I'm not saying that I think the Grid is a bad idea, because it's definitely not. It's just that it's sometimes being wrapped in needless complexity and presented as some sort of magical panacea for all our computational problems.
Amen to that. The endless hype surrounding "Grid" technology is rather annoying, but it does *sound* good. Hacking NCBI's EUtils via REST is more likely to be the way things go for bioinformatics than complex webservices/grid technology stacks. That quote is from a new weblog I came across recently: Flags and Lollipops, authored by a bioinformatician working at a large UK university. It has a bioinformatics focus, with some great posts this week on Naming conventions in biology and Data access restrictions on genetic mutation databases.
I came across the same access restrictions with HGMD during my PhD work (data integration for personalized medicine). Having a neto XML file format for exchanging data from these kinds of mutation databases is not much use if they don't allow free access to the data. Anyway, it was a nice idea and the examiners seem to like it.
Flags and Lollipops has been duly added to the "Reading list" side bar.
