an organization that aims to help make biology a worthwhile pursuit for citizen scientists, amateur biologists, and DIY biological engineers who value openness and safety.
Today for me is the day of discoveries. I learned about the International Open Space Initiative (to give robotics enthusiasts a way to send their tele-controlled and/or intelligent robots to the Moon and Mars), about the DIYbio and biohackers, about OpenManufacturing (which doesn’t seem to have produced enough content to link to), Open Source Medicine (ouch!), BioBrick Assembly Kit (with an assembly manual), OpenWetWare, and a whole bunch of other awesome and inspiring community efforts, which do not belong here.
Stumbled upon SciVee.TV – an open video upload service for research-related videos.
I believe it is highly useful. Compare: watching an 8-10 minute video of someone’s research to reading their article on that same subject. For me, those 8-10 minutes make video option a clear winner.
One of the envisioned uses of SciVee is to upload videos describing peer-reviewed published articles. This has two benefits for the reader: quickly getting acquainted with the essence of the article, and having that article as a complete reference for any questions not discussed in the video. For the author, this gives an additional bonus of higher visibility of his research.
Personally, I’ve immediately found 3 videos pertinent to my topic. Of those, one was accompayning an article in PloS Biology, one was an hour-long lecture, and one was a poor quality audio recording of someone’s intended research.
SciVee is young, and that is currently the largest drawback: not much could be found in a narrow research field. But I’m sure it will grow.
The two graphs below (clickable) are for CPU and RAM use during a period of a program going wild between 23:17 and 23:41 (24+ minutes of server’s downtime). The program was run non-root, it just consumed all the memory it could. It was killed by kernel, so the server started responding without any interventions – which were hard to perform, because none of the services (including ssh) were responding during downtime.
If you happen to be developing a C/C++ program – do use mtrace and valgrind, those are huge helpers against the problems akin to that shown on the graphs.
Stumbled upon 
