Category Archives: programming

OSCONfusion

Posted by Greg on July 22, 2010 Comments Off

So I have spent the past week in Portland, OR at the O’Reilly Media’s OSCON 2010 and learned some useful things for my job, but it has also generated a fair bit of dissatisfaction.

The fun talks were more on the geeky side, like how to build a device to monitor the environment. It would be fun tostick a box on my parent’s dock to monitor Cayuga Lake’s water temperature, or better yet to make a small radio telescope and record the data.

In-between the very geeky things was a lot of rather boring stuff, so boring that I wonder what my role is in the programming world. Sure I can build large web-database applications that meet the needs of international health care research. Sure I can add little widgets to display pretty charts. Is this what I want to do? It was often more fun reading the ModRef magazine I brought. It does not help that a lot of people in the programming community think an open bar is the most exciting part of a convention. I really do not want to smell the partially digested alcohol on your breath. It is not pleasant.

I am more famous

Posted by Greg on November 18, 2009 Comments Off

At long last I am on another publication for the years of slave grad work I completed. TAG published A Universal Core Genetic Map for Rice last month in their online edition. Hopefully it will make it into a print copy at some point. I identified the 18k+ SSR loci and built a system for making automated primers for them. The lab who published this used a defined subset of those 18k+ primers for verification and publication. Hopefully this will help the world produce better rice.

The best use for AI: StarCraft

Posted by Greg on November 12, 2009 Comments Off

I am sure that my church youth group will get a kick out of this. An AI competition using StarCraft. I am still amazed that the game’s appeal has lasted so long. Especially considering that I was saving the galaxy while they were still in diapers. Despite what people say, Protoss FTW!

Random limerick

Posted by Greg on January 16, 2009 Comments Off

I wrote a program to generate random limericks. Here are two example results:

 There once was a man in crowded
 Who thought they were quite shambled.
 They had their observation's,
 And some abbreviations,
 But could not really unheeded.
 There once was a lady from miserably,
 Who thought they were quite fashionably.
 They had their coupon,
 And some hellion,
 But could not really provably.