eric.jain.name 

Having my sister visit me here in Seattle provided a good excuse to do some local sightseeing — first by land and water with the Ducks of Seattle, then by air with Seattle Sea Planes.

Here are some take-away notes from the course on presenting data and information that Edward Tufte gave in Seattle on July 17.

Over the last few days several books from Manning Publications appear to have been added to Safari Books.

Spent this weekend at the Spring 2008 Pacific Northwest Software Symposium. Here are my notes (trimmed down to whatever I felt was new & noteworthy to me) and some general comments about the event.

I recently needed to add support for extracting data from Excel files (which are still ubiquitous in labs) to a Java application.

Blist is an interesting cross between a spreadsheet application and an interface to a proper database. The goal (I believe) is to allow mere mortals to create and share simple databases on the Web.

While looking for a birthday and farewell (I was just leaving the Swiss-Prot group) present for Amos Bairoch, I came across a company that creates custom action figures. Here’s the result!

Some pictures and notes from a one-week trip to Rwanda.

During the last two weeks I ran some tests to answer a few questions that had been accumulating:

1. Should I disable hyper-threading (ht)?
2. How much does doubling the available memory improve performance?
3. Mirror, mirror on the wall, who has the fastest JVM of them all?

It’s not uncommon for organizations to have strict policies regarding the use of GPLed code, due to the somewhat viral nature of this license.