eric.jain.name 

Spent this weekend at the Spring 2008 Pacific Northwest Software Symposium. Here are my notes (trimmed down to whatever I felt was new & noteworthy to me) and some general comments about the event.

I recently needed to add support for extracting data from Excel files (which are still ubiquitous in labs) to a Java application.

Blist is an interesting cross between a spreadsheet application and an interface to a proper database. The goal (I believe) is to allow mere mortals to create and share simple databases on the Web.

While looking for a birthday and farewell (I was just leaving the Swiss-Prot group) present for Amos Bairoch, I came across a company that creates custom action figures. Here’s the result!

Some pictures and notes from a one-week trip to Rwanda.

During the last two weeks I ran some tests to answer a few questions that had been accumulating:

1. Should I disable hyper-threading (ht)?
2. How much does doubling the available memory improve performance?
3. Mirror, mirror on the wall, who has the fastest JVM of them all?

It’s not uncommon for organizations to have strict policies regarding the use of GPLed code, due to the somewhat viral nature of this license.

One year after the amazing and memorable conference that was held at the 20th anniversary of Swiss-Prot we’ve made all the talks available on Google Video. Here’s a starting point. I heard it’s going to be a rainy weekend ;-)

Just got back from the ISMB conference in Vienna. Turned out to be a quite busy conference — I barely managed to attend any talks :-)

In the latest effort to make myself obsolete by the end of this year, we are looking for a software developer to help us better make our data available to both humans and machines. The main responsibilities of this position will be the further development of the UniProt web site and the UniProt RDF distribution.