Posts

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. ...

When you work with 2D gel electrophoresis in proteomics, you end dealing with “pick lists”. For this purpose, I wrote Picklist Editor, a tool to help visualize and modify this pick list. As usual, software and source code are available here. Feel free to use it and report any bug or your wish list :-) (and if you didn’t understand everything above because you are not in the proteomics field, just go to the page too because I also wrote a small introduction) ...

One day, one has to sit at his/her table and try to really understand how to deal with XML. Since I think I can only learn with a project in mind, I took Alexandre Dulaunoy’s mergerss suggestion and tried to develop my own catrss. As the name implies, catrss is one of the many descendants of the cat command. Catrss is used to concatenate RSS file(s) to standard output. In its most simple form, you simply have to give it some RSS files to parse and it will concatenate them for you ; the command is: ...

After discovering the Flickr API, I started coding oncolour this night and here is the result … oncolour is a PHP script that allows you to display your photos from Flickr on your own website and with a specific background colour. It’s better with an example … This URL " http://www.epot.org/flickr/oncolour.php?id=860125589," will give this result: Some other solutions have been developed and used ( example) but this one is really free: free for use (see here how to use it - even for your photos - and a description of all the options) and free to re-use (see here how to download the script and use it on your own server). Feel free to use it! :-)

Quuxlabs is releasing the alpha version of GeoPolis, a web service to gather and show the ongoing police control. More info can be found on the project website and on the Quuxlabs blog. I made some comments regarding the service accuracy, automation, security and independence but I’ll be glad to use the service once I’ll be able to drive again. Btw, in the same topic – watching the watchdogs, my map of cameras in Liege (see announcement and update) is now located on the CCLV website. The database management is also handed over to them. Moreover Christophe Cattelain is now systematically taking photos of those cameras in Liege and he publishes them on Flickr …

I told you it’s boring to lay down the whole day (see previous post). And even if I have a laptop, it’s very uncomfortable to type when you are on your bed with a leg on top of 3 pillows. Anyway, I’m not here to talk about my life but to share two small Python scripts. Their goal is to retrieve two television evening news programmes (from RTBF1 and France2, both in French). With that, I can directly watch evening news from my laptop (no need to browse their website nor install ad hoc Firefox plugin; everything can be done from the command line). ...

It’s so boring to lay down the whole day (sprain at left ankle), I decided to give a try to Miro, a software to “watch internet video channels as easy as to watch TV”. Before trying it, I tried to watch their video demonstration but it’s not working since it requires the proprietary Flash player … Now, if you want to try Miro, do not use “yum install Democracy” on Fedora 7 (Democracy Player is Miro former name). It will give you version 0.9.5.1-10 that will cause many problem (the main one being it won’t run). ...

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.

Since I already posted a lot about IT here, I decided not to mix everything, not to confuse some readers and to start another blog dedicated to neurosciences on the Nature Network. So, here is the branching-plot novel choice: You want to read more entries on IT? Stay here. You want to read more entries on neurosciences? Go there.

Since my Ph.D. is related to memory consolidation, I was interested in a strange idea from Francis Crick. He asked the question of long-term storage of the memory trace 1. How is this memory trace stored in our brain? And, more importantly, how is it protected against molecular turnover? In his view, Crick suggested three hypothesis: Memory could be encoded in alterations of some part of the cell DNA. This will imply that each neuron synapse would be represented by a part of the neuron DNA since the actual paradigm states that memory is encoded in the strength of individual synapse. This first hypothesis seems unlikely. Memory could otherwise be stored in a local piece of DNA or RNA, at the synapse (a bit like the mitochondrion has its own DNA). This piece would be immune to the molecular turnover. Although more logical, this hypothesis seems unlikely too. Finally, Crick’s last hypothesis states that molecules at the synapse level would interact in such a way they could be replaced by new ones, one at a time, without altering the general status (strength). The figure below shows a working example of this hypothesis … ...