When to use “a” or “an”
July 1st, 2010A historic or an historic? A university or an university? A MBA or an MBA? A user or an user? If there’s even a little doubt about which is correct, there is a simple rule to clear up the confusion.
Acer Aspire One Slow?
June 8th, 2010The Acer Aspire One netbook running Windows 7 Starter Edition won’t win any performance benchmarks. However, you can greatly improve this netbook’s responsiveness with some targeted tweaking.
Tickler file system alternative
May 30th, 2010A tickler file system is an old but innovative way to schedule a physical reminder on a specific date. However, checking it everyday, ensuring it’s up-to-date, and rotating the reminders to each new month seems like an added hassle (especially if most of your 43 folders are empty!). There is an alternative…
What are the benefits of a tracing JIT?
April 23rd, 2010Firefox uses a tracing JIT. Adobe’s been using it for a while. A Python interpreter uses tracing. Microsoft is also researching its possibilities. So what’s the big deal?
What is the purpose of PyPy?
April 7th, 2010PyPy is a Python interpreter written in Python. It claims to be faster than CPython for certain benchmark tests. How can Python — not particularly known for its speed — interpret Python source code faster than an interpreter written in C? Also, an interpreter written in Python sounds like a neat exercise, but what’s the point of doing this?
Official launch of Daily Morn
March 29th, 2010Daily Morn is online! It’s been many months in the making… Many thanks to Joshua Corbin, Jeremiah Nisbet and Kevin Dwyer. Getting this web site up-and-running would not have been possible without their great suggestions and endless experience.
PyCon 2010 Atlanta
February 22nd, 2010PyCon 2010 was in Atlanta this year. It wasn’t quite as warm as I hoped it would be, but definitely an improvement over the 2-3 feet of snow we got in the DC region. I do feel a little smarter after attending PyCon, but also infinitely humbled by the creativity, energy, and raw intelligence in the Python community. Here are some notes I took from the talks I attended…
Biostatistics of cigarette smoking
December 16th, 2009Stay away from smoking! This is my analysis of the GSE5056 dataset from the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO). The dataset is part of a study aimed at understanding how cigarette smoking modifies neuroendocrine cells. By comparing the smokers to the non-smokers, it’s possible to see very clear trends using statistical methods despite the enormous amount of gene data.
Lenovo Thinkpad T400 wireless problems
July 12th, 2009The built-in wireless for the Thinkpad T400 gave me endless issues on Vista. Everything works perfectly for a while. Then all of a sudden it doesn’t work, and worst of all… nothing I do from the Vista network configuration windows can bring the wireless interface back up. The ThinkVantage wireless tools don’t help either and frequently the applications won’t load at all. When this happens, the only fix for me seems to be to reboot the machine. There is a work-around…
Benefits of form versioning
March 14th, 2009Picture a fully developed CRF. The form layout is pristine, the validation rules are working exactly the way you want them to, and the field data maps directly to your database tables.
What more can you ask for?
Unfortunately, forms hardly ever stay the same throughout the course of a clinical trial or a research study. Forms frequently need to adapt to new data points that were unforeseen during the protocol definition phase. So how can we handle this?