Category: Software and Programming

Categories
Oddities Software and Programming

Genomic Music and Greasemonkey

Here’s an article by some folk who’ve made a tool for converted protein sequences into musical tones:

We have converted genome-encoded protein sequences into musical notes to reveal auditory patterns without compromising musicality. … The conversion will help make genomic coding sequences more approachable for the general public, young children, and vision-impaired scientists.

You can go to the article page and listen to an MP3 of Human thymidylate synthase A.

And, to prove that bioinformatics geeks are as geeky as they come, you can install a Greasemonkey script that lets you play any sequence in a webpage.

Categories
Blather Software and Programming

On booting back into Windows

I’ve been using Linux (Kubuntu!) on my home computer since around late June 2006.

No, it’s not any better than Windows XP. In fact, it has it’s share of annoyances. But I sit in front of my computer on an uncomfortable chair in a cold and dusty enclosed balcony with no elbow rests, so I’m used to being uncomfortable using my computer.

But it’s telling how much discomfort I found when booting back into Windows to do some work with 8-bit Hebrew files (you can’t even see 8-bit Hebrew in Scite on Linux), and having to make do with Firefox 1.5.0x and Firebug 0.4 after getting so used to Firefox 2.0 and Firebug 1.0. Which I also use at Work (Windows again).

Yep. Because “Desktop” is now “the environment you use to run your browser Firefox”.

Sort of like how “Windows” was once “the environment you use to run Word”.

Categories
Software and Programming

image preloading hack

Found on the JQuery mailing list, here’s a javascript hack to preload hidden images to a webpage, by Luke Lutman – (this is just a quick note for myself)

$(window).bind('load', function(){
var preload = [
'/images/assets/file/1.gif',
'/images/assets/file/2.gif',
'/images/assets/file/3.gif'
];
$(document.createElement('img')).bind('load', function(){
if(preload[0]) this.src = preload.shift();
}).trigger('load');
});

Categories
Software and Programming

IFRAMES suck

Finally, it seems that the inline frames introduced in HTML 4.0 will be mostly harmless.

Jakob Nielsen, 1996

Having stumbled across that text less then 24 hours after dealing with a hacked site that had it’s pages modified with an invisible iframe that attempts to load a malicious site, I couldn’t help thinking idiot! as I read that.

Categories
long Software and Programming

JQuery documentation in PDF

This is documentation for old versions; because of changes in the way the JQuery source and documentation is organized, my scripts no longer work with the current version.

I’ve been fascinated for a while by JQuery, a rather fine javascript library, a fact that I’ve alluded to in the past, but which I appear to have started paying attention to sometime in late August. I use it at work, and I’ve actually tried to unbold every message in its mailing list, once.

One of the nicer things about JQuery is its documentation. However, I came across Chris Heilmann’s complaint that JQuery (and other javascript libraries) should have its documentation readily available for offline reading in PDF. Inspired by this, I decided to write a utility to build a PDF file from the JQuery documentation.

Well, now here it is, a birthday present for JQuery.

UPDATED for version 1.1.4:

Older versions, JQuery 1.1:

The PDFs created have clickable tables of contents for navigation, and aren’t intended for printing.

Continue reading “JQuery documentation in PDF”