Well, everyone else was doing it

Everyone seems to be having fun with Wordle. Except for me, until I realised that all my machines were cursed with something named “icedtea-gcjwebplugin”, as opposed to the Sun java plugin. Problem solved. So there it is. But for the prominent “bioinformatics”, you’d never guess I was a biologist, would you. I do believe that this is telling me something.

Linux tip: forward email from M$ Exchange Server to GMail

My work email has migrated to M$ Exchange Server, with M$ Outlook Web Access. Eurgh. No more POP3 retrieval to my GMail account.

I restored sanity using an Ubuntu server as follows. Needless to say, this requires that (a) the exchange server allows IMAP access and (b) the SMTP server for your machine will relay mail outside of your domain.

Updated: to do it all via procmailrc, without .forward
Updated: to poll folders other than Inbox

FriendFeed “best of” the week

The new best of FriendFeed feature is proving to be a hit. It also provides material for people who are too busy to write real blog posts. Here’s my top 10, according to FriendFeed, from the past 7 days:

• We’re all looking forward to having an insider at Amazon Web Services
• Cameron explains FriendFeed for scientists
• A variety of (non-serious) explanations for the falling number of Google searches for bioinformatics-related keywords
• Our thoughts on certifying online research
• Get to know Prochlorococcus – you’re probably breathing the by-product of its metabolism right now
• Pierre on sorting articles by journal impact factor
• Could XMPP be the new MPI?
• Welcoming new members to the Life Scientists room
• Who’s off to ISMB 2008?
• Paris area employers: call this talented man

Automatic content for the people

Anyone who has ever built a website knows that maintaining it is a lot of work. There’s just making sure it hasn’t gone offline because the httpd daemon died. Constant monitoring for script kiddies and their SQL injections. Not to mention continually feeding it with fresh content, lest your audience become bored and desert.

I’ve always thought it would be cool to build a site that could more or less look after itself. There’s a myriad of content management systems to choose from, most of which are somewhat hackable in whatever language they happen to be coded in. One of the more mature in this respect is Drupal – which is the engine behind Eureka! Science News. It’s a fully-automated science news portal, using a bunch of customised Drupal modules to aggregate, cluster, categorise and rank articles.

First impressions are excellent. Coders will enjoy this post at Drupal explaining how it all works.

Notes from the day job: published #3, #4, 2008

This year, I’ve experienced what bloggers call – um, not blogging very much. One reason is that much of our conversation has moved to other services – notably FriendFeed. However, the main reason is that I have a day job: develop bioinformatics applications, perform research, publish articles, present talks and keep the boss happy. Read on for some “notes from the day job” – especially if protein kinases and their substrates are your thing.