1. Install the annotationTools R package:
   source(“http://bioconductor.org/biocLite.R”)
   biocLite(“annotationTools”)
2. Download full HomoloGene data file from ftp://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pub/HomoloGene/current
3. library(annotationTools)
4. homologene = read.delim(“homologene.data”, header=FALSE)
5. mygenes = read.table(“file with one entrez ID of the source organism per line.txt”)
6. getHOMOLOG(unlist(mygenes), taxonomy_ID_of_target_organism, homologene) [alternatively, wrap the call to getHOMOLOG into unlist to get a vector]

It might be easier to achieve the same results with a Perl script calling NCBI’s e-utils.

Source: Kelly’s think tank.

ask.debian.net is a StackOverflow-like Q&A website built with OSS Shapado.

That’s my first encounter of Shapado, so it was interesting to read Shapado authors’ justification and a related question on meta.SO.

Find out more about the depicted office. That would be a nice setup for flight and/or space simulators, I guess.

TinEye Firefox extension helped finding more nice workplaces.

And Stefan in his office description provided some more links to multi-display workplaces – Mitch Haile’s and Kevin Connollie’s among others.

In my previous post on CUE sheet support in Linux music players I mentioned DeaDBeeF. Unfortunately, DeaDBeeF is not yet available as a Debian package.

Fortunately, Alexey Smirnov (the author of DeaDBeeF) maintains a github repository deadbeef-debian which has simple instructions on installing DeaDBeeF in Debian (citing with minor edits): Read the rest of this entry »

Nature published the said survey based on responses of over 10000 employees in science. It has lots of multi-axis data to explore, and some major trends are discussed in the special report. Highly recommended for anyone considering science career changes.

You should already know that my preferred city vehicle is VentureOne (now called PersuHybrid, and still far from mass production – while Carver One, the original tilting three-wheeler, is now bankrupt/dead). It might be more realistic to go for Campagna’s T-Rex, which is in production since 1996.

Now, welcome the Terrafugia’s Transition transformer flying car! It can drive as a car (and is sized as a car with wings folded), and it can fly as an air-plane! Now your trip to anywhere looks like “drive to the airport – fly – land – drive to gas station – repeat as needed”. Terrafugia claims that (on average) there’s a suitable airport every 60 miles in the US. And you can fit Transition into your average garage!

That doesn’t (yet) feel like something from the future – and maybe that is why their prototype already had test flights, and they plan mass-production for 2011, and already have over 80 pre-orders.

If only it had vertical take-off…