Hi This is my first post with the Jadoo blog engine. As I stated before, I was planning to write my own blog software with these goals: Simplicity No PHP nor any script for the client All the processing done un Python, offline No DB (maybe some other goals but I don’t remember them, right now) I’ll try to apply the “release soon, release often” principle (where does it came from?): before writing an entry, launch jadwrite.py ; to create html files, launch jadpub.py ; then upload html files with your FTP client (scripts are highly customized for my blog, for the moment ; and everything doesn’t respect all the standards). I’ll also to retrieve all my previous posts (but the URL will be changed ; the RSS URL also changed). But for the moment, I have other important work to do … There is no system for comments for the moment (I don’t know if there will be one in the future) but you can send me comments and requests to jepoirrier@gmail.com. ...

Yesterday, we went for the Bazaar organised by the Bozar. While people were selling Indian bibelots and food ( yummy!), Nandini set up a “Spice Corner” where she exposed and explained everything about Indian spices (you could even taste Pan Masala!). She had quite a success but, unfortunately for some visitors, Nandini did not sell anything. Our famous Peter also had a table for Rose vzw that was represented by Swapna (they were still there on Sunday). ...

ISAL is inviting you to the annual Christmas party, full of spices and fun. It will be held on Saturday, December 16th 2006 (19.00 hour = 07.00 PM), at Holy Spirit College, Naamsestraat 40, B-3000, Leuven. You can find the menu (veg and non-veg) and other details on the Christmas party webpage.

This week is very stressful because I am doing a 2200+ euros 2D-DIGE experiment (*) on samples from a rat organ we never studied before and from which I cannot obtain any more new samples. We found a new pattern of proteins dispersion (compared to our previous experiments on other organs) and, more importantly, we found a clear difference in protein expression in at least 2 spots. In the image below, all the whitish spots mean proteins in these spots are found in equal amounts in the 3 conditions. But spots in red or green mean proteins expressed at different levels (even on/off) between conditions! ...

… at least in my biased population. It came from a file containing all the people interested by ISAL and that I had to parse (the file, not the people). It’s a tab-delimited file with the names, e-mail addresses, location, interests, etc (in total, 379 unique e-mail IDs). I used Python for that purpose. Since I had all the e-mail addresses in a Python set (*), I decided to do some stats. I know it’s useless but here are the results: 30.34% of Hotmail accounts, 27.18% of Yahoo ones, 7.39% of Gmail ones, 7.12% of Rediffmail ones (a popular e-mail service in India) and “only” 7.65% of KULeuven ones. As we can see, members mainly use free e-mail accounts (probably because the majority of them are students - the “S” in ISAL). And less than 10% of members come from the KULeuven, although ISAL is a students organisation from Leuven (the “L” in ISAL). Of course, R can produce nice charts. And since its documentation states that pie charts are “a very bad way of displaying information”, I also produced a regular bar plot. ...

I couldn’t find sleep tonight (*) so I did two small variations on the Ruby official logo for Ruby France, since they are looking for a new logo (**). Double-clic to enlarge, single-clic to reduce back to the small images (***) : I also like Greg’s proposal. (*) it happens very often these days (**) No, I don’t know Ruby (***) Doesn’t work if javascript isn’t enabled in your browser (usually it is) + Internet Explorer doesn’t correctly render the transparency ; please use a real browser instead

Just to remember, here are some websites to find antibodies: abcam, the largest one, apparently Biocompare antibody search (links to many vendors websites) Invitrogen search engine (never found any antibodies there but, in case it could useful, …) Links to information and protocols about antibodies on IHC World and the antibody resource page.

On Saturday, we went for the Rose Dinner 2006. Rose is an independent not-for-profit organization run by volunteers. Its mission is to support and foster primary education for children from economically disadvantaged rural communities in developing countries (mainly India), primarily by improving basic facilities in primary schools. Yesterday, its impressive team of cooks offered us great food (thanks Swapna), there was a good atmosphere. It’s good to see that people that actually do something in an effective manner. :-) ...

In this article, Brad Reagan gives many examples where the use of electronic data begins to cause problem, in a preservation perspective. The causes can be a new software that is not fully compatible with previous data models, new physical formats (unable to play old formats), too much raw information, etc. For the moment, free projects like the Internet Archive or the Free Archive (a.o.) are trying to cope with this problem. Although the dangers of a “digital blackout” really exist, I think the author forgets one important aspect of information from the past: we already lost a lot of it. What is left is what time left us, often with some damages. It survived time, taking many different forms and paths, different storage procedures, different media, different locations, etc. ...

I’ve just written some “search plugins” for Firefox (1.x and 2.x) that allow you to quickly look for a specific Digital Object Identifier ( DOI). These DOI are more and more used in biomedical sciences. One of their interesting features is that they allow direct linking to the scientific article. The plugins are availble here. If you already have Firefox 2, the installation procedure is very easy: all you have to do is go to the plugins page, click on the small arrow near your Firefox search box and choose the “Add DOI lookup” option; it will then automatically be installed for you. ...