Dev

Folding Farmer is a service for Folding @ Home, the protein folding distributed computing project. Instead of downloading the @home client and running it on your own machine, you can subscribe to Folding Farmer and utilize their computing cluster to process work units on your behalf.

Because the Folding @ Home project assigns credit to people [...]

I am concerned that in our zeal to move on to the “next paradigm” we may be missing a tremendous opportunity to extend and deepen the current paradigm. We have only scratched the surface of what would be possible if end users could freely program their own applications… In fact, [...]

SQLite’s feature list is seemingly perfect for exploratory development and conceptual proofs. SQLite is lightweight with no configuration required. The database is stored in a local file that is easily portable* between systems. The data requirements for prototypes, blogs, and pet frog web apps† are well within the capabilities of SQLite. The single-access model also [...]

Enamored as I am of Twitter, I wonder about the long-term availability of the system. The business model might run its course or be overtaken by others offering the same service. People might grow tired of posting to or reading it.

Twitter’s ephemeral—and increasingly blasé—form may make you question the utility of preserving all that [...]

I am in the process of adopting a version control system for my personal projects, not just for source code but for writing as well. I have decided against subversion, although it seems to be the way now to distribute code on the internet. I am currently evaluating Mercurial.

Mercurial is a decentralized version control system. [...]

Now that I am leaving Japan, I have started taking notice of the more esoteric items that I will miss. One is programming in Ruby on a Japanese keyboard.

At work I use the Japanese version of the Apple Pro Keyboard, which makes a few deviations from the standard JIS keyboard. Japanese keyboards are qwerty, so [...]

Just as politics has met “Web 2.0″ design, so has science. Recently out-of-beta, the Community Cyberinfrastructure for Advanced Microbial Ecology Research and Analysis (that’s CAMERA) is an online collaborative database for microbial metagenomics. Metagenomics is the sequencing of genomes from environmental samples, and is expected to pick up the genomes of diverse microorganisms that can’t [...]

Twitter

Twitter is an internal monologue that other people can overhear. I decided to give it a spin when they moved to my web host. I use it with Twitterrific, and I love the way a new message from someone I’m following punctuates my workflow. It’s like the first time you had email: you hear the [...]

95% percent of my computer use at home involves the network. Since getting OmniWeb (which lets you manage browsing), I’ve been finding more ways to drop other applications in favor of web apps.

Joyent Connector

Joyent is an suite of web apps for email, calendar, contacts, and bookmarks. Although it’s currently missing some interface patterns that we’ve [...]

I’ve started using the GTD web app Tracks to organize my lab work. When setting up Tracks, I went with PostgreSQL instead of SQLite. Why? Tracks is the perfect kind of app to couple with SQLite: single client access, not a lot of data, personal (read: undemanding) usage. However, I simply know PostgreSQL better, so [...]