and
Tags from del.icio.us/jasonpm via wordle.net:
DIYbio is an organization for the ever expanding community of citizen scientists and DIY biological engineers that value openness & responsibility. DIYbio aims to be an “Institution for the Amateur” — an umbrella organization that provides some of the same resources afforded by more traditional institutions like academia and industry, such as access to a community of experts, to technical literature and other resources, to responsible oversight for health and safety, and an interface between the community and the public at large.
Check out diybio.org and, if you’re in the Boston area, drop by our meetup next week! Read Jason Bobe’s summary of the first meeting at the DIYbio blog, and keep an eye on the DIYbio mailing list for details.
A little while back, I resigned from my position at VistaPrint to take a great opportunity at thoughtbot, inc in downtown Boston. I’ll be starting with them on Monday, June 9, and am super excited to join their small and dynamic team. Initially, I’ll be working on tools for the Nature Publishing Group like Nature Network.
I got to hang out with some of the team at RailsConf, see some top-secret Tee-Bot designs, go on some exciting Portland excursions and adventures, and I might have even learned a little Ruby or Rails along the way.
An easy way to import a Mephisto blog into WordPress is by using a Python script for extracting a WordPress-friendly WXR file from Mephisto (which can be imported via the WordPress web admin interface), which eventually worked like a charm. I had to modify it to use MySQL, and to look at a different date field for publication (my Mephisto install was returning Null in the field m2wp.py was looking at).
- Go grab m2wp.py.
- Download m2wp-mysql.diff. (Update 6/6/08: fixed the missing trailing newline)
- Run
patch m2wp.py m2wp-mysql.py.diff -o m2wp-mysql.py. - Now you can run
python m2wp.py -hand you’re off and running!
A less effective method is to transform Mephisto’s Atom feed into RSS, and import that into WordPress. This is a pain, because the feed does not contain comments, but here is how I did it before I discovered m2wp.py:
- Get the XMLStarlet command line XML toolkit.
wget http://atom.geekhood.net/atom2rss.xslwget http://mymephistoblog.com/feed/atom.xmlxml tr atom2rss.xsl atom.xml > rss.xml- Go to http://mywordpressblog.com/wp-admin/admin.php?import=rss
- Import your rss.xml
- Pull comments over by hand.
Mac Cowell and I have been working on a new project, coined Bricklet. Bricklet is an open and extensible platform for storing and sharing standardized synthetic biology parts with the goal of fostering a rich ecosystem of synthetic biology software.
Bricklet currently consists of:
- A proposal for a Part Description Language
- A proposal for a Parts Sharing Framework that supports a web of registries, selective publication, document revisioning, and provenance/attribution.
Our intent is to implement ideas from the synthetic biology community and the BioBricks Technical Standards Working Group. We want to exercise these ideas with the hope of gaining insight into both their advantages and limits, with the intent to iterate in the future. Eventually, we may like to submit our ideas as patches to a project like Brickit to reuse existing functionality and build development mindshare.
We are tracking the requirements, design, and implementation on the Bricklet page at Google Code page. Mac and I will be presenting our progress at the Standards and Specifications in Synthetic Biology Workshop at the end of this month.
There are a few activities that, arguably, comprise the bulk of science.
They are, of course, not linear.
And each one generates many artifacts.
…many, many, many artifacts.
Wouldn’t it be nice to keep track of all these? (Especially in a distributed team!)
2 ideas and then 1 idea:
1. GPS devices need more information about real-time traffic information. The best source for this is other GPSes that are also stuck in traffic. If they could communicate, they could intelligently route traffic to optimally spread traffic over primary and alternate routes. There are products that do this. iPhone and Android would also be excellent candidates.
2. To share this information, they need to be networked. They can form an ad-hoc wifi network when near one another and nodes with internet connections like internet phones and nodes near municipal wifi (which could be embedded into traffic lights?) can act as up/down links to a central database of traffic information.
3. In lieu of available real-time information, devices could sync with the central database by docking. A Bluetooth-enabled GPS could send its daily traffic recordings to your phone, which syncs itself to your computer when you carry it inside to home or work, which communicates this information to the internet. Pattern recognition is applied, and then traffic patterns are downloaded via the same channels to your GPS. It can use the traffic patterns to avoid areas of likely congestion during your route. (And you could cut out the middleman if your phone is your GPS.)
I actually had to register for a LiveJournal account today (ack), but it was for a good cause: to post to lolscience.