Lab-Life

In the last post, I told you one of my photo on Flickr was published in an article from Nature Reports Stem Cells. After some discussions with three friends, I decided to write an e-mail to the journal editors basically stating that, although I enjoyed my photo being shown in their journal, they did not comply with one of the two conditions of the CC-by-sa license (the “Share-Alike” part, more details in the copy of my e-mail). I chose this licence for this photo because it is there to give freedom to other people on some material while this freedom stays with the media even if the latter is modified. ...

This morning, I released Picklist Editor 0.1 with a text introduction … Hmmm … on my photos on Flickr you can see the hardware side of the picking process … (click on pictures to see details). On the photo on the left, you can see a gel on a low-fluorescent glass plate. This plate is in part in a tray that firmly holds it when the robot is doing its job. The holes everywhere result from the picking process but there are proteins everywhere and you can’t see them in visible light since they are labelled with fluorescent Cy dyes. You can see two white round stickers on each side of the gel: these are the picking references. ...

Don’t write to my ULg e-mail address (jepoirrier@ulg.ac.be) because I don’t have it anymore. No more ULg address … Something is definitely over now … If you really want to contact me, have a look here.

Taking advantage of my laptop crash, I went back to some text-mode tools ( vim, mutt, …): they are fast, easy to use (once you read at least the introduction section in the manual) and reliable (text files are more easily recovered after corruption than binary blobs). I also tested and adopted Snownews. Snownews is a text-mode RSS newsreader. Installing it is very easy: download the archive, and type the usual “./configure; make; make install”. Since I’m following some blogs written in French, I configured Snownews with Unicode support: “./configure –charset=UTF-8”. ...

Source : Le 15eme jour du mois, 165: 4 (hé hé)

I am wondering if VoIP is reliable … Since a few weeks, the university is deploying VoIP phones in the whole campus. The good thing is that everything was apparently planned since a long time: cables were already there, just next to the regular IP cables. But since then, some problems are occurring … No connection to the “old” phone network, a whole morning without phone due to “a problem in the software controlling one of the infrastructure device”, … A few days ago, I even received an e-mail from the lab computer specialist telling all the scientists how to reset the lab firewall in case it blocks all the IP+Voice communications (for an unknown reason). I am not criticizing the deployment model of this particular case but I’m wondering how reliable is VoIP … ...

“Que du bonheur” (French) can be translated into “Pure Happiness”. I found this ad for a hotel/casino on the way back from Luxembourg where I won the best poster award at the Benelux Sleep Congress 2007. So, I’m really happy! :-D The winning poster is the one on the left, on the photo above. The poster on the right was about Gemvid and was ranked second :-)

Nandini published her second scientific paper in Journal of Proteome Research and it was just published “ahead of print” (i.e. in electronic version before the “official”, paper version). It’s: Ruelle V., Falisse-Poirrier N., Elmoualij B., Zorzi D., Pierard O., Heinen E., Pauw ED. and Zorzi W.: " An Immuno-PF2D-MS/MS Proteomic Approach for Bacterial Antigenic Characterization: To Bacillus and Beyond" J Proteome Res., e-pub ahead of print. PubMed ID: 17488104 DOI: 10.1021/pr060661g Congratulations! :-) ...

A small post from the Benelux Sleep Congress 2007 (where they left two unprotected wifi networks near and in the congress hall :-) ). It’s mainly a medical congress but I had very interesting discussions with, a.o., Prof. Peter Meerlo and Dr. Michel Cramer Bornemann, mainly about Gemvid and the proteomic aspect of my Ph.D. Let’s see what can I do with all these contacts … Otherwise, the Domaine Thermal of Mondorf-les-Bains is a beautiful place (ok, it’s not as natural as landscapes aroung the highway and national roads going to Luxembourg). Unfortunately, I left my camera at home (and it’s really a stupid decision taken in this morning rush).

In " Patenting the obvious?" ( pdf), you’ll read about people fighting against a patent on methods for making embryonic stem cells from primates. I won’t go into the details about the patent in itself (although I think that there shouldn’t be any patent based on or containing living “things” or part of it). I just want to share my surprise when I read this (emphasis is mine): In its 2 April statement, the patent office said that it accepted these arguments, and intended to revoke the patents. WARF has until June to respond to the decision, and if it is unhappy with the outcome, it can then initiate an appeal. The patents will be treated as valid until the re-examination process is complete — that is, until WARF’s response and the possible appeal have concluded. That could take years. ...