Today it is much more difficult to get up than it was 10 years ago, and that's not just because we're all getting older. 10 years ago chances are that every morning started with the same thing; hitting the alarm clock. Wind the clock on a decade and chances are most people don't even have an alarm clock. After all why have a separate device that performs only one task when we can merge many devices into one in the shape of a mobile phone.
Today I had to take the car to a tyre garage type place having picked up a puncture in the shape of a massive thorn over the weekend. Now I've never been a great advocate of the intelligence required to be a mechanic but having discussed the matter with the garage prior to my arrival, I was pleasantly surprised where, upon my arrival I was greeted with the title Sir and sure enough I had to say nothing about the issue at hand.
The church would have you believe that Sunday is the God given day of rest, whilst the business world would tell you that it was rather the Bank Holidays that were sacrosanct. Well today I tell you that for me that today is that day of rest. Which after a 7 day stint I feel is not necessitated but somewhat required if I am to be of any cognitive use in the following week.
The science world is an odd one. Almost all ideas are communicated through one of two means, tried and tested means that show no sign of changing any time soon. The first is that of academic papers or journals, these are essentially like the entries in the Encyclopedia Britannica of old. Each piece has an introduction, a methods section, results and conclusions. Typically any given piece will have a minimum of 4 authors and have to go through 2 sets of reviewers and editors before it can go to print.
So I've had my HTC Desire now for approxmately 2 years now and whilst it has served me well I've had a bug bear with it for a long time. Essentially the phone has only 148 MB of internal storage and after the basic Android OS has been installed this is reduced to under 134 MB. Now I knew that this phone didnt have much memory when I bought it, and as a result when I bought the phone I bought it with a 16 GB microSD card.
Today I've been trying to come up with a nice way of visualising the binding interface between protein-protein or protein-DNA complexes. What follows is a quick little walk-through mostly for my own purposes so that I can remember what I've done in the future.
Download PDB file from pdb.org, here XXXX will be your PDB accession code.
Point a terminal window at the download directory
cd ~/Downloads
Run CCP4:
ncont XYZIN XXXX.pdb >> XXXX.ncont << eof
Recently my (Ubuntu 11.10 64bit) machine stopped playing nice with PyMOL and whenever I tried to render or move an object I was facing a >40 second render time, while both of my CPU cores jumped to >90%
When I paid close attention to the startup messages in the PyMOL command window I could see:
Detected OpenGL version 2.0 or greater. Shaders available.
PyMOLShader_NewFromFile-Error: Unable to open file '/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.7/pymol/data/shaders/default.vs' PYMOL_PATH='/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.7/pymol'
It was once said that the difference between the ordinary and the extraordinary is that little bit extra. A potent statement, and one full of wisdom, but one I find myself disagreeing with more and more by the day.
In this age of sensationalist media it is my opinion that adjectives that used to be the preserve of linguist expression are now all to often thrown about willy-nilly.
This week I've been cloning machines, but each new machine has slightly different hardware, even if it's just a MAC address or serial number.
So, a quick disclaimer I'm using openSUSE 11.3 and so things will be slightly different for different versions of SUSE or different distros.
SUSE unlike some of the more user friendly OS's doesn't go out of it's way to get you online. So we need to manually tell it what to do. First open a terminal and log in as a system admin:
su
Now view the network connections:
In the last week I've had some need to setup some new PCs to control some of our machines in the lab. The problem being that the control interface between machine and PC is quite complicated and uses some pretty niche software, on the openSUSE OS (which is one of the most difficult linux OS's IMHO).
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