Photo. Interior, Metro Reference Library.

Posted via email from nocx's posterous

Winter tires on.

Studded tires on bike at long last.
Bring the snow!

Posted via email from nocx's posterous

STAR*D + metanalysis implicates GRM7 in major depression

http://www.nature.com/mp/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/mp2009125a.html

Posted via email from nocx's posterous

First Ubuntu print job is second Ubuntu save

In the short 2+ months that I've been using 9.10 Karmic Koala, there have been two tight spots where Ubuntu has come to the rescue.

First, I was in a long meeting where a colleague was running an LCD presentation from a Windows netbook. Halfway through the meeting, the netbook crashed, was irretrievable. No more PowerPoint; in most situations I would have rejoiced.
However, the slides were very much needed for viewing at the time. I thought, "I'm the only other person in the room with hardware. But I've never tried running an display projector from Ubuntu. What the heck, we don't have much to lose if it fails." I pulled out the Ubuntu notebook, plugged in the video cable, found the display preferences, and with a very small number of clicks, Ubuntu recognized the projector and displayed the slides smoothly. Meeting saved.

The second time was tonight. Kid with project due tomorrow. The new printer and MacBook were not on talking terms after a correct installation of correct software including correct printer driver. After a couple reboots, I thought "I really had never thought about printing anything from Ubuntu. As a matter of fact I hate printers. But let's give this a try." I plugged the printer in. Ubuntu detected it, searched and found correct driver and asked to install it. Two clicks later, I get a rainbow of a test page. No 10-point font "test" page -- see the colourful photo of the Ubuntu test page at the top of this entry. After a couple minor formatting changes in Open Office, the kid's project is done.

On to other things.

I asked a colleague today:

"Have you noticed I've not used Microsoft Word since late October?"

"No, I haven't."

LA goes Google

Although this post contains nothing new, could this augur the knell for Microsoft?

The City of LA has gone Google for its 30K employees.

If this and other early implementations are a success, at about 1/10 the cost of Microsoft, and 25GB of email storage per user, I think more will migrate to Google.

2009, free software

The year 2009 I will remember for many personal reasons. For work, it was the year I started a personal experiment with free software. Hypothesis: You don't have to pay exorbitant fees to Cupertino to use something that works really well.

1. While still on the Mac, I went completely to Open Office. No more MS Office, no more Pages.

2. I moved out of EndNote to Zotero and eventually Mendeley. Some people are afraid Mendeley will start charging, but Mendeley is clear that your ref library is yours, and you can walk away with it at any time, in EndNote, RIS or BibTex format.

3. I dropped SAS and SPSS for R.

4. I stopped using my MacBook and moved to Ubuntu on a Lenovo. I don't do a lot of photo or video. Linux had always intimidated me, but Ubuntu is user-friendly and has a good community of support.

More to follow . . .