And so I’m reading that the FFXI Fan Festival has kicked off yesterday (I wish I could have been there). Naturally, reports have been flowing. The FFXI Encyclopedia has a good report of what has been said so far. 1up, the online branch of EGM, has also covered the event, but the article is only focusing on the new jobs (talk about explaining something no one else will ask… not to mention the attitude of that “journalist”).
Some random thoughts:
- A lot of people have been asking about a “new tank”. Personally I think Square Enix will never create a new one, because otherwise people will just stick the Ninja subjob to it, while they don’t seem to keen on “uniforming” things;
- Dancer seems a technical job. Whether the playerbase will try to screw it up (like they did with the Bard) or not remains to be seen. It is certainly interesting to have a healer/enfeebler who uses TP;
- I haven’t seen anything of the Scholar (save a - rather useless - video where two bash a bee with a dancer), especially regarding abilities and spells;
- No one seems to have asked anything about the missions. The first ones in Treasures of Aht Urghan were embarassing to say the least (little content, no player action, artificially lengthened), so I would hope the developers have learnt from that.
The people at Square Enix said that FFXI is not finishing with Wings of the Goddess. I wonder if it is true: the codebase is many years old and I’m unsure of how much this MMORPG will be profitable for them in the next years.
November 15, 2007 – 20:57
While working today on an annotation class in Python I stumbled on a problem. Normally I work with lists of genes that are consistent, i.e. all Entrez Gene IDs (or RefSeq IDs, or Genome Browser IDs…), but today I had a list of mixed identifiers.
The subsequent idea was “let’s implement auto-detection of common identifiers in the class”. The problem is… is there any actual documentation on how identifiers are made? So far, using regular expressions, I’ve tracked down a few:
- RefSeq
- GenBank
- Entrez Gene
- UCSC Genome Browser
- Ensembl
However, I have no idea if I have implemented all types of these IDs. Does anyone know a place where to look these information up?
(On a related note: my thesis defense will be on January 14th, 2008, so I have to get the printing going)
November 11, 2007 – 22:30
After a long time I’ve finally got hold (thanks, Melissa) of Akihabara Denno Gumi PataPi!, that is the manga version of Akihabara Denno Gumi (or Cyber Team in Akihabara, if you prefer): some of you may even remember a rather sparse description on this very page when it was still devoted to ADG (almost eight years ago, time flies…).
Read More »
Following up my recent post, I’ve been looking for alternatives to TMeV. So far I’ve found the R package pvclust and the Pycluster library, part of BioPython. The first one also performs bootstrapping (I’m not sure if it’s similar to what support trees do, but it’s still better than no resampling at all). I’ve found another Python project but it is still too basic to perform what I need.
Read More »
