Yes, I’m on Twitter- alandove: Should've redacted sequence of ancient girl's DNA. http://t.co/aomVOqla Now terrorists can synthesize cave-girl from scratch.
- alandove: National Academy of Sciences report (http://t.co/No8xHa5C ) - no second gunshot from grassy knoll. Must be part of conspiracy.
- alandove: Whenever I'm feeling negative, I just press ctrl-alt-cmd-8.
- alandove: Turdivirus is to virology as Uranus is to astronomy.
- alandove: RT @profvrr: This Week in Virology (TWiV) episode 169 is up: Epidemiology causes conclusions (p<0.05) http://t.co/2Hk5mwxr
- alandove: I gather there's some sort of sports event today. I mean besides the indoor triathlon I did this morning.
- alandove: Wondering if anyone's compared @Norovirus incidence at land resorts vs. cruise ships.
- alandove: Must remember to relax sphincter. RT @marynmck @lizditz launching bottle rockets from one's anus http://t.co/0j46Rc6n
- alandove: Blog post: A chat with Mike Osterholm (http://t.co/eKFzdFQ4 ) #H5N1 #NSABB
- alandove: @newprof1 Certainly much easier to type.
Tag Archives: computers
Wolfram Alpha Gets Its Emotion Chip Installed
When Wolfram Alpha launched, I plugged a few questions into it and was fairly impressed with its abilities. Then I tried to stump it. It didn’t take long: the question “how do you feel?” generated an error. I told a … Continue reading
Simple Hack: Magnetic Mac
There are powerful magnets hidden inside the screens of recent-model iMacs*; mine has them all around the edges. I don’t know why Apple put them there, but here’s my favorite use: holding documents while I transcribe them. The picture shows … Continue reading
Displaying a Complete Archive on One Page in WordPress
Today, I tried to solve a seemingly simple problem on the Walter and Ina site. Of course, a seemingly simple computer problem can quickly turn into a huge time-suck, and that’s exactly what happened. I’m betting there’s at least one … Continue reading
Health IT Discovers the Obvious
Computer scientists at UCL Medical School and Warwick University in the UK report that open source medical records software is more secure than proprietary software. In an accompanying press release, the researchers explain: Critics of Open Source often argue that, … Continue reading
Oh My God, That Actually Worked
I just upgraded the site to the latest version of WordPress. Normally, this takes about 15 minutes of careful work, involving a download to my desktop, some FTP monkey business, checking of config files, and so forth. This time, after … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged computers, server administration, software, web development, wordpress
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Medication Alerts in, Medication Alerts out
A new report in the Archives of Internal Medicine brings up an interesting problem with electronic prescribing systems. As the authors explain in an accompanying press release: The researchers reviewed the electronic prescriptions and associated medication safety alerts generated by … Continue reading
If The Shoe Fits…
Try visiting Typealyzer and entering the address of a blog. You’ll get a Myers-Briggs personality type indicator for that blog’s content. Yes, this is silly, but anyone who maintains a blog is obviously narcissistic enough to try it. Here’s the … Continue reading
Saving My iLife With Applescript and rsync
With a little bit of spare time this week, I finally got myself synchronized – my MacBook now has the same versions of all of my important files as my desktop machine, even down to mirrored libraries in iTunes and … Continue reading
Crossing Over
I’ve been struggling with a tricky problem in Web design lately: how to preview my sites in Internet Explorer. For my personal site, I largely ignore that buggy browser’s bizarre behaviors (see my archived tirade for details). But lately, I’ve been working on a Web redesign for a nonprofit group, and they need their site to be accessible. There’s no current version of Explorer for the Mac, and my old copy of IE5 doesn’t capture a lot of the more recent bugs the folks in Redmond have added. It seemed like the only reasonable option was to install Windows on my Intel Mac, paying hundreds of dollars to Microsoft to get a copy of their operating system, and then install Explorer. I have a moral objection to that, though, as it would mean enriching Microsoft, not in spite of, but because of their very worst habits.
Thankfully, the good folks at Codeweavers have come to my rescue. Instead of sending a big payment to Bill Gates, I can now send a measly $60 to this small company that helps support the Open Source movement. That’s the registration price for Crossover, a product very similar to the more popular Parallels. While both applications allow one to run Windows applications on the Mac, with Parallels you still have to shell out for a copy of Windows itself. Crossover eliminates that by using the open source Wine emulator instead. Now, back to hacking these stylesheets. Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged browsers, computers, mac, operating systems, tools, web development
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The Joy of Text
Over the past several months, I did one of the hardest things for a professional writer: I switched to a new word-processing application. This is the third time in my ten-year writing career that I’ve done this. Shortly after leaving the lab, I migrated my work from a “borrowed” copy of Microsoft Word (The Worst Word Processor Ever Created) to the vastly underrated AppleWorks application. When Apple abandoned that product, I moved to the supremely elegant Nisus Writer. I’ve heard that for some writers, this application was their main reason for buying a Mac. While I have other excuses, I can understand that thinking perfectly. From its uncluttered, easily configurable menus and tool drawer to its open, nonproprietary file format, Nisus is truly a writer’s tool.
If I were not such an extreme geek, I would have stuck with that decision, and I still recommend Nisus Writer to aspiring and practicing journalists who aren’t especially technical. Besides its aesthetic advantages, having all of your notes and past stories in text-based files (specifically Rich Text Format, or RTF) ensures that your archive will remain accessible for years to come. You can’t say that about many other formats.
About a year ago, though, I started to re-learn computer programming after a 20-year hiatus, and it changed my perspective on “word processing” completely. You wouldn’t know it to read their emails, but in their regular work, computer programmers are the most diligent copyeditors on the planet. As a result, they’ve developed text-handling systems that make even an elegant word processor like Nisus Writer look like a dull #2 pencil. If you’re a technically-minded writer, especially if you work for “new media” outlets on the Web, keep reading. Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged computers, emacs, smultron, text editors, tools, writing
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