The Galaxy genomics workbench has problems with mixed content blocking in Firefox 23 when it’s running under https, which it should be based on sending logins and passwords. When you click on any of the public data sources (e.g. UCSC Tables) under Get Data, Firefox blocks it. The solution is to turn off mixed content […]
Author Archives: jimhu
Almost perfect day of college football yesterday
Stanford, Wisconsin, Texas A&M all won Texas, USC, and Notre Dame lose Mitigating factors: it’s early, and wins were against weaker opponents. couldn’t watch the Badgers, didn’t ppv for the Ags Cardinal and Aggies wins still leave concerns about future success. For the Ags, the future is next Saturday, when Alabama comes to town with […]
Weird, given Marissa Mayer’s rep from Google
I first heard of Marissa Mayer from a podcast of this talk from the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series. As I recall, one of the intereresting things was the way Google tested UI options and gathered data about what did or did not work for users. Given that, I am kind of surprised how hideous […]
Fix for Macports 2.2.0 upgrade problems (if /opt/local is a symlink)
I was having trouble updating MacPorts on one of our OSX servers. Error: org.macports.extract for port gnupg returned: command execution failed Please see the log file for port gnupg for details: /opt/local/var/macports/logs/_Volumes_r4_opt_local_var_macports_sources_rsync.macports.org_release_ports_mail_gnupg/gnupg/main.log Error: Unable to upgrade port: 1 To report a bug, follow the instructions in the guide: http://guide.macports.org/#project.tickets It turns out that version 2.2.0 doesn’t like symlinks to /opt/local that didn’t bother earlier […]
A biocurator ranking for Journals
There has been a lot of focus on impact factors for journals, and there are some interesting issues with how publishers can try to game the system. I wonder, however, if it would be useful to publish some alternative rankings of journals based on other criteria. Specifically, I’d love to see a ranking of journals […]
Microfiber stylii
Most of the time, I use my finger on my iPad, just as Steve Jobs intended. But there are times when a stylus is nice: Taking handwritten notes Actual drawing For a while, I’ve had a Wacom Bamboo stylus, which is one of the better ones that have soft rubber tips. But recently I got […]
WordPress 3.6 segmentation faults
Over at the biochemistry website, we’ve been getting some segmentation faults since upgrading to WordPress 3.6. Just updated Ubuntu and restarted apache and hoping this fixes the problem. ugh.
Can we make Science more family-friendly?
A couple of weeks ago, Jon Eisen tweeted a link to an article in the Atlantic: For Female Scientists, There’s No Good Time to Have Children Over the past decade these issues have come to the attention of universities in the United States and abroad. Many sensible policies have been introduced in an attempt to make […]
So it’s a Ponzi scheme?
The Detroit Free Press defends their home town against mischaracterizations in the national press with the first installment of The Truth About Detroit What was said: “Government employees and their overbearing unions have been on a decades-long crusade to defraud the taxpayer and unjustly enrich themselves. When everyday Americans are struggling to find job security and […]
Making ethics training memorable
Over at Freakonomics, a story about The Encyclopedia of Ethical Failure, a compendium of tales of misconduct, used in ethics training by the DoD.