dennogumi.org » General

Holidays

Einar — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 13:18:08 +0000

Like every year, it’s finally time for me to go away and enjoy some hard-earned holidays. I’ll be spending next week traveling around France, then going to the sea.
As such, my online presence will be reduced to the minimum: reports from the trip and some photos when I’m in France.

See you on August 30th!

Camogli and Portofino

Einar — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 17:32:32 +0000

Yesterday I’ve been in Camogli and Portofino, two small towns in the eastern part of Liguria. The weather was nice and warm, and I took the opportunity of taking a few photos:

Those are samples, the rest are available in the gallery.

Moving on

Einar — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 16:30:57 +0000

Some say that all good things must come to an end. I’m not entirely sure that this is a universal truth, but I can say that at some point in life there are decisions that need to be taken.

In this case I made my own: today was the last day in Dr.Cristina Battaglia’s laboratory, a place where I spent my three-year Ph.D. course and one year as a post-doc research fellow.

Those four years were not bad at all. They were interesting, and provided a good learning experience. I think I owe quite a bit to that place, especially because I was able to learn and improve my skills alongside the analysis and research work. So my thanks go to my former supervisor (Dr.Cristina Battaglia) and all my colleagues. It’s been a fun ride.

New theme and 2.7

Einar — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 21:02:59 +0000

As you have noticed, I have upgraded FailWordpress to version 2.7, getting also a new theme in the process. The header image is temporary, until I or someone else gets it fixed. The gallery has also changed: I ditched WPG2 and Gallery 2 because they kept on breaking every time I upgraded Wordpress (of course it’s probably Wordpress’s API and schema instability to blame).

Therefore, the gallery had been organized and most likely older posts won’t show images anymore (I’ll get to fix those eventually).

Report any problems you find in the comments. Thanks.

DataMatrix page up

Einar — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 20:14:14 +0000

Ok, ok… my definition of “tomorrow” is not like what most people use, apparently. Although I took quite a while, now there is a static page on DataMatrix. There you will find a summary of wht I wrote in my other blog posts regarding this module. Of course, it will be kept up-to-date should I release a new version.

Aside that, I put a contact form on this blog. It may be useful for reports that aren’t directly related to the posts.

Posting from KOrganizer

Einar — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 03:46:00 +0000

Following the instruction from Mike Arthur’s post on planetkde, I tried posting on dennogumi.org from KOrganizer (KDE 4.1.1). Lo and behold, it works! It’s always better to use an application rather than a clunky web user interface…

DataMatrix 0.5

Einar — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 19:54:58 +0000

At last, since it’s been like ages, I decided to put out a new version of DataMatrix. For those who haven’t seen my previous post, DataMatrix is a Pythonic implementation of R’s data.frame. It enables you to manipulate a text file by columns or rows, to your liking, using a dictionary-like syntax.

In this new version there have been a few improvements and correction to a couple bugs (for example saveMatrix did not really save) and the start (only a stub at the moment) of an append function to add more columns (I’ll also think about a function to add rows).

DataMatrix is licensed under the GNU GPL, version 2 only. You can download the installer (Windows) or the source distribution (Linux and other *nixes). The only requirement is Python 2.5 or later installed on your system.

The README currently is a stub, but you can browse the pydoc generated documentation, which details how to instantiate and use DataMatrix objects (or you can turn to my older post).

Also, since git is the new “cool feature of the day”, DataMatrix is is hosted on github’s repository, and you can grab the source with

git clone git://github.com/cswegger/datamatrix.git

Comments and suggestions are welcome. I’ll be putting a static page on DataMatrix tomorrow, if time permits.

New PC, at last

Einar — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 21:24:35 +0000

All right, it didn’t quite turn out as I had expected. This post wasn’t “soon”as I predicted originally. The reason? The fact that the video card I bought died after three days of usage, and getting a replacement took a while. Finally though, I have a functional system. It’s a Core 2 Duo CPU (7200) with 2 Gb of RAM and an ATI Radeon 3870 HD video card.

I installed Linux on it, of course, but instead of Kubuntu I gave openSUSE a try. It’s quite polished, although I had to go through some hoops to enable font hinting, especially in Firefox (not that I use that browser a lot, but I still need it for some things). I’ll be keeping Kubuntu on the Eee, as there’s a larger community for customization.

With this PC, I can do a few things, such as trying out FFXI on WINE and also try out some web application using the Django framework.

By the way, if you have seen some downtime in this blog it’s due to the absolutely awful Wordpress upgrades I attempted, and mostly Wordpress’s fault anyway.

I’m back

Einar — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 19:00:42 +0000

Sadly (for me) I’m back from the holidays. For those of you who wondered why the updates on Japan stopped: when I got back to Tokyo I didn’t have an Internet connection, so I had no means to update. The whole holiday was a blast, though, and we’re considering getting back in two years.

Aside from that, work has picked up a really fast pace immediately (why on Earth journals don’t accept LaTeX-produced PDFs?) and I expect a round of meetings and planning to start soon to plan the next three months. I had a poster accepted at the ECCB 2008 conference, but the steep fees (1200 euro for flight, registration and lodging) made me reconsider. Better luck next time, I guess.

On other fronts, I read that FFXI can run on WINE now. I’ll be sure to try it once I finish preparing my new PC (I’ll write about it soon).

That’s all for now.

Japan – Day 6

Einar — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 11:54:24 +0000

Today we went to Nar, site of the first capital of Japan, especially to see the Todaiji Temple, designated as a World Heritage site by UNESCO. We used an express train to get to Nara and then a bus to get to the Todaiji itself (actually it’s a quick walk, I just didn’t know the distance was so short). The temple lies inside the Nara-koen, or Nara park, which is famous for its 1200 tame sacred deers.

There are lots of them. Everywhere. Literally. As they’re tame, they approach people and aren’t really scared (save for the younger ones). You’ll see some photos of them in the gallery. After that, I got to see the Daibutsu (BIG BUDDHA, for NRK). It’s a huge statue of the Buddha, in bronze and gold. Along with that, we paid a visit to the Nara Museum (1200 yen – ick) to see an exhibition on the thirty-three shrine pilgrimage in Japan. Nice exhibits, just a little short for the price.

The afternoon was spent looking for electronics at the BIC CAMERA store near the Kyoto station. Tomorrow we’re back to Tokyo – last two days of shopping before going back to Italy. The gallery has been updated, as usual.