Month: October 2009

Evolution of H1N1

I needed some data to test the pChart charting library so I decided to use WHO data about swine flu (in its weekly updates). The only issue I had was that the WHO started to collect data by country and changed to gather data by regional offices from July 27th, 2009 onwards. So graphs below are only by regional offices.

Evolution of A/H1N1 cases - jepoirrier.net

Evolution of A/H1N1 deaths - jepoirrier.net

For your information:

AFRO: WHO Regional Office for Africa
AMRO: WHO Regional Office for the Americas
EMRO: WHO Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean
EURO: WHO Regional Office for Europe
SEARO: WHO Regional Office for South-East Asia
WPRO: WHO Regional Office for the Western Pacific

I didn’t really see such graph on the web but there is the excellent FluTracker by Dr. Niman and a lot of information about the swine flu on Wikipedia. If you want to start interpreting these curves, you might be interested in reading squareCircleZ’s post about the H1N1 and the Logistic Equation.

Powerplant screensaver

Do you know your local powerplant chimney can be a screensaver? (movie taken in October 2009 in the South of Brussels, Belgium)

Waiting for PDF comments in Evince

Evince defines itself as “simply a document viewer” (for Linux/Gnome and now for Windows too). However it can already read a lot of formats: PDF, TIFF, PS, DVI, DJvu and plans to support a lot more in the future.

But for me there is one important feature missing: the ability to read comments in PDF files. I sent PDF versions of draft documents to my PhD thesis promoters and they send them back with their comments. Open them in Evince: you’ll only get the balloons but no possibility to click on them (see Figure 1 below). Open them in Acrobat Reader and not only you can see that there are comments but you can also see their content (see Figure 2 below).

Figure 1: reading a PDF with comments in Evince

Reading a PDF with comments in Acrobat Reader
Figure 2: reading the same PDF with comments in Adobe Acrobat

It’s in the roadmap and Carlos García Campos already has an unstable release that includes annotations. So I’ll keep Acrobat Reader for the moment. As soon as Fedora packages Evince with annotations, I’ll not see any reasons to keep Acrobat Reader on my laptop 🙂

Btw, both Okular and KPDF also seem to miss this feature.

2.54

2.54 It’s the impact factor of the Open Access journal Proteome Science where I published my last article, last year.

I didn’t see that before but came to know when I downloaded the 453 remaining e-mails from an old account (3 months without fetching them). The announcement of this new impact factor was in one of the three interesting e-mails.