Category Archives: Software

Genetics, Joke, Software

Face recognition, face value

With a new child, people are always asking if the baby looks like the father or the mother – probably a prehistoric social reflex to confirm that this is your offspring that you are caring about.
Face recognition clearly is a science of its own – a lot of heuristics and Bayesian computing – more at face-rec.org – and even a big business if you think of automatic passport control or age determination for goods that are only allowed for adults.
Face recognition works quite robust as I found in the advanced online demo at betaface.com. A new browser plugin from polar rose will even allows to annotate web pictures – Orwell meets Flickr.

img000843.jpg

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 06.04.2026
Genetics, Software

Many, many maps

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Ever since I created a linkage map of the human genome with old-fashinoned crimap, we are talking about “mapping” diseases and genes. GIS mapping also ever increases – see the interesting first monday article Many, many maps: Empowerment and online participatory mapping, that has a lot of details about grassroots initiatives building on Keyhole/Google technology. I learned also about Common Census – looks like grassroot epidemiology.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 06.04.2026
Software

Powerpoint slides in wordpress

I have tested several programs for their usefulness of showing Powerpoint slides on the web- some packages create standalone pages only while others have major problems with figures, graphics or transitions (or are quite expensive).

A rather simple method works at least in part – loading a .ppt file in Open Office Impress and exporting it to .swf. The flv player, however, creates a messy display as it doesn’t use the full display area.

Another option is to export all pages as 800×600 .jpg files and mount them in File Show Maker to a standalone flash film – as seen below in a talk that I have given in 2006:

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 06.04.2026
Software

Undocumented Thunderbird function – help needed

For documenting a research project I want to insert quick links to previous emails. Clicking a link should kickstart Thunderbird and go directly to a known message. Mozilla.org says

Athough Google desktop is able to do it, there is no clear API to instruct Thunderbird to display a given email stored in its mail box (knowing the folder & message ID)

Here is how Google Desktop Search (GDS) links to an email

gsdurl.png

What I have found out so far by comparing different links

(1) is the fixed parameter relating to my hard disk??
(2) is a variable parameter relating to the physical location of my \daten\Mail\thunderbird\imap\INBOX file??
(3) is the unique Message-ID that may be seen in Thunderbird with the View Header plugin
(4) the variable salt/seed value that is stored in the registry at HKEY_CURRENT_USER\\Google\\CustomSearch\\Google Desktop Search\\Url which may be retrieved with a 2 line perl script.

So I am ready to construct URLs that link to an email by using GDS. This is, however, not very elegant. Isn’t there any other way (maybe by a Thunderbird extension) to construct and follow links directly to emails? Can somebody trace with Sysinternals Process Explorer what GDS spits out and follow it up at XUL planet ?

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 06.04.2026
Software

At its heart

43 folders writes:

Remember that your blog is only incidentally a publishing system or a public website. At its heart, your blog represents the evolving expression of your most passionately held ideas. It’s a conversation you’re holding up with the world and with yourself — a place where you can watch your own thoughts take different shapes and occasionally surprise you with where they end up…

wow – couldn’t say that in a better way.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 06.04.2026
Genetics, Software

Human genome variation

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Being a former curator for a genetic disease database, I received a PM that explained why the foundation of the Human Genome Variation Society did not include most of the HUGO Mutation Database Owners — most did not join as they found it difficult to pay for membership. This reflects the overall frustration in obtaining funds for databases projects that are between research and service. Now, a new initiative for the Human Variome Project (HVP) is started to create a focus pulling the whole vision together and to assist in fundraising. Meeting details are at www.humanvariomeproject.org. I strongly support this initiative. All genetic variation databases are sharing a high interest in the community but zero interest at funding bodies (more). I have a dream…

the flyer…
humvariomeproj.png

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 06.04.2026
Joke, Software

Laptop stolen – phoning home

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Scientists are frequent travellers – hopefully you have always your harddisk encrypted. There are many companies that offer to trace your computer like Computrace(R), zTrace(R), LapTrak(R), BoomerangIt(R), LoJack(R) and PC-Guardian(R). Save your $/€ for your next experiment, here is the trick: During the next boot your laptop will send out a http request to any server you like. You simply need to watch the server logfile if your stolen laptop is phoning home…
For installation please download LaptopService.cmd, LaptopService.reg and two small binaries from the windows ressource kit. Adjust path and server name before running LaptopService.cmd. Voilà, that’s it – for a good joke look at Slashdot.

|wj_LaptopService.cmd|

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 06.04.2026
Software

XP system crash

I had to manage a system crash this weekend – where even the rescue console did not work. I learned that (1) my old Knoppix CD could neither write to the hard disk nor (2) read access a truecrypt partition. (3) Too late, I should have spent some money on ghost(r) or true image(r)! I further learned on the next day that (4) Bart PE does not work with OEM versions, (5) truecrypt versions are not compatible and (6) a grml iso is not helpful at the system prompt. Ultimately I came across (7) sysresccd that includes

  • GParted: partition resize tool
  • GNU Parted: a text tool for editing disk partitions
  • Partimage: a partition image tool
  • Plenty file systems tools allow you to format, resize, and debug an existing partition of your hard disk
  • Ntfs3g allows you to mount your partition and get a full read/write access to the NTFS partition
  • Sfdisk allows you to backup and restore your partition table

wow, simply a lifesaver.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 06.04.2026
Allergy, Joke, Philosophy, Software

Science of course and effective too

Most people in the field search Pubmed but there is another site that I frequently visit – the European patent database that often have more concise information. Look at current allergy patents – the last one will definitely work you may also use a big plastic bag ;-)

patents.png

Be aware that being cynical is probably bad for your heart.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 06.04.2026
Software

Biomedical journal search – a small gift

Pubmed often leads you to dead ends – journal citations without a link to the journals’ home. Google helps sometimes but is always time consuming. As a little gift for you, I have written a small bookmarklet that will scan the Regensburg library files – just left click on the

bookmarklet

link below and move it to your browser toolbar. With just a mouse click you can then locate the journals homepage.

Addendum

Another approach – the LibraryLookup Bookmarklet Generator.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 06.04.2026
Joke, Software

Playing with your browser

Some blog authors are nuts about protecting their web site from copying files. There are many ways to protect your site – but only one really good (publish nothing). I often see small javascripts that disable the ability to right-click where javascript.about.com has a much simpler solution:

<body oncontextmenu=”return false;”>

Please try a right click now…
If you are fooled by a web author in such a way, what could you do? tech-recipes has the answer: Of course, we can use javascript to turn it back on.

When visiting the offending website, type the following into the URL bar of your browser:
javascript:void(document.oncontextmenu=null)

Happy browsing, yea, yea.

 

CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 06.04.2026