Monthly Archives: June 2008

Annoying fork talks

Now even the (once respected) Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols is jumping on the bandwagon of Plasma haters. With a rather uninformed and rant-ish entry that just advocates a fork, like some other people said on the kde-devel mailinglist a week or two ago.

The entry is rather dismissive of everything in KDE 4 save Plasma (and a mention on Dolphin’s single click icon), and also gets some facts and links wrong (yes, the Plasma web site is outdated, but since the developers are busy coding, someone else should step up and help). I wanted to point out a link to the Plasma FAQ, but apparently I can’t (I assume it’s because of my ISP, as usual).

In any case, I didn’t find mention of specific problems, save the fact that apparently SJVN doesn’t like Plasma. But why? Why didn’t he point out the specific problems? My question is, was he really interested in having problems fixed, or he just wanted to advocate a fork for the sake of some unspecified reason? I think the latter.

I’m no developer, but I’m liking where Plasma is doing. I already set up three different activities on my computer here at home, which uses nightly Kubuntu packages. I switch between general, writing and coding activities, which have different plasmoids loaded. The difference in layout and the like are the bigger advantage over traditional virtual desktops.

Fork talks like the aforementioned blog entry are no good, they only want to kindle more flames, just as the behavior of trolls on the Dot reached the point of no return. Not a good sign.

data.frames in Python - DataMatrix

For a long time I have tried to handle text files in Python in the same way that R’s data.frame does - that is, direct access to columns and rows of a loaded text file. As I don’t like R at all, I struggled to find a Pythonic equivalent, and since I found none, I decided to eat my own food and write an implementation, which is what you’ll find below.

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Commercial applications, public funding

I wanted to write this earier, but I couldn’t: I’m now in a hotel in Maastricht, Netherlands, and waiting to get back tomorrow. I’ve been attending the 4th NuGO hands-on advanced microarray data analysis course and I even wanted to blog about it… but the hotel’s connection did not resolve any non-European web page until late today.

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Asus Eee PC here!

After almost a month of wait (Dynamism.com doesn’t like simple order procedures), I finally got hold of an Asus Eee PC 900 (obviously - for the readers of this blog - the 20 Gb Linux version). Read more for some quick impressions and pictures.

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