Category Archives: Software

Joke, Software

Less than one mistake in every 6 million deliveries

I have seen recently a TV documentation about the Dabbawalas in Mumbai who deliver freshly cooked food to the workplaces and return the empty boxes back to the customer’s home. According to Wikiedia.

In 2002, Forbes Magazine found its reliability to be that of a six sigma standard. More than 175,000 or 200,000 lunch boxes get moved every day by an estimated 4,500 to 5,000 dabbawalas, all with an extremely small nominal fee and with utmost punctuality Continue reading Less than one mistake in every 6 million deliveries →

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 24.11.2025
Software

A Mac OSX journalling error can inhibit the boot disk to be mounted

The screenshot below shows my desperate search why my Macbook wouldn’t boot again (following a cold reset writing a large Photoshop CS5 file for more than 15 minutes).

The verbose boot mode (APPLE+S) showed some error with the journalling system, basically an error as described at the currently non functioning Apple Support Board

jnl: replay_journal: bad block list header @ 0x4bra50 (checksum 0xega0fee1 != 0x927a5993)
jnl: journal_open: Error replaying the journal!
hfs: early jnl init: failed to open/create the journal (retval 0).

Unfortunately nothing helped. Booting from an external disk just showed a normal, error-free HD in disk utility. Continue reading A Mac OSX journalling error can inhibit the boot disk to be mounted →

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 24.11.2025
Software

Optimized SSD under OSX

Having now a SSD in use for more than one year, here are my accumulated tweaks. The first one is Smart Sleep which greatly enhances sleeping/wakening time. Disabling the motion sensor (“sudo pmset -a sms 0”) doesn’t hurt but is isn’t really necessary. Mounting the SSD noatime , however, gives a measurable performance gain. And at the end, I dropped that RAM thingy as it breaks with every system update.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 24.11.2025
Genetics, Software

R cloud computing

A recent article on WPA hacking using the Amzon EC2 cloud computing facility let me wonder whether there couldn’t be more useful projects. For example gene-gene interaction testing would be nice – indeed somebody has already setup a possibility to use R: Robert Grossman, director at the Informatics at the Institute for Genomics and Systems Biology. Great, many thanks!
What’s even better, a

… 60 Genomes dataset can be found here, as part of the public data that Bionimbus makes available to researchers. With the Bionimbus Community Cloud, the data is available via both the commodity Internet, as well as via high performance research networks, such as the National LambdaRail and Internet2 … If you are a member of the Bionimbus Community Cloud, then you don’t need to download the data but can compute over the data directly with Bionimbus. Currently, we are not making the Bionimbus Cloud generally available, but expect to do so beginning in approximately June, 2011.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 24.11.2025
Software

Mac wallpaper with notifications

Do you want to know what the large figures on my desktop mean? These are the counts of important emails (with sender in my addressbook), all other unread emails as well as unread RSS feeds.

It turned out to be a bit tricky what to enter into the Geektool shell window – here is my solution:

|wj_geektool.sh|

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 24.11.2025
Software

Why I don’t have an iphone (yet)

Just recently I read an interesting blog entry of another internet veteran. I am reprinting here the main argument

The iPhone vision of the mobile Internet’s future omits controversy, sex, and freedom, but includes strict limits on who can know what and who can say what. It’s a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord’s pleasure and fear his anger. Continue reading Why I don’t have an iphone (yet) →

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 24.11.2025
Genetics, Software

OSX 10.6, Macports, GD and finally Circos

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I need live circos plotting for an upcoming seminar next year.
After installing the most recent xcode, a new macports and a fresh GD library, I issued on the command prompt

sudo port selfupdate
sudo port install gd2
which perl
sudo perl -MCPAN -e shell
cpan> install MD5
cpan> install YAML
cpan> install CPAN
cpan> reload cpan
cpan> install Clone
cpan> install GD
cpan> install GD::Polyline Continue reading OSX 10.6, Macports, GD and finally Circos →

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 24.11.2025
Allergy, Philosophy, Software

Keep secret

There is a new Edge Special Event about the Hillis’s question “WHO GETS TO KEEP SECRETS?”

The question of secrecy in the information age is clearly a deep social (and mathematical) problem, and well worth paying attention to.
When does my right to privacy trump your need for security?; Should a democratic government be allowed to practice secret diplomacy? Would we rather live in a world with guaranteed privacy or a world in which there are no secrets? If the answer is somewhere in between, how do we draw the line?

With all the wikileaks hype over the last year, the Edge essay is la perfect supplement to our last paper about anonymity in genetics – check out BMC Ethics “Caught you: Threats to confidentiality due to the public release of large-scale genetic data sets“.
What we didn’t mention in this paper are more complicated statistics like stochastic record linkage – more on that in RJournal 2/2010, p.61 ff

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf accessed 24.11.2025