Back of a Stamp

Reasons not to skydive

cass — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 12:22:00 +0000

British Parachute Association just posted a survey (on facebook) on why members are losing interest in the sport. Thought I’d have a quick read in the name of procrastination. Reasons included:

“too many pre-madonnas on the dropzone”

“skydiving did not really challenge me interlecturally”

and my personal favourite:

“<…received bollocking which…> put me of the under canape aspect of skydiving”

Barcamp London Venue Crisis

cass — Fri, 21 May 2010 13:47:43 +0000

The venue for London Barcamp 8 has fallen through. They have minimal budget and they need:

Venue available on the weekend of June 12th/13th
1 “large” space that can hold enough people for the opening talk (~150)
between 5 to 10 spaces for sessions, sizes varying between 10 to 40 people per room
possibility for about 60 people to stay overnight for hacking, networking, and more
some sort of internet connection

They’ve already contacted most of the usual suspects (Guardian, PayPal, BBC, Google etc).

Can you help? Contact Cristiano Betta (cbetta@gmail.com).

Biogeeks Tech Meet

cass — Thu, 20 May 2010 11:52:02 +0000

Monthly biogeekery and beer at the London Biogeeks Tech Meet tonight at Imperial College London.

Next month’s is at KCL, which means I’m on the hunt for people to speak. Get in touch if you’re interested.

Running a single test in Perl

cass — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 10:03:18 +0000

Just a reminder to myself, you can:


	make TEST_FILES=t/Foo-Bar.t test

NGS Day in London?

cass — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 16:40:26 +0000

Elia Stupka has proposed a Next Gen Sequencing Day in London.

Science Hack Day, London

cass — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 16:14:35 +0000

Science Hackday at the Guardian offices in London.

From their wiki:

Where will this take place?
London. The Guardian have kindly offered up part of their building to serve as a Venue.

When will it happen?
The weekend of Saturday, June 19th and Sunday, June 20th, 2010.

What’s a Hack Day?
A bunch of geeks get together in the same physical space to collaborate and create awesome things, usually by mashing up APIs. A Hack Day is usually 48 hours long and involves a sleepover …although not much sleeping happens when everyone is either hacking or playing Werewolf.

Who is this for?
Imagine a Venn diagram showing the intersection of web geeks and science geeks …that’s a pretty big intersection. Science Hack Day is for anyone with an interest in science who wants to dabble with APIs and datasets. If you’re a coder or a designer or just an enthusiastic person with good ideas, Science Hack Day is for you.

Sweave Basics

cass — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 16:22:37 +0000

Some notes I made while I was figuring out how to generate reports in R with Sweave: http://mng.iop.kcl.ac.uk/site/node/489

Biogeeks Tech Meet Mar 18th @ KCL

cass — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 11:53:35 +0000

Karim Chine doing a workshop on Elastic-R: a google docs-like portal for data analysis in the cloud

http://biogeeks.wordpress.com/category/event/meeting/techmeet/

Biogeeks Feb Tech Meet – Thurs

cass — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 14:46:47 +0000

This is tomorrow at Imperial. All welcome. Come along to the pub if you can’t make it to the talks.

Full details at : http://biogeeks.wordpress.com/2010/01/07/february-tech-meet/

Briefly, talks are:

Andrew Clegg : Building your own search engine with Apache Solr
Manuel Corpas – KaryoDAS: An Interactive Genome Visualization Tool
Phil Dawes – Decentralised version control with Git

Dev8D

cass — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 14:42:40 +0000

eeep. Forgot I’d signed up to go to dev8d.

Looks like it might be fun though – I’ve signed up for a beginners’ Arduino workshop and a Clojure coding dojo. Might drop in on the Rails and Python stuff too, as people keep trying to convince me Perl is going the way of Linear A. I’ve been playing with Rakefiles and work is a lot more organised as a consequence, so Ruby’s in my good books at the moment. Still, Moose, Catalyst and co. seem to have grabbed most of Ruby and Python’s good ideas for Perl5. Plus, I’m going to have to learn Perl6 for the same reason that I own The Second Coming and Chinese Democracy. Not sure I can justify spending the time on another Perl-ish language.

None of this is very relevant to work though – I’ve signed up to the linked data workshop on the first day, so hopefully I’ll come back all inspired about building an ontology for our lab data and getting our data online with some shiny REST API to get binding sites and histone mods in given genome regions and so on. Or at least finding a student to do it…