Tag Archive for 'ego'

Buy My Book!

Was I really involved in writing something that sounds this classy?!?!

“Modern bioinformatics encompasses a broad and ever-changing range of activities involved with the management and analysis of data from molecular biology experiments. Despite the diversity of activities and applications, the basic methodology and core tools needed to tackle bioinformatics problems is common to many projects. Building Bioinformatics Solutions provides a comprehensive introduction to this methodology, explaining how to acquire and use the most popular development tools, how to apply them to build processing pipelines, and how to make the results available through visualisations and web-based services for deployment either locally or via the Internet. The main development tools covered in this book are the MySQL database management system, the Perl programming language, and the R language for statistical computing. These industry standard open source tools form the core of many bioinformatics projects, both in academia and industry. The methodologies introduced are platform independent, and all the examples that feature have been tested on Windows, Linux and Mac OS. This advanced textbook is suitable for graduate students and researchers in the life sciences who wish to automate analyses or create their own databases and web-based tools. No prior knowledge of software development is assumed. Having worked through the book, the reader should have the necessary core skills to develop computational solutions for their specific research programmes. The book will also help the reader overcome the inertia associated with penetrating this field, and provide them with the confidence and understanding required to go on to develop more advanced bioinformatics skills.”

The book that I am a co-author on, Building Bioinformatics Solutions is shortly going to be available on Amazon (UK) and Amazon (US) as well as other countries.

If you’re looking for an introduction to some of the tools used in the field of Bioinformatics (programming, databases, data analysis) or even just looking for a general introduction to Perl programming, MySQL or R why not check it out. :)

Still here and after more?!?! Why not head on over to bixsolutions.net - the companion site for the book, and take a peek at what’s on offer.

Now get off my lawn! ;)

A Better Ls for Mac OS X

I’m a bit of a command-line freak and like to spend a fair amount of time with the terminal open… As such I like to spend a small amount of time getting the terminal set-up nicely. Other than changing the default colour scheme and font, one (slightly) more drastic change is to replace the standard implementation of ls for one that is slightly more configurable.

The default ls on OS X comes from BSD and compared to the GNU/Linux alternative is slightly lacking when it comes to comes to changing how things look - so what I like to do is replace it with the GNU ls available in MacPorts - this allows me to get a terminal setup like below:

terminal.png

Continue reading ‘A Better Ls for Mac OS X’

Let’s Get Started…

Welcome to the introductory post to hocuspokus.net! So, what’s going on here then?!?

Well, basically this is going to be a place for me, Darren Oakley to dump my thoughts and little ideas that I have on a semi-regular basis… Expect posts on subjects such as Apple (god - not another mac blogger!), Perl programming, Bioinformatics (it’s what I do for a living), Unix geekiness, Xbox 360 and many things in between as I go about my daily life.

Anyway - enough of this boring first post nonsense! Will be back soon with more interesting things to say!