Projects

Personnally, I am not very satisfied with current common blog systems. They are based on a huge collection of PHP scripts and MySQL but web providers couldn’t certify that service will have all the ressources needed. I am looking for something simpler, even if this solution is not (will not become) a major blog system … Thanks to Google Cache, I was able to retrieve a nice idea Alexandre Dulaunoy had on his previous blog software (unfortunately, this idea was removed, along many others, when he changed for a new version of oddmuse). Here is the quote: ...

I am currently building a family website. Here are some requirements: services will be based on existing free software (I don’t have time to develop a complete solution) first service provided: a news service (I don’t know if it will be a forum or a shared blog) second service provided: a photo gallery all this should be on a shared host server (so it should work with PHP safe mode enabled ; I don’t have time to maintain a dedicated server) all this will allow everyone in the family to add elements, it will need very little maintenance and it should also be fast an e-mail address will be provided to everyone (all serious providers give e-mail addresses) Although I am running WordPress for this blog, although a friend of mine is running DotClear, I am tempted to try b2evolution (blog), TextPattern (blog and more) or even Vanilla (forum) for the first service (blog). What is interesting is that these tools are localized in French, they allow multiple author to write and, finally, they have an anti-spam service “out-of-the-box”. ...

In our lab, we are (also) working on rodents behaviour. Some time ago, I wrote a very simple software that logs pre-defined behaviours to a file when the observer detects one of these particular behaviours and clicks on the ad hoc button. I accumulated quite some logs but I wasn’t able to really visualize how the rat performed. So, this evening, I wrote another small software to read those log files and to plot a graph of the rat activity. Here is a screenshot of the software in action: ...

This week was quite busy … In the proteomic lab, I released the first version of IPGPhor2 Reader (see also the previous post). Of course, since we didn’t fail any recent experiment ;-) we don’t see the immediate usefullness of this software. The main purpose of this software is that it allows to see where and when an experiment failed, how the current was given during the IEF and when it was not correctly supplied. ...

IPGPhor is a device from GE Healthcare (formerly Amersham Biosciences) that performs an isoelectrofocusing of proteins. Version 2 of IPGPhor can be connected to any computer via a serial cable. GE Healthcare provides a monitoring software but no post-hoc analysis software. This gap is efficiently filled by IPGPhor 2 Reader. Today, I wrote “IPGPhor 2 Reader”. Its goal is to parse log (text) files resulting from an experiment with the IPGPhor and to plot graphs. This software (for MS-Windows, since IPGPhor logs are collected on a MS-Windows computer) is available here. ...

I explain here how to use the GD library with C to draw a rainbow (or HSV scale).

Two weeks ago, I bought a small IR camera on eBay. I received it this morning and I managed to have some time to test it. The camera is quite small (approximatively 15cm long, 10cm in height without the mounting kit) and comes from a Chinese factory ( Shenzhen Lianyida Science Co. Ltd ; I have the LYD-806C CCD model). The box is in plastic. It is said to be “weather proof” but, anyway, this one will stay indoor. ...

I was experiencing frequent disconnections of my internet link at home. These were very short but long enough to disturb one service I am using. So I decided to check if my internet provider was correct and doing his job correctly. My first idea was that there must exists free (as in free speech) and simple command-line tools to test the connection speed under GNU/Linux. As I am not a specialist, I tried to find such tools on the internet but didn’t find any (if you have one, please feel free to share it with me). So I decided to write my own set of scripts in Perl. ...

I am currently (i.e. during the night, my only free time) trying to use the libpng in order to open PNG files and process them later. I haven’t read the entire manual yet but, following their example.c, I succeeded in opening a file, check if it’s really a PNG, read all the data and display some basic information about it (width, height, bit depth, …). Next step: process the data (I will probably only be able to do it during the next week-end).

I am looking for a widget toolkit (a software bag of things that allow you to create GUI). I have two desideratas: I want to use C++ and I want to use it on GNU/Linux. I’ve found two big lists of widget toolkits: one on Wikipedia and one on atai.org. For the moment, I think of using gtkmm or wxWidgets but I need more information … Now, some grumpy people will tell me they only use text-based applications ;-)