Those who have been watching may have noticed I quietly started developing an Android application in the last month or so. It’s still super-buggy and far from feature complete, but I thought it was time to announce it here (”release early, release often”). It’s not ready for real users yet, but developers may like to take a little look.
A quick post to share some bookmarklets I made.
I’ve found QR-code “2D barcodes” really handy when playing with my Android phone.
Sometimes, I have a web page open on my desktop PC, and I want to quickly load it in the Android Chrome browser to see what it looks like. Rather than re-typing it with my thumbs, the Barcode Scanner application allows me to scan a QR-code from the screen of my computer, and if the decoded text contains a URL, open it in the Android browser.
These two bookmarklets turn the URL of the current page that is open in your browser into a scannable QR-code:
Google Charts API based bookmarklet: Drag this link –>Current URL to QR-code to your bookmarks toolbar.
The code is: javascript:location.href='http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=qr&chs=350x350&chl='+escape(location.href);
Alternatively, I made a Kaywa QR-code generator version. Drag this link –>Current URL to QR-code to your bookmarks toolbar.
The code is: javascript:location.href='http://qrcode.kaywa.com/img.php?s=8&d='+escape(location.href);
They both do the same thing, so you probably only want one. Only tested on Firefox.
(Update: seemed Wordpress ate the javascript in the bookmarklet links … should be okay now)
Since I got a new toy for Christmas, I’ve become interested in geolocation and the fun things you can do when you have an internet-connected GPS-enabled device in your pocket. I’m also a compulsive delicious tagger, so I quickly discovered the existing practice for geotagging delicious bookmarks.
Essentially, this seems to be: add the tag ‘geotagged‘, along with the tags ‘geo:lat=X.xxx‘ and ‘geo:lon=X.xxx‘, where the X.xxx’s are the latitude and longtitude numbers that are likely to come straight out of your GPS, in decimal degrees (WGS84).
This is all very nice, but the problem with tags in this format is that there is no easy or efficient way to use them to retrieve all items tagged for a particular locality. Sure, if I’m standing right on top of the Eureka Tower at -37.821362,144.964213, I can search for tags geo:lat=-37.821362 and geo:lon=144.964213 to find all the geotagged links for that exact location, but what if I’m standing 50 metres across the street looking up at the tower and want to search for links near my current location ? Continue reading ‘Delicious geohashes … mmmm … tagging *drool*’
I noticed an interesting post over on BoingBoing: “Comfort with meaninglessness the key to good programmers“. It outlines some research by Dehnadi and Bornat on attributes that can predict aptitude in computer programming. They conclude that a “deep comfort with meaninglessness” is an important predictor of programming aptitude.
I think comfort with meaninglessness is an important skill in studying biology (and probably other sciences too). Many times, during the description of a system, various acronyms are thrown about as labels for entities (or ‘actors’) in that system. An important skill of the scientist is being able to follow how all the actors in the system relate to each other, without necessarily knowing anything about the specific properties of those actors. There are lots of protein and gene names which often bear very little meaning relative to the biological entity that they label, and fixating on what ‘the name’ means simply distracts from the true nature of the entity.
Continue reading ‘Naming in molecular biology: get comfortable with meaninglessness !’
Something broke out of the picket-fence surrounding Nature Networks Blogs. I’ve never participated in a blog meme … but this one appealed to me simply because I liked the questions. I haven’t read anyone else’s answers yet, to avoid biasing my own.
1. What is your blog about?
I often ask myself this question. Being a scientist, I always feel like it should be about science, and the various biological systems I work with. I reality, it is about programming, bioinformatics, the web with the tiniest bit of structural biology thrown in. I used to blog about Linux related things occasionally, but I split that off into another blog (which gets 10 times more traffic 
).
Continue reading ‘That Science Blog Meme Thing Going Around’
