Here is what I am currently working on:

 

New database to speed genetic discoveries »

A new online database combining symptoms, family history and genetic sequencing information is speeding the search for diseases caused by a single rogue gene. As described in an article in the May iss…

Lakes and Oceans

Awesome xkcd cartoon today about the relative depths of lakes and oceans.

 

Baylor-Hopkins Center for Mendelian Genomics

And the other project I have been working on is a website for the Baylor-Hopkins Center for Mendelian Genomics. This website is designed to capture patient feature and DNA sample information for sequencing single-gene mendelian phenotypes. The site is not really for public consumption though.

OMIM – Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man

For the curious, for the past 18 months I have been working on the OMIM website on-and-off. From the website:

OMIM is a comprehensive, authoritative compendium of human genes and genetic phenotypes that is freely available and updated daily. The full-text, referenced overviews in OMIM contain information on all known mendelian disorders and over 12,000 genes. OMIM focuses on the relationship between phenotype and genotype. It is updated daily, and the entries contain copious links to other genetics resources.

Worth a look if you are interested in genetics.

 

Flashback botnet

This is probably the most ‘stable’ article I have read on the Mac Flashback malware exploit, ‘stable’ in the sense that there is no hysteria or hyperbole.

The one thing I would add is that you should check all browsers as well as Safari:

defaults read /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/Info LSEnvironment

defaults read /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/Info LSEnvironment

defaults read /Applications/Chromium.app/Contents/Info LSEnvironment

In fact I have removed Flash from the ‘/Library/Internet Plug-Ins’ and ‘~/Library/Internet Plug-Ins’ folders, so Safari and Firefox don’t have flash on my machine, Google Chrome and Chromium have their own Sandboxed versions of Flash. Also while I have Java installed, it is disabled on all browsers.

 

 

 

 

 

Google Please Don’t Crawl This Server

For some reason the Googlebot has found it necessary to crawl a development server of mine, I suspect that one of the users uses Google Chrome which probably snarfs urls browsed.

Google tells us that one way to do this is to return the 410 HTTP  status code , and the way to enforce this in httpd.conf is:

# Tell crawlers to go away   

RewriteEngine On    

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (Googlebot|bingbot|Validator|MJ12bot|Baiduspider)    

RewriteRule ^.* - [G]

 

I have included other crawlers in the list just to make sure.

 

Chromium OS X

Came across the Chromium OS X browser for Mac, guess it is an open source version of Google Chrome.

Can’t really much difference between the two, but I will try it out for a while and see.