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.

 

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.

 

Whale Tail

This is the tail end of a baby Humpback Whale who cruised past us, when I say cruised I mean mobbed us, three people go hit (there was no damage). I caught a picture of its’ tail which was about 5 feet wide.

You can see the front part of the whale here.

Eye Contact

I had the opportunity to get on a boat going to the Silver Banks which are located north of the Dominican Republic. There was a group cancellation and I jumped on (there is usually a two year waiting list for this trip.)

Humpback whales migrate from the North Atlantic down to the Silver Banks to raise their young for three months at the start of the year. So there is an opportunity to get in the water and swim with them.

This is a young calf (still 12 feet long) who came right up to me to check me out.

Ask Ars: How can I safely erase the data from my SSD drive?

This is an interesting issue, I had not really thought about it until I read about it, and I am always very careful to erase drives before I sell them or give them away.

Ask Ars: How can I safely erase the data from my SSD drive?: “

How can I safely erase the data from my SSD drive? I’ve seen a few pieces in recent days about how traditional ‘secure delete’ programs fail to work properly on SSD drives, so what tools are available and useful?

As pointed out in a recent research article, there isn’t a standard method for securely deleting data from a solid state drive. Hard disk drive”

I guess I will need to go to plan B when I have to dispose of SSDs in the future, which is what I do now with drives that die.

How to stay safe at a public Wi-Fi hotspot

I use WiFi hot spots from time to time and I am always careful how I use them, but it is always good to have a reminder on how to use them safely (by way of ArsTechnica). Basically the message is use SSL all the time:

How to stay safe at a public Wi-Fi hotspot: “Firesheep lit a figurative fire under the feet of folks who otherwise weren’t concerned with the security of their data as it passes to and fro over a WiFi network in a public place. That’s good. You’re at risk whenever you use WiFi on a public network, but thankfully it’s never been easier or cheaper to secure yourself thoroughly.

Steve Gibson also talked about Firesheep in this podcast.

SSD Update

A few weeks ago I was pushed by a friend to replace the internal disk drives in my laptop and desktop machines with SSD drives. I picked 128GB SSD drives.

Results were interesting and mixed. Both machines boot much faster but I avoid rebooting as much as possible to avoid losing context, my desktop machine is always on and I just put my laptop to sleep when I am not using it. Launching applications on the laptop is much faster which is very nice, but there is no appreciable speed difference on the desktop machine most likely because it packed with memory which allows the operating system to cache large portions of the filesystem. Still it has been a very worthwhile update.

So not that much difference on the desktop machine, but the laptop has gotten a new lease on life.

How to Botch Trial Software

How to botch trial software:

• Insist on offering the Windows version even though the user is on Mac.
• Forget to put a link to the Mac version of the software on the download page.
• Require Java to be present and running in the browser but forget to put up a warning when it is not.
• Have a System Preferences pane with a product logo and single button which says “Uninstall …” but which does nothing when clicked.
• Force the user to use the Activity Monitor to kill off the running product (which failed to be stopped by the “Uninstall …” button.
• Finally force the user to have to manually remove the software from the various system folders.

Phew…

Banning Competitors’ Products

I have always thought that looking at your competitor’s products to be great idea, especially when they outsell you 10 to1, at least.