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Showing posts from January, 2010

Head of the league

Whoop! I am top of my work's fantasy football league. That's a surprise but pleasing.

An open letter to Apple from the fanboys | BitterWallet

eigenclass - A better backup system based on Git

A better backup system based on Git

A fast, powerful backup system built upon Git and efficient, compact tools written in OCaml (faster than the C counterpart with 1/5th of the code :)

UPDATE (2008-03-31) gibak 0.3.0 released

Recent events have pushed me to get serious about backing up my data. I'm naturally inclined to use simple solutions over specialized backup systems, preferring something like rsync to a special-purpose tool. As far as "standard" tools go, however, git provides a very nice infrastructure that can be used to build your own system, to wit:

  • it is more space-efficient than most incremental backup schemes, since it does file compression and both textual *and* binary deltas (in particular, it's better than solutions relying on hardlinks or incremental backups à la tar/cpio)
  • its transport mechanism is more efficient than rsync's
  • it is fast: recoving your data is *faster* than cp -a
  • you keep the full revision history
  • powerful toolset with a rich vocabulary

Interesting

Posted via web from danbrewer's posterous

Google Docs: Download

The GDD python script backs up your entire archive of google documents and can be put in a cron job to make this occur automatically at perscribed times.

Posted via web from danbrewer's posterous

Make your own David Cameron poster

Brilliant stuff.

Found via Jake

Posted via web from danbrewer's posterous

xkcd - Dirty Harry meets Rain Man

First-Person Tetris

AHhhh, you got to love it.

Posted via web from danbrewer's posterous

The Holocaust We Will Not See

The Holocaust We Will Not See: "Avatar, James Cameron’s blockbusting 3-D film, is both profoundly silly and profound. It’s profound because, like most films about aliens, it is a metaphor for contact between different human cultures. But in this case the metaphor is conscious and precise: this is the story of European engagement with the native peoples of the Americas. It’s profoundly silly because engineering a happy ending demands a plot so stupid and predictable that it rips the heart out of the film. The fate of the native Americans is much closer to the story told in another new film, The Road, in which a remnant population flees in terror as it is hunted to extinction." By George Monbiot

BBC News - Reporter breaks an 'unbreakable' mobile phone at CES

A census of amplified and overexpressed human cancer genes : Nature Reviews Cancer

This paper, that I am an author on, was released on 24th December 2009: "Integrated genome-wide screens of DNA copy number and gene expression in human cancers have accelerated the rate of discovery of amplified and overexpressed genes. However, the biological importance of most of the genes identified in such studies remains unclear. In this Analysis, we propose a weight-of-evidence based classification system for identifying individual genes in amplified regions that are selected for during tumour development. In a census of the published literature we have identified 77 genes for which there is good evidence of involvement in the development of human cancer."

I spent a huge amount of time on this one but I am still pretty low on the author pecking order. This is for a super high impact journal, "Nature Reviews Cancer" which has a 2008 ISI Impact Factor of 30.762.

Also check out the associated website which I put together just before Christmas. Hopefully, this work will get further funding and get regularly updated.