Disqus - Latest Comments for pansapiens

Re: Phage game review: Another number-based sphere-takeover game. Is it any better?

pansapiens — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 22:12:34 -0000

I was ABOUT to comment that you should be calling this genre "Galcon clones" ... but then I discovered it wasn't the first in the genre either ( http://www.galcon.com/class... ) ...

Re: Mobile apps for structural biology and protein design

pansapiens — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 07:13:33 -0000

Also worth a look are: ESmol ( https://play.google.com/sto... ) and/or it's native library companion NDKmol ( https://play.google.com/sto... ). They are based on the open source GLmol.

Re: A big leap and a logical step: Moving to PLoS

pansapiens — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 03:02:20 -0000

Congrats Cam ! Exciting times.

Re: Samsung Galaxy Note coming to Australia early in 2012

pansapiens — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 01:25:32 -0000

As a happy Dell Streak 5 user, this is good news. The ~5" screen format isn't for everyone, but it's great to have choice and diversity. Oh, and it's a "Phablet" (as in fabulous phablet), not a "Phoneblet". You saw it here first - pass it on :)

Re: Testing the Ortholog Conjecture with Comparative Functional Genomic Data from Mammals

pansapiens — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 00:04:58 -0000

Some (lively) discussion about this paper around the interwebs: http://phylogenomics.blogsp....

Re: Android Is As Open As The Clenched Fist I’d Like To Punch The Carriers With

pansapiens — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 19:56:11 -0000

Webkit is built around components of the KHTML rendering engine from KDE's Konqueror browser, which is GPL licensed. Apple open sourced their additions and changes to what was already open source software.

Re: Save space by automatically deleting downloaded update packages

pansapiens — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 04:51:57 -0000

It has always bugged me that Ubuntu doesn't run sudo apt-get clean periodically as a cron job by default (or a smart version that looks at how old the cached .deb is and acts accordingly). For users that don't know this trick, after a few years and few upgrades, the oldest cached packages can really eat up a lot of space. This type of manual maintenance just shouldn't be required on your average desktop machine, IMO (same with the ever growing kernel list .. but that's another story).

Re: Poll: Do you want the Ubuntu window controls on the Left Or Right hand side?

pansapiens — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 20:09:13 -0000

vs8: You can make Chrome / Chromium use the window manager (metacity) title bar and borders by going to "Options -> Personal Stuff -> Appearance -> 'Use system title and borders'" . This way you get consistent positions of your max/min/close buttons between Chrome(ium) and other windows, at the expense of just a little screen real estate. Even though this won't put all the buttons back on the 'right' side (like various fixes in these comments discuss), at least everything will be consistent.

Re: Poll: Do you want the Ubuntu window controls on the Left Or Right hand side?

pansapiens — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 19:59:45 -0000

Maybe this is not such a silly idea - I wonder if any usability studies have been done testing that possibility ? I can imagine lots of interesting variations on this idea too - lets say the 'big fat close button' in the middle of the title bar required a double click to actually close the window - this way hitting it accidentally wouldn't be much of a problem, but hitting it intentionally might be easier. Another option along those lines would be to put "maximise" and "minimise" on one side, and "close" on the opposite - this way you would be less likely to accidentally hit close when going for the other buttons. (After writing this, I noticed David's comments about Symphony OS below, along similar lines). Unfortunately no matter how much better a UI change is in a technical or logical sense, familiarity usually still beats innovation.

Re: Poll: Do you want the Ubuntu window controls on the Left Or Right hand side?

pansapiens — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 19:35:50 -0000

You are correct. I've never been good at telling my left from right - and I was so careful too :)
I meant (double triple checking this) - I voted *right* (Traditional Ubuntu / Windows-style) but my own configuration uses *left* (OSX-style).

Re: Poll: Do you want the Ubuntu window controls on the Left Or Right hand side?

pansapiens — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 16:59:11 -0000

I configure my window controls to be on the right, and yet *I voted left* - I always thought part of the rationale for choosing left over right as the default was providing some UI familiarity to Windows users who might test or switch to Ubuntu. There are more Windows users than OSX users (OSX puts window controls on the left), and the convention for Ubuntu/Gnome has always been 'right', AFAIK. For these reasons alone, there seems no reason to change it. Familiarity is half of usability, and using the right side for window controls is more familiar to more people.

This seems to be another of the recent examples of "OSX envy" in Ubuntu, which on the whole are great - nothing wrong with copying the best bits of the UI - but this particular OSX-ish feature is mostly just a bad idea (or am I missing some very sensible usability reason for doing this ?).

Re: Know any good javascript game engines?

pansapiens — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 23:49:51 -0000

Here are three I bookmarked recently, none of which I've used (yet):

The Render Engine: http://www.renderengine.com/index.php
gameQuery: http://gamequery.onaluf.org/
Also, Raphaël may be an option for vector graphics: http://raphaeljs.com/

And the only one I've actually used - Processing.js: http://github.com/jeresig/processing-js

Re: Building a game in Unity…

pansapiens — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 01:40:09 -0000

Even though, like kevnull, I love to seeing people make innovative games, for the sake of learning the ins-and-outs of Unity, I think it's worth 'remaking' a game that you are already familiar with - ideally one that you've (partially) made using some other framework. This way you don't risk getting bogged down in 'design' issues and can focus on understanding how to do an implementation in Unity. Once you have a working Pong/Asteroids/whatever clone, then you will be in a much better position to take that simple game and add some innovative twists. It's amazing how throwing in some apparently simple new element can dramatically change the dynamics, turning a 'tired old arcade classic' into something fresh. And remember - 'finished' means menus/title screen, "you lose" screens, etc. These always seem to take more time than you would expect, despite being window dressing to the actual gameplay.

Myself, I'm still working through the last parts of the 2D and 3D 'Lerpz' tutorials - but once I'm done I plan to make a 2.5D sidescrolling shooter (I'm thinking Ikaruga, as an initial reference). I suspect the most time consuming part will be (for me), will be creating the 3D models, since I haven't done much 3D modelling before, laying out the levels, and writing flexible code to generate interesting enemy paths. The nice thing is that all the 'standard' engine stuff, like camera following and collisions, etc, should be a breeze with Unity.

Re: Rotamerically Induced Perturbations

pansapiens — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 21:41:12 -0000

Donnie: I noticed there are also (less well tested) wrapper scripts for NAMD in the package, along side the AMBER equivalents. I'm pretty sure NAMD is provided free of charge to academics, and may be another (cheaper) option.

Re: Getting RESTive

pansapiens — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 23:46:43 -0000

Eeekk ... reading Roy's post hasn't made me much clearer on whether I've abused the term in the past, but it's likely that I have at some point.

"I suspect a lot of people get it wrong because they read only the Wikipedia entry on the subject, which is not based on authoritative sources." - RF. <- .. that's me, after spending some time reading Roy's dissertation, I fell back on the more accessible Wikipedia version.

Re: MySocial 24x7 - Companion for FriendFeed

pansapiens — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 03:15:44 -0000

The sidebar is great, it's almost always open in my Firefox.

Two feature requests:

* Middle click to open links in a new tab (+1 to michaeltwofish's vote)
* Deal with FriendFeed "Rooms". You could do this just like the "All Friends" dropdown list, just add an equivalent for "Rooms" you are subscribed to.

Re: ResolveRef

pansapiens — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 19:15:01 -0000

Source is in SVN at Google Code ( http://code.google.com/p/re... ).

Re: A global informatics collaboratory

pansapiens — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 20:28:07 -0000

This is in response to the "biogeek" global collaboratory idea, combined with a response to your previous bursty work post.

So back in April, I took a weekend off from science related stuff and participated in a 48 hour hour solo game development competition ( Ludum Dare, http://www.ludumdare.com/ ). Essentially, anyone who wants to participate registers, the theme is announced and everyone makes a video game from scratch in 48 hours. It's extremely bursty, and a lot of fun. While there are no 'teams', everyone keeps in touch during the compo, helping each other out with technical issues, demoing beta-versions of each others games and posting updates on their journal etc.

The whole thing is tied together using existing applications; Wordpress with a voting plugin, a wiki, an IRC channel for chat ... and everyone hosts their final game entries where ever they want. So what has this got to do with biogeeks collaborating on scientific problems ? Well, maybe you can see where I'm going ... at the time it struck me that a similar thing could be achieved for some "biogeek" projects ...

I think a good way to get the ball rolling would actually be to encourage a bursty weekend on a particular project (maybe the Elsevier Grand Challenge ? ... looks like things are moving faster than I can finish my comment :) ). By using existing applications, tweaked a little to our needs, I think something could be strung together ... looks like the biogang wiki is already a good focal point ( or dare I say, a "nodalpoint" ). FriendFeed seems to be the other center. A purpose built portal would always be nicer in the long term, but I think in the short term, to "just get going right now", I think the loosely-coupled Ludum Dare style collaboration should work well enough.

Re: Google Code as a science repository

pansapiens — Thu, 22 May 2008 20:01:42 -0000

It's amazing how the little differences in the interfaces between say, Google Code and Sourceforge seem to make participation easier. They essentially have similar features, and yet one always feels a whole lot more usable than the other. There are a lot of dead (or still-born) projects on Sourceforge, and I'm sure part of the reason is the messy setup for comments/bug tracking/documentation etc. It just doesn't seem as slick and easy to get an overview of what is going on in a Sourceforge project compared with one in Google Code (or Trac). I think we will see more tech-savvy (and hopefully the not-so-savvy) scientists realizing how nicely some projects can be managed this way and jumping on board in the future.

Ever since Neil wrote about setting up Trac + SVN to manage bioinformatics projects, I've been managing a few internal projects this way and it works great. Some of these will probably move to Google Code when I've cleaned them up for pubic consumption, but I really should get into the habit of just starting these out 'in the cloud' to begin with.

Re: Wordpress issues

pansapiens — Wed, 07 May 2008 01:50:06 -0000

I did notice it went down for a little while. I had similar symptoms on my blog when I tried switching from apache2-mpm-prefork to apache2-mpm-worker , while playing with some performance tweaks. In my case, however, I think the cause was that installing apache2-mpm-worker on Debian was uninstalling the required php5 packages or something. I just decided not to mess it and revert back to apache2-mpm-prefork with the appropriate php5 packages, since I really didn't have time to troubleshoot it (ultimately it would require using FastCGI). Anyhow ... same symptoms, but different problem. Looks like you got it resolved pretty quickly anyhow.