbre del networking che della conoscenza reale. Rimanendo su facebook vorrei sapere se anche tu, onesto lettore, hai la sensazione che la parola friends venga abusata.

Sicuramente puoi dividere i tuoi contatti in conoscenti ed in amici; alcuni sono semplicemente persone con cui hai scambiato qualche battuta, qualche commento o qualche e-mail, con cui poi il rapporto è in uno stato dormiente se non dimenticato.

Ovviamente la categorizzazione in due gruppi sarebbe allucinante se fatta in base all’utilizzo dello strumento (i.e.: numero di messaggi scambiati, eventi, chat..) in quanto la produzione di parole e messaggi non è per nulla correlata all’amicizia stessa.

Concludendo, come ha suggerito un mio amico polacco, forse necessitiamo di un nuovo neologismo per chiamare i nostri contatti in facebook. Facebookers suona male…
Idee?

TiddlyWiki mandatory plugins

August 6, 2008 / / 2 Comments

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

August 4, 2008 / / 1 Comment

The bioinformatics survey proposed by Bioformatics zen during july is over.

survey

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!

macro regions

Have a look the other initial charts here.

More to come.

The constant itchy: proper LaTeX GNOME editor

July 30, 2008 / / 2 Comments

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:

  1. Integration with LaTeX tool and possibility to run them with shortcuts keys
  2. Wizard to introduce figures. Really useful
  3. Shortcuts to introduce LaTeX sections, LaTeX style and other stuff. I really love it
  4. 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:

  1. 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.
logo 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:

  1. 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.
  1. 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?