Ara que comença a fer fred, el menjar calòric passa molt millor. Això és el cas de la majoria dels plats de la cuina romanesa. I, un dels components gairebé omnipresents de tota taula romanesa és la mămăligă, una preparació de farina de blat de moro bullida, que acompanya molts àpats actuant talment d'alternativa al pa. La mămăligă seria, al cap i a la fi, el mateix que al nord d'Itàlia es coneix amb el nom de polenta.

This article first appeared in redcedar. Also in a summarised version in Ellipse PRBB magazine.

It’s been almost a decade since the term “Open Science” first appeared in Wikipedia. The page was created by Aaron Swartz and initially redirected to the “Open Access” entry. Some years later this young activist committed suicide as a result of the pressure from the judicial charges against him after having uploaded many privative licensed articles to the Internet.

In a previous post I detailed how to set up a web-based streaming from a Raspberry Pi device. After having updated Raspbian to its latest stable version, jessie, I thought it could be a good moment for reconsidering the streaming approach I was using.

A few weeks ago I finally had my dissertation (PhD) defence. Below you can see the shown slides (in Catalan), trying to touch in around 3/4 hour many of the different involved works.

One of the mentioned topics was protein moonlighting (or multitasking), that is, the property that some protein molecules may have additional functions or roles apart from the one that is primarily annotated or known. As example, the group in which I worked during my PhD studies is actually keeping an exhaustive list of these cases.

This usage can be considered as a kind of metaphor of the original moonlighting term. As it can be read in Urban Dictionary, it refers to the fact of having an additional job, normally during moonlit hours (at night).

For a non-native English speaker it's always hard to know how popular certain words or expressions are. It was funny to learn that at least this word seemed to exist already during the 1970s in the USA. However, as we can see during a conversation of the main character of Taxi Driver, not all people may have been fully familiar with it.

Around one year and a half ago I started some testing with graph databases (Neo4j so far) and I used Gene Ontology and NCBI taxonomy datasets as sample cases. I explained my experience in this presentation by February 2015:

After a while, I finally found time to update my importing scripts and API Java extension so they could work with newer versions of Neo4J and Py2neo (2.2.3 and 2.0.7 at the time of writing).

Regarding Py2neo, I noticed that Neo4j REST API seems to rely more explicitly on Cypher queries that it did in the past. With the help of this article about multiprocessing in Python and Py2neo, and after several tries, I managed to get importing work within acceptable time.

As final tips, if you plan to use similar approaches with your own data, I would suggest to create nodes and populate their properties at the same time (keeping data in memory if necessary). I also noticed that trying to create relationships with multiple parallel processes fails, so keep only one worker for these steps.

L'11 de març de 2015 van complir-se 20 anys del llançament del que molts consideren millor videojoc de la història, Chrono Trigger. El joc, un RPG japonès desenvolupat per l'empresa Square (després Square Enix), relata la història d'uns personatges d'una realitat que recorda l'Edat moderna europea, que viatgen al llarg del temps per salvar el món d'un futur apocalíptic. Es va comercialitzar per a la consola Super Nintendo el 1995 primer a Japó i pocs mesos després als Estats Units. Malauradament, no va arribar a distribuir-se mai a Europa (com tampoc a la resta del territori PAL).

Per tal de preparar la Viquimarató de Bioinformàtica que tindrà lloc el proper divendres 27 de febrer de 2015 a Barcelona, una de les coses a fer és tenir preparat un llistat d'articles (inicial aquí) que suggerirem als participants perquè hi puguin treballar (sigui tant ampliant-los com creant-los de bell nou).

Fa una setmana, a l'acte de DebatCatDigital de Palafrugell, comentava que hi ha molts casos d'ús, actualment relativament simples a nivell tècnic, com ara xats, que acabem emprant en serveis externs i on potser llavors esdevenim carn de dades quan aquests se'ns ofereixen de forma gratuïta.

Fa unes setmanes, gràcies a la recomanació de n'Alina, vaig poder veure dues interessants pel·lícules sobre la figura d'Adolf Eichmann:

I purchased a RPi Camera for Xmas, and I could not wait for testing it with my personal aquarium. Of course, if you browse the web, you'll see I'm not the first one to try it with their aquatic pets. In any case, below I share with you some notes that can be helpful for setting up a low-CPU consuming web-streaming using a domestic Raspberry Pi (with Raspbian in my case).

The resources I mostly followed:

These winter holidays I've been taking care of my home network and I finally found some time to set up a Raspberry Pi for my everyday Internet needs.

Durant la 'sobretaula' després d'una de les sessions del festival Barcelona Pensa, em comentava un assistent que considerava adoptar Linux sempre que això comportés un compromís ideològic. Això m'ho deia, potser contrariat, perquè segurament se m'havia escapat abans algun comentari difús on remarcava la complexitat del món actual.

Si teniu l'ocasió, aprofiteu sens falta aquest cap de setmana del 15-16 de novembre de 2014 per visitar l'exposició del Big Bang Data del CCCB.

Personalment destacaria la secció, tot just entrar, on es relata gràficament com és la infrastructura d'Internet, sovint dissimulada rere metàfores puerils com 'núvol'.

Avui estava fent la sobretaula del sopar escoltant amb melangia èpica la banda sonora original de Chrono Trigger i, mentre llegia les fugaces piulades a la línia temporal del meu compte de Twitter, me n'adono que la definició del refrany Cada terra fa sa guerra no s'adiu massa a la idea que jo en tenia.

It's already almost 2 years that I wrote about the upcoming RESTful times in Bioinformatics. And well, it's already happening...
Just as curiosity, I will explain my recent experience using ENSEMBL REST API.