Since a few months, I am telling myself that I need a new mobile phone to replace my old Nokia 3410 (battery is nearly dead, some keys are not working all the time, etc.). Yesterday, Trolltech, the company behing Qt, announced the shipping of a green Linux-based mobile phone in September 2006. I don’t know if it will be a true product or “only” a development tool (a kind of prototype for developers). But I know that I want one if it’s available. ...

In the August 10th, 2006 issue of Financial Times [1](*), Patti Waldmeir wrote a column about a new book [2] she recently read. In this book, Sunstein start from a 1973 citation from F. Hayek, a liberal philosopher and economist: Each member of society can have only a small fraction of the knowledge by all and … civilisation rests on the fact that we all benefit from knowledge which we do not possess. ...

Today, 15th of August, is the Independence Day of India. Happy Independence Day! Picture from ISAL Today, the Indian Embassy in Belgium held a very small ceremony (but I was in my lab at that moment ; MS-Word invitation). I guess it is/was celebrated all over India ( more pictures on the Times of India website). By the way, Bozar are organizing an India Festival from October 2006 to January 2007. You’ll enjoy expositions, listen to music, see theatre plays, listen to literature, watch cinema and dance, both from old-style India and from modern India. If I have to pinpoint one event, it will be the Dhrupad concert where my father-in-law will sing with the Gundecha Brothers ( dhrupad on Wikipedia). It will be on Wednesday 17.01.2007 at 20:00. But, of course, there will be many more great artists from India …

While looking for something totally different (what exactly is the Mascot score? Partial answer here), I found the Original photo gallery, a two-parts tool to get digital photos on the web. This tool could be interesting for the family website I plan to build. Since my hosting company enabled PHP Safe Mode, I cannot use most on-line gallery tools. Original seems to be an ideal solution because all the treatments are done off-line, on my own PC. Then everything is loaded on the website. Still, it’s not a static gallery like the one Picasa does (for example). ...

Under this title, James Boyle, professor of law at Duke Law School (USA), wrote a comment article in the Financial Times [1]. For him, we all have a cognitive bias regarding intellectual property and the internet: the openness aversion. The openness aversion is the fact that we undervalue the importance and productive power of open systems, open networks and non-proprietary production. With three examples (internet, free software and Wikipedia), he somehow shows the evolution of mentalities towards theses “open things”. In 1991, scholars, businessmen and bureaucrats (and even us, maybe) would have scoffed at the internet as a business product. At that moment, control and ownership seemed the right way to go. ...

For a long time, I was looking for a video capture software for GNU/Linux. From time to time, I look on the web to see if there are improvements in this field. A recent NewsForge article triggered my curiosity, one more time … If you accept proprietary formats, you can use vnc2swf : your film will be in Flash format, a proprietary format. Also based on VNC, there is vncrec that produces its own video format (this one seems to be free and easily exported with transcode). ...

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”. ...

Nandini published her first paper in a scientific journal: Falisse-Poirrier N., Ruelle V., Elmoualij B., Zorzi D., Pierard O., Heinen E., De Pauw E., Zorzi W. Advances in immunoproteomics for serological characterization of microbial antigens. J Microbiol Methods. 2006 Jul 3 ( DOI access). Congratulations! :-) It is still in electronic format (ahead of print) but already available on the web (but not Open Access, unfortunately ; I think Nandini will auto-archive it somewhere). Here is Nandini’s BibTex entry (will be updated for volume and pages asap).

In the June 2006 issue of BioTechniques, Thomas Conrads and colleagues wrote an article about mass spectrometry used in biomarker discovery [1]. It is part of a “Special Section” devoted to mass spectrometry for proteomics analysis that is worth reading in itself. But one figure caught my attention. In this figure (reproduced below), they plot the mass spectrometry data acquisition effort and bioinformatic effort -vs- the experimental focus. In the few past years, people relied too much on the increasing power of mass spectrometry and bioinformatic tools in their experimental design. The authors criticise the fact that people “are overly dependent on technology and suffer from lack of imaginative sample preparation”. It’s not because analysis power is available downstream that sample collection and processing could be neglected. ...