08:44 – I sent off the preface and lab safety chapter to the reviewers yesterday. That leaves the introduction, which is well in progress, and a lab session that I wasn’t sure I’d have time to do before deadline. That one is on simulated DNA gel electrophoresis, “simulated” because we’ll use dyes rather than actual DNA fragments for the separation.
Those dyes–crystal violet, methylene blue, and safranin O–are included in the kit as biostains, and they all migrate the same direction in a gel. We’ll use their different molecular masses as proxies for DNA fragments of differing BP size. We’d use real DNA, but that’d require expensive restriction enzymes, and wouldn’t produce very distinct banding in an agar gel (as opposed to agarose, which is much, much more expensive than agar, which isn’t cheap itself). I was thinking about having readers pre-run the gels to clear out some of the gunk that’s present in plain agar, but that’s really more trouble than it’s worth.
My 5 year-old Asus laptop is — I guess — getting Windows rot. Even though it is a dual core 2+ghz machine, it is taking longer and longer to do what used to be essentially instantaneous. I have been living dangerously, as I have not had a backup machine since I left Germany over 2 years ago; I just left the others behind for the family.
What is driving me crazy now, is that the stereo audio has suddenly slipped off-center to the right. I have checked everything, but nothing is apparent (there are a lot more places a shift like that can happen than just the balance control on your player).
Guess I need to get another machine. Problem is that I really need laptops and not desktops, because I have to take my work with me a lot. But — apparently due to cost-cutting — no one is making laptops with what I want in them anymore. At minimum, I want a quad core with ATI video (only HP offers an ATI option with Intel anymore, since AMD bought ATI), configuration for 2 internal hard drives, lots of USB 3 (minimum 4), and FireWire. Not even MSI puts FireWire on their laptops anymore. Outboard converters are not desirable, because it is just more junk I have to carry around.
I will probably convert the Asus to Linux, once I get a satisfactory substitute; I just cannot face re-installing Windows. Although I suppose running Linux with Windows in Virtual Box is a possibility. What a lot of work to get there, though.
Meanwhile, there has been a thread on the radio automation forum, about SSD’s. One guy implemented them on computers at the studio and transmitter, and got excessive I/O errors, including ‘lost’ files, or files that could not be read. Published error rates show SSD’s are around 2%, while magnetic spinning drives are in the 5% range. So there has been some controversy over his experience, but no one else has yet implemented solid state drives in mission-critical production machines.
Something else I just found out. RAID 1 apparently is the only configuration that will catch read errors and correct them. I had thought 5 or 6 did that, but apparently not. One of the most experienced broadcast techs on that forum says RAID 1 is the only way to go for mass audio storage.
Oh, that same tech puts thermal indicators on all his hard drives, and said there is no advantage to SSD from a heat standpoint. Both spinning drives and SSD’s operate at 40°C, and his especially quieted boxes run around 25°C internal.
SSD’s also must — apparently — be formatted for ext4, as error correction for TRIM — which SSD’s require — is only available in ext4.
Chuck, I am pleased to bestow upon you the Howard Kaikow award for replying to your own posts… 🙂
Stream of consciousness. Sometimes my stream runs dry.
But not today.
Struggling pupils don’t catch up, data shows
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-16721884
I suspect this has always been true, and is true the world over, not just in the UK. Which is a good reason to fail students and have them repeat the material they do not grasp — and do it at the time they failed in the first place. I have often wondered if so-called college ‘remedial’ classes actually do any good. I suspect that for most students, the answer is no.
Hmmm, one of my nephews had to repeat an early grade, Grade 2 I think. I’m not sure what the problem was but repeating fixed his problems. My sister had managed to get him into school early, and even held a fake (very early) birthday party for him to help con everyone. Repeating a year didn’t really keep him back, as he’d started earlier anyway. Quite a lot of kids graduate from high school at 18 nowadays, as he did. (Like most kids in the stone age, I graduated at 17.)
My brother repeated Year 11, and then had to repeat Year 12. A nice chap but not as smart as his younger brother… 🙂
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-01-27/man-dies-in-45m-crane-fall/3795882
Darwinism in action…
We are issued Windows laptops at work, most with XP on them but upgrade-able to 7. One of my young colleagues is due for a replacement this summer and it can’t come soon enough, because he is getting regular blue screens now; machine can’t be more than two or three years old.
It is possible, however, for us to put Red Hat, Fedora or Ubuntu on our issued laptops (but not personally owned equipment) but we still have to put the corporate security stuff on them, along with some version of Lotus Notes, and the drives have to be totally encrypted. We can only use these machines exclusively for work, NOTHING else. I would like to do this ASAP, and run, if necessary, Windows 7 as a vm with RH’s kvm, but I need permission from a person who is technically null and void and is also a dick. So meanwhile I have to lug around the laptop outside my office, and after using a netbook for a while, it’s like unto toting around a frigging desktop.
We shall see…
Is Lotus Notes available for Linux?
Yep.
http://www-01.ibm.com/software/os/linux/software/lotus.html
I only use it for the email and Sametime. Until ordered otherwise.
Wow. Both the chemical company and the telephone company where I taught English in Berlin, used Lotus Notes for email and calendaring (no surprise that IBM consulted for both their workflow and IT). As far as I know, it is the only calendaring program that really works. E.g. in Outlook, if you go on vacation and do not take out your trash, it will not generate that task for next week. Every task has to be 100% completed before the next week’s task is generated. Also, if your secretary only finishes half of the recurring task you gave her, it will not generate that task for next week, unless she forces it by claiming it was 100% finished, but then it does not accurately record the work she did/did not do. Outlook also does not allow you to look at workload tasks in the future, because it does not generate them into the future until each occurrence is 100% completed.
No problem in Lotus Notes.
I hated Outlook and Outlook Express; both were major security holes. I have been OK with Notes and Sametime, which work fine. Pidgin is another IM for either Windoze or Linux that will also import contact data from other IM programs, like Sametime, and mine works fine on my Ubuntu 11.10 netbook.
In unrelated but sort of related nooz, since you brought up Germany; our daughter is gifted at languages and so far knows, at age 19, Latin, French, Greek, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish and Mandarin Chinese. Now she wants to learn German next and is thinking about doing one of her McGill years in Germany. Our son spent a few weeks in Hannover when he was in high school, maybe ten years ago, and we had a German exchange student here one semester a couple of years ago. And a bunch of my ancestors evidently came to England from what is now the Schleswig-Holstein area a while back. Mixed with Norse buggers, all violent brutes, thieves, pirates, rascals, rapscallions, reprobates, etc. Fit only for hanging. And that goes for me, too.
@Chuck: I know others have had different experiences, but I have always been very pleased with the Dell business-class laptops. If you need better graphics, they also offer their Precision workstations in laptop form: these have better graphics and take 2 (or even 3) internal hard disks or SSDs. At this point, I would definitely go for the SSD option. More: Linux installs very well on them – some models even offer Linux preinstalled.
I run Windows in Virtualbox with no problems – sometimes 2 instances at once. Important, of course, is having enough memory – my current beastie has 8GB. You still have the setup, but take a snapshot of the fresh installation, and make a copy of it. This is useful later, for creating new/different Windows installations.
RAID 5 certainly does correct read errors – that’s the entire point. The only RAID configuration that does not is RAID-0 (striping).
SSDs are great. They are still “new”, meaning that people don’t have a lot of experience with them, but in many areas they are already being used for servers. Just as with hard-disks, if read-errors and data safety are concerns, you don’t want to go with a single disk, but with a mirror. I’ve not personally tried SSDs in any sort of RAID configuration, but this shouldn’t really be a problem.
@OFD: If your daughter passes through Switzerland, we’d be happy to provide her a place to stay for a few days…
Thanks, Brad! She is just starting at McGill this year, after spending the year between high school and college in Rome, working as an au pair. This, after a previous summer on an island twelve hours from the Greek mainland, and her junior year abroad in Brazil and another ten weeks earlier in Guatemala. Quite the traveler, and is considering a double major in languages and international commerce.
Me? I rarely leave this northern Vermont county and haven’t been on a plane since 1994.
If your daughter passes through Switzerland, we’d be happy to provide her a place to stay for a few days…
Where in Switzerland? I have been there a couple of times. Interlocken and Lauterbrunnen (spelling may be off) spending a couple of nights mostly to visit the Eiger and take the cog railroad. I had also been to Lucerne a very pretty town and Pilates which is up on a mountain or is the mountain.
I really want to return and stay several days in those hotels that are halfway up the trip to the base of the Eiger on the cog railroad. I believe the village is called Wengen. They occur before you get to the transit station where you switch trains to continue the trip up the mountain.
We’re roughly halfway between Basel and Zurich, a couple of miles outside of Aarau. Sadly, not the scenic part of the country. To get to the Alps takes an hour or two by train, depending on where you’re heading.
Chuck,
Since the industry is fragmenting between netbooks and tablets, versus traditional notebooks, you might consider the ultrabook for your next purchase,
Likely the “next big thing”.
.mg
Thanks for all the references and suggestions. It is not really a good time to need a new computer, what with the war between various formats going on, and the cheapening of full-sized laptops. I am still contemplating what to do, but I think I am headed towards the HP microserver to double as the experimental platform for both the radio automation software and as server for its audio storage (and eventually my own personal storage). If that goes well, then I will just duplicate that for the radio project.
I have GOT to be able to edit video and audio easily on a portable format, so a full-sized laptop with i7 quad core will probably replace my current Asus dual core. May have to pop for something like the ADK line
http://www.adkproaudio.com/laptop3.asp
unless I can find a place that will customize something less expensive. It MUST have FireWire built in. FireWire is by no means gone in audio/video work.
The current Asus will then become a backup for the emergency that has yet to happen. Unfortunately, I am now getting frequent audio glitches (pops, split-second pauses, and other hiccups) that are intolerable, as this machine is occasionally used on-air. Running only the audio program helps, but does not eliminate the problem. Might be memory; the computer is supposed to have 2gb of Crucial in it, but I have never opened it up to verify that it is Crucial.
Since we moved to Germany, my philosophy has been 1 computer (laptop) to do everything. That has worked fine until a couple months ago, but I just cannot afford to take this machine out of service for investigation and repair without a substitute. This has been one whale of a computer. Thanks, Mike for the original recommendation. I just need a little more operational security and maneuvering room. And a lot more memory, which this machine does not support.
It MUST have FireWire built in. FireWire is by no means gone in audio/video work.
Chuck, you might find it a bit easier to find a laptop with the right expansion capability and add FireWire. Looking on NewEgg there are multiple adapters for ExpressCard slot and 32-bit CardBus Type II.
Outboard converters are not desirable, because it is just more junk I have to carry around.
Ah, never mind.
Chuck, maybe someone else has already pointed you there, but GenTech offers some very heavy duty laptops. I took a brief look at the one they list as 17″/18″ Sager/Clevo, for one example. Besides having FireWire, it takes up to three hard drives, packs a choice of desktop I7 CPUs, and ATI or NVidia video. (It also costs a fortune and probably weighs a ton.) At any rate, I only looked at the one and they have other choices I did not check out.
Ah, thanks for the tip. That must be new, because I started my search at GenTech, and they did not have a single laptop with FireWire. Thanks for the tip. Weight is not much of a problem, as I carry it in my backpack, when it must travel.
I must say that I credit myself with having brought 2 things to Germany: sneakers and back packs. When we arrived in 2001, EVERYONE wore leather-soled shoes. Within a couple years, kids were following my lead with sneakers, and then — by 2005 — adults were wearing them. Don’t know what the Italians did for work after that.
Second was backpacks. We brought 3, and wore them everywhere. Jeri’s son was SO embarrassed by me wearing a backpack in dressy work clothes, as all real men carried briefcases at the time. Kids wore what they called ‘mail pouches’ (cannot remember the German name) which was a pouch that slipped over one shoulder and rested on one’s hip on the opposite side — kind of like some women’s purses. By the time we left, both kids and adults were again following my lead and wearing backpacks everywhere. Deuter backpacks became the most popular brand — probably because it sounds German, but in fact, are a company in Colorado.
I don’t understand how bags that have a strap over just one shoulder stay put. I’d be nervous all the time about it falling off, being stolen and all of the weight being imposed on one shoulder.
Well, it’s no problem when the bag crosses the body over to the other hip, like the pony express pouches. I know it sounds strange, but Jeri actually had — from childhood — a very minor crooked spine (not visible to the untrained eye), that allowed her to put a purse on one side and not feel any stress. But after having a thief unhook it and make off with it, she began crossing it over to the other side, pony express style, so it could not be just lifted off.
Actually, backpacks are not comfortable for me, unless they are the kind that has curved straps, and have the little locking strap thingie to pull the main straps together in the front below the neck. With that little device, I can go all day with a pretty heavy backpack, feeling hardly any stress at all. Had to carry a lot of books all over Berlin with me. Deuter is best, IMO. Jeri had an Eastpack, which are warranted for life, and she had to have that warranty brought into service after just a few months. I am still going on the Deuter she got for me, specifically with a computer pocket for Bianca. That has been my main backpack since 2006, and it goes everywhere I go, including to all work assignments, often carrying Bianca.