Archive for the 'Programming' Category

Google Clear Button

Tuesday, March 13th, 2007

Here is a simple Greasemonkey script that adds a Clear button to Google search result pages.

N-Triple Converter Comparison

Monday, March 12th, 2007

In order to bulk-load RDF data into Oracle (Spatial) 11g, the data needs to be converted to N-Triples first. If the data set is large, this step can add quite a bit of overhead, which is why I decided to benchmark and compare several options.

Metalink for UniProt RDF

Wednesday, March 7th, 2007

The UniProt RDF distribution is over 5GB large. To help people retrieve the data more efficiently, we now mirror the data and provide a Metalink file that describes all the file locations.

Fastest Java Virtual Machine?

Tuesday, January 16th, 2007

The best choice of virtual machine is of course dependent both on the application and on the hardware the application is running on; here are the conclusions of a performance comparison with the latest batch of Java virtual machines for a web application that makes heavy use of BerkeleyDB and Lucene on an off-the-shelf Intel machine with 64-bit extensions.

Blast Google Gadget

Tuesday, November 7th, 2006

The Google Gadgets API can be used to create small applications that people can add to their personalized Google home page. Here is a simple “gadget” for blasting protein sequences.

Google Life Sciences Search Engine

Tuesday, October 24th, 2006

Google now allows you to create custom search engines. I used this to set up a search engine that searches in well know life sciences sites.

dog – better than cat

Thursday, May 18th, 2006

How do you concatenate two huge XML files efficiently without writing any code?

Google "Subscribed Links" for Enzyme Database

Wednesday, May 17th, 2006

Google Subscribed Links provide a mechanism for adding information at the top of a Google search results page. I set up an example that can be used to see information from the Enzyme Nomenclature Database when searching for something like EC 1.2.3.4.

ToonTalk

Tuesday, January 31st, 2006

It looks like our initiative to port all of our code to a more compact and efficient language didn’t get very far. So what next?

Producing Open Source Software

Monday, January 23rd, 2006

Here are some notes on the book Producing Open Source Software. The book does an excellent job of explaining how open source projects work and how they deal with typical problems.