FOSDEM is the annual Belgian meeting of free software developers. Like in 2005, I would only be able to go there on Saturday (Sunday, we are preparing experiments for Monday, in the lab). A car will thus do the journey from Liege to Bruxelles, on Saturday morning (8.00-8.30) and it will come back in the evening (at around 18.00-19.00, except if we stop in a nice Indian restaurant in Leuven). There are 2 or 3 seats left. If you are interested, please contact me.
MS-Visual Studio 2005 for Indians and Asians? :-)
I installed MS-Visual Studio 2005 this evening (I had to). The installation took around one hour. During this time, three persons are telling you the new tools and advantages integrated in their product. One is Indian and the two others are Asians. With a Vietnamese mother and an Indian wife, it’s a strange feeling when an occidental product takes Asians to advertise their product.
(Well, even if you are not Indian nor Asian, you can still use VS2005 ; it’s just a post at 00:21)
New stylesheets for my website
Since a long time, I decided to provide a better stylesheet and organization for my website (the previous one was too simple but quite ugly). Now, you have a menu on the left and a RSS feed for the last changes. In fact, I use two stylesheets: a “big” one for displaying pages on your screen and a very small one that your browser will call if you decide to print a page (it removes the menu – useless when printing a page – and also removes most of the fancy styles). It is still simple but I hope it’s more beautiful.
Why do we need to stress?
Yesterday evening, I watch “Le Voyage des femmes de Zartalé” (Zartalé women’s journey), a film from Claude Mouriéras, on Arte TV (description in French). We didn’t initially plan to watch it. But it was worth. In the Afghan village of Zartalé, half of the community suffers from tuberculosis. There is only one small hospital nearby (a journey of at least a couple of hours). Classes are given in the fields by the mullah. The film depicts the calm conflicts between traditional values and modern ones (medications -vs- prayers, illiteracy -vs- literacy, …) and the importance (or influence, if you like) of religion.
They do not have electricity, car, heating systems, … These items seems “essential” for us. They live in a beautiful landscape (for us) and don’t seem to notice. They are maybe dreaming of our “modern comfort”. We can dream of their surroundings, calm, etc. (because we maybe can afford holidays over there: living there is very hard). All this to say that we may worry about proteins related to memory, prions, light that experimental animals are receiving, etc. There are other things in life.
Again, some toys for geeks
After the IR camera, I bought a dB meter and a light meter for the laboratory. They were the cheapest ones available (but they are still costly, around 150 euros, knowing money is coming from my own pocket).
The dB meter measures noise level. In my office, it measured 62 dB (approximately). According to the Wikipedia article on Decibel, it’s between “Office or restaurant inside” and “Busy traffic at 5 meters”. The problem is that I am exposed to this continuous environmental noise everyday, at least 8 hours a day. Now I can put a number on the reason why I appreciate silence and calm. Fortunately, I only have a few months left, here.
And, in fact, I didn’t bought it for me. I bought it to measure noise level in the room where we are keeping rats. Same number: around 66 dB. It’s high but still below the recommendation of 83 dB. And we cannot do anything to reduce this noise since it comes from the ventilation (we must keep this level of ventilation to maintain an adequate temperature, relative humidity and to renew the air).
A light meter is a device used to measure the intensity of light. It shows results in lux (a measure of the perceived intensity of light). All our activities are influenced by the amount of light we receive (cfr. Seasonal Affective Disorder, e.g.) and light is also a powerfull zeitgeber (time giver) for our circadian clocks (yes, we all have many ones!).
In my office, with only 2 neons on the ceiling and my computer screen, my eyes receive 65 lux, which is far from acceptable! When I switch on my desk lamp (a “lamp” to see radiographies, in fact), I receive 260 lux (that’s ok for an office: recommendation states between 700 and 2000 lux). Outside, just in front of the lab, there are 455 lux (it’s 16:00, cloudy, foggy (and cold!). You can imagine how much you eye should receive if it was sunny …
Once more, I didn’t bought the light meter for me but for the rats. Rats that are ready for experiments receive 406 lux and rats that just entered our animal housing unit receive 260 lux (they are placed one rack below the first ones). 400 lux can be considered as a lot of light: the average light intensity in the litterature is around 200 lux. I think I will reduce the light intensity in their room.
What’s wonderful is that some people found that the more a rat receives light, the more it will sleep. Moreover, light has an influence on body posture and wall contact. But it has no influence at all on eye closure nor cage position. So, the next time you’ll go to sleep, pay attention to the light and your own behaviour (provided there is a direct link between rats behaviour and humans one).
Beginning with an IR camera
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.
For this project (at work), we have an “outstanding” PC with an Intel Pentium II processor and running GNU/Linux RedHat 7. In this computer, we have an ATI Rage 128 with a TV tuner. We connected the IR camera to the computer, opened AVView (from the Gatos project) and we obtained a color image of things in front of the camera. For the screenshots below, I used a software written by my brother; pictures are in black and white because we are not interested in the colours (anyway, with IR LEDs on, images are B/W). With four white neons in a room without windows, we have this result:
When I switch off all the lights in the room, the IR LEDs from the camera are automatically switched on. The same objects with only IR LEDs:
We are monitoring changes in images. The problem is that all pixels are changing when switching from visible view to IR view. This change is not due to the experiment but is due to the observation system. I have to see how to cope with that in the results …
XML DTDs in biology
I was looking if a XML DTDs already exists for my field in biology (and, of course, I didn’t find any). It seems that bioxml.org is not available tonight (and wasn’t available before ; a WHOIS search told me that it is owned by someone from the bioperl project). I’ve found three collection of links to biologically-related DTDs: one by Paul Gordon, one by XML.com (XML.com DTD repositories) and one by Andreas Matern. If you are interested, you can even try a seach in the XML.org registry. Most DTDs are focused on genes / genetics / genomics, proteins / proteomic, … but very few DTDs exist in other biological fields. And, of course, I am looking for a DTD in another field! All right, all right, I’ll try to write my own definition …
P.S. yes, this is another post full of links. It’s late and I’ll dig a little bit more tomorrow
The wonderful "I'm feeling lucky" button from Google … (hem)
The sixth Free and Open source Software Developers’ European Meeting (FOSDEM) is a 2 days event, organized by volunteers, to promote the widespread use of Free and Open Source software. It will take place in Bruxelles (Belgium) on the 25th and 26th of February 2006.
On their promotional material page, they give some links to website that already display their banners. One of them refers to a “belgian LaTeX reference site”. Instead of the correct URL, they did a small mistake (at least at this time ; I’ve sent an e-mail for the correction) and they wrote http://http//www.latex.be.tf/ (don’t use this yet). I didn’t noticed the difference because the wrong URL is “hidden” by the text “LaTeX” (as any other regular link on the internet). Now, click on the wrong link and you’ll be redirected to the Microsoft website if you are using Mozilla Firefox. Why?
In fact, in Firefox as in many other browsers, the URL textbox is also a search textbox. In Firefox, when you enter something that’s not (exactly) an URL or if you enter words in the URL textbox, you are redirected to the Google “I’m feeling lucky” function.
This type of search does not gives you all the results (like a “normal” search) : it will redirect you directly to the first result. What happened to me was the following: I clicked on the wrong link, Firefox didn’t interpreted it as an URL and used the Google “‘Im feeling lucky” function. With Google, a search on “http” (the first word in the link) gives the Microsoft website as the first result. From Fosdem to Microsoft, this link is a bit surnatural 🙂
A lot of work
I have quite a lot of work. Therefore, I don’t have much time to post here. However, some days ago, I found this cool “ad” in another lab:
The first time I saw this one, I thought one can buy alkaloids, fatty acids, etc. for 0.3 – 0.65 euros from there. But, I quickly understood that it was not the case: these are parts of notes you can buy. 😉
First presentation with LaTeX Beamer: RFT in fMRI
Today at 11:00, I’ll be doing my first real presentation with the LaTeX Beamer class. It will be about Random Field Theory in functional imaging (fMRI), a topic I’ve never done, ever, in my life (I am working on other techniques in the same lab). But, anyway, preparing this presentation was a good challenge (to understand a new technique from scratch and to do it with Beamer). I am quite impressed with Beamer ease of use.
Slides in French and in English are available here.
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