Entries Tagged 'Uncategorized' ↓

The Toyota Prius - Gasoline-electric hybrid vehicles can serve as a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) for your house. The Prius, unlike the generator, also has a battery that provides instant, UPS-like power, to your house.

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Now this is “the life”….

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A funny, tongue-in-cheek site that appraises just how Web-2.0-compliant a website truly is. If you wanna jump on the Web 2.0 bandwagon, you can start by developing your website with Ruby on Rails, using the Google Maps API, and, oh yeah, referencing Digg.com.

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There it is, quaintly situated on my Powerbook between the FireWire port and the S-Video port. Normally, it just chugs along, shuttling several million packets of data back and forth every minute. Business as usual. But until yesterday I just took my beloved ethernet port for granted. In fact, I really haven’t used it that much in the past year. Wireless internet is simply pervading the troposphere, making ethernet for personal computing almost obsolete. Ethernet is still markedly faster, but the convenience of wirelessness seems to be the fait accompli for many.

Nevertheless, when I sit at my desk, either at work or at home, I plug in. There’s something visceral about it. Wireless is just voodoo magic. You can study all the electromagnetic theories and radiophysics you want, there’s still that tiniest skip of faith that your notebook is connected. But when you plug in that ethernet cable, you just know. You’re part of the network topology, the internet cloud.

I haven’t given it this much thought until yesterday. Yesterday. The unthinkable. I did what my own dad warned me against since I was ten. “Do not eat near the computer,” he’d pontificate. I tried to respond but I was frankly too busy picking off a nice piece of crumb cake. And here I was, yesterday morning, sipping my coffee, doing my work, when, with a slapdash sleight of my hand, I knocked the mug over. I was able to react before the mug’s side wall made landfall, but a few dollops of burnt coffee have safely touched down on the shiny silver of my Powerbook. With my right hand stabilizing the mug from further liquidation, I yanked the Powerbook with my left hand away from the rancid brown pool, as an army helicopter might evacuate soldiers from an ambush. And all this in a matter of 0.5 seconds. I quickly wiped off the Powerbook with a paper towel, and even turned it over for about 5 minutes with the lid open so that any moisture that made it in might mercifully decide to escape. But I did not turn off the computer, as I found later to be the standard procedure for such dire emergency.

I wanted to kick myself but awkwardly found the task a non sequitur as I am not as doubly-jointed as I used to think I was. But several minutes after my flimsy attempt at triage, I found everything to be working and back to normal. At least everything I took notice to. I connected the ethernet cable to the Powerbook, and the Powerbook was connected, and I saw that it was good. And I rested.

Later in the evening my wireless connection timed out, as it usually does on a random occasion. That is when I noticed that something was awfully wrong. I lost the internet. I restarted the router, thereby restoring the wireless connection. But now I was curious. The built-in ethernet should have been on all along. And it wasn’t. Also, the ethernet indicator on the router was off. I tried running some diagnostics on the notebook, but they insisted that the ethernet cable was not connected. I plugged in the other Powerbook, and got a connection. The ethernet indicator lit up. That’s when I put two and two together. I suspected that when I initially connected the ethernet cable after the spill, it was still the AirPort that connected me to the internet. I instinctively began sniffing around the right side of the notebook, the site of the ethernet port and the site of what-my-pontiff-dad-would-call the crime. And there was this slightest bit of a burning smell near or around the port. Just to make sure, I smelled the other side, and it smelled like fresh notebook casing. But then I didn’t know if it’s the smell of a kaput ethernet port or of burnt French roast. I rebooted the computer, just to ensure it’s not some software malfunction that’s easily correctable. Still, no dice.

I searched online and found some individuals and their horror stories about spilling coffee on their Macs. They tried to get their machines repaired but wound up having to shell out a boatload of shekels to replace parts. Things started looking bleak for me.

I started panicking. I shut the computer down and tried to distract myself with other diversions (eating, cleaning, tending to wife). Meanwhile, I went through the classical stages of post-trauma. I wanted to wake up to the pre-spill world. I kept on reminiscing on how wonderful things have been. How whole my Powerbook was. What an integral part the trusty ethernet port could have potentially played in the singularity of the Powerbook. Then I started accepting that I haven’t really used the ethernet port and I could live without it. It was a hard fact, but one I was ready to accept.

An hour later, I turned the computer back on and connected the ethernet cable (when dealing with trauma, you can always return to denial). And, as if a miracle from heaven, the ethernet indicator on the router went on, shining more brightly than the fire of a thousand suns. I turned off the AirPort off just to make sure I had an ethernet connection. I did. I did have a connection. I stopped short of pinching myself. I jumped up with glee. Reunited with my ethernet port and the oneness of the Powerbook. Like Dorothy after she finds Toto. And now I’ll never let anyone hurt my poor little ethernet port. I’ll love it and care for it. I promise.

I don’t really know exactly what happened. Frankly, I don’t want to. Well, I do, but it probably isn’t worth the effort. I have no idea if the nearby ports have been affected, I don’t really use them (I should be using the FireWire port, I know). I told myself yesterday that I’ll swear off coffee because of the incident. But now life’s back to normal. We can all move on. And since nothing happened, I’m still sipping coffee from the same mug while typing this. Some things will never change.

Breaking news!!! Security guards wrestled a man to the ground in a Wal-Mart after he cut in line to get laptop computers that were on sale Friday, a television station reported.

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Reading this, I’m just not sure whether to laugh or cry. Someone needs to develop this further into an O’Reilly book or something.

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In case you’ve been wondering what I’ve been doing at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory since joining this past July, I can now share the gory details. On Tuesday, the NSF announced the Maize Genome Project, as a collaboration between Washington University at St. Louis Genome Sequencing Center (WUGSC), Arizona Genome Institute, and us. I’m the project lead for the CSHL phase, which involves analyzing and annotating the genome.

At about 2.5 billion bases, the maize genome is about 6 times as large as the rice genome, and about 80% repetitive. This makes it an extremely difficult genome to sequence. Since the estimated 50,000 maize genes lie in the more unique regions (most of the repetitive region is junk DNA), we will regularly need to analyze and annotate the genome to ensure that we’re targeting them.

Read the NSF press release for more paltry details like, why we’re doing this, the scientific, agricultural, and economic impact this will have, how much money we’re getting (cha-ching!), and how long it will take.

Google is offering Urchin website analysis tool for free now.

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“Producer Michael De Luca and Sony have apparently decided to dismantle the scrap and solder it back together for a 21st century version of the heavy-steppin’ police weapon…”

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A really cool applet visualizes name popularity trends across time as you type the name. Pretty addicting, whether or not you’re a prospective parent.

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