tsocks

tsocks - Transparent SOCKS Proxying Library

At work they have just installed a new web filtering system and it seems to be destroying half my life: ical/webdav doesn't work, Firefox maximises when it downloads a file, tasque (my task manager) does not download all my tasks from rememberthemilk.

One particular problem is that I can't reliably use R to download gene annotation data from ensembl using the biomaRt library. I thought I might try and use ssh with a SOCKS proxy to isolate the problem but couldn't work out how to make R uses the SOCKS proxy. tsocks is a wrapper program that intercepts any network requests from the child program and passes to the SOCKS proxy.

I'm having trouble getting it to work with R at the moment, but its a good idea anyhow.

Guardian Football Chalkboards

Chalkboards | Football | guardian.co.uk

The Guardian have just recently put up a football chalkboards flash webapp. You can pick any match and look at how any player or the whole team did certain things like shot, pass, tackle etc.. Its also quite nice how you can set the time in the match to look at. Very interesting and definitely worth a look.

Bring On The Trumpets

Matt Berry we love you

CryoPID - A Process Freezer for Linux

CryoPID - A Process Freezer for Linux

This looks like a nifty utility. Basically, it allows one to save the state of a process (program) to file and then resume it. So you can for example restart the computer without having to run the program again. I can see this being very useful for some of the analysis that I do that takes a long time.

xbmc-iplayer

This is a plugin for XBMC (the media centre application on my modded xbox) which should allow access to BBC iplayer. As the xbox is attached to the TV we can missed BBC stuff on the nice screen.

Looks easy enough to install, I will try and have a go this weekend.

MP3s = Communism

Brilliant!

Software so A can smash the keyboard and get a response

Here is some software designed to entertain babies when they try to destroy your laptop/computer:

OS X: AlphaBaby
Windows: baby smash

How to Keep Fruits and Veggies Fresh

A useful table on what fruit and veg to store where.