Whoever told me that hashbrowns with a hamburger topped with ketchup is great for breakfast is a culinary genius. Oh wait, that was me.
Archive for May, 2008
I swear, Perl is a horrible horrible language for bioinformatics. I have switched over to PHP and have been doing a hundred times better. These are my specific reasons why PHP is much better than Perl for bioinformatics. Clearly, if you don’t know what I am talking about at this point you can stop reading.
- References. In Perl, arrays and hashes must be referenced before either setting them into a 2d hash or array or before sending them into a function. This is a huge annoyance and there are so many weird ways to dereference variables. So many ways that you never know if you are going to be right about how you deference and thus these scripts always involve extra testing.
- Arrays, hashes, scalers. These are all given by different variable prefixes (@,%,$) whereas PHP has one easy to remember prefix: $.
- Classes. Classes are clearly more understandable than Perl modules and thus PHP is more clear than Perl when programming object-oriented scripts.
- Built-in Functions. One argument against PHP is that it has too many difficult to remember functions but Perl has about 10 times fewer functions. I am arguing that having more functions is in fact much easier especially if you take the time to remember them like I have.
- Cross between C and Perl. One problem in bioinformatics is that there are many programmers using Perl but also those who use C and Java. PHP is an excellent bridge between these major languages in that it is very similar to all of these languages and is easy to pick up, no matter what your computer science background is. It is the perfect language to bridge the language gap in bioinformatics.
- Web application. Many bioinformatics tools are online. Why not use PHP? It is already meant to be a web language and only recently has it been picked up as a standard command line language. Why not use PHP instead of Perl which is a command line language?
- *edit* Clear documentation. Perl has almost no centralized documentation but PHP has terrific documentation. All you need to do is go to php.net/whatever_function and find what you are looking for instantly.
I have a few functions and I believe I will eventually try to change them to objects, essentially making a much better biophp than biophp itself, which hasn’t been updated in years and stunk even when it was being updated.
Now who’s with me?
I think my cousins opened a restaurant on 1st and 1st in New York City. But I haven’t talked to them in a while and don’t know anything about it.
I just signed up for Twitter. Do people actually use it? I’m curious.
i really enjoy game night. Andrew brought over cards and we played Bohnanza, which is by far the best German game I’ve played.
Also Betsy brought over some really good wine. I couldn’t throw away the empty bottle because I am still trying to memorize the name, Seven Sisters. There, I wrote down the name. Now the bottle can be tossed.
I forgot how much I inappropriately laugh in the movie theater.
I was at the movie theater with Karen, watching The Chronicals of Narnia: Prince Caspian, and there is an uplifting scene where one by one, all the characters say “For Aslan!” But I defy you not to laugh when the bear says it. I just don’t know, it’s just funny how says it.
I love PhD comics. They hit the nail on the head about 50% of the time, and there’s always some truth in it. I’m not sure who the Golden Boy of the lab is, but I think it’s our golden office whereas there is another office with all the rotating students and not-PhD students.
Wow this is tons better than I thought!
My friend wants to teach guitar lessons here in Atlanta. Anyone want to take it up?
Craigslist RSS really stinks. I have begun to read Best of Craigslist through RSS, and I have come to loathe how they manage it.
For those of you who do not know, RSS is a really easy way to be updated automatically of new items in blogs, news articles, and funny classifieds ads. Every time there is an update, RSS is supposed to update itself with the new item. Not only that, but usually RSS contains the whole content as well. For instance, if you had RSS for the New York Times technology section, you would be able to read the latest article on technology as soon as they published it online.
On Craigslist’s RSS feed however, they choose to show the actual HTML markup instead of the markup itself. Behold, see what they have for the RSS vs what the actual page shows.
Free to a needy yard, one, two year old grumpy, mean and annoying so called minature goat, needs work, It won’t eat weeds but will eat your shrubs and flowers,Is anti-social, which means that he does nothing but scream at you every time you go outside. The only time he’s friendly is when your feeding him. He bullies his brother around. Really isn’t too smart, he gets his head stuck in my fence almost on a daily bais, which has to be cut to remove him. <br> The reason I’m getting rid of him is because after two years of trying, I realized I’m not a tree hugger and would rather mow my weeds than wait for the stupid goat to eat them. <br> Now that you know what to expect from him, and your still interested keep in mind that I will not give him to someone just to make tacos out of. I want him to go somewhere to be a companion to a horse, or someone thats willing to put in the time to make him tame & friendly. He is cut so the billy goat thing isn’t an issue. <br> Below are a couple of pic’s including his head stuck,and a pic of his replacement. <br> Thanks, Steve (928)###-#### <br> <br> <img src=631354274.1.jpg> <img src=631354274.2.jpg><br> <img src=631354274.3.jpg> <br><br> <ul class=”blurbs”> <li> Location: fernwood <li> it’s NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests</ul>
Who reads HTML like this? Do most of you even know what HTML is? Compare it to the actual page and see how good it is!
http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/flg/631354274.html
1. I like that you always have good intentions
2. I think that Sia’s Academia reminds me of you, but maybe that’s just what is stuck in my head right now.
3. What will you do with that poetry degree of yours? When is the first book coming out?
4. My clearest memory of you would probably be you standing in your kitchen enjoying a beer as you cook.
5. Only you and I will understand this: lauraleebeasley.com oh yeah
6. Our fight to the death: Here we are in Atlanta, trying to survive on street food. We both head for a street vendor at GA State University grounds, unaware of each other. Suddenly both our hands are on the same delicious soft pretzel! I make the first move of trying to push you away, but your newborn baby-like grip holds onto the pretzel. You make the second move, which is taking out the beer bottle you conveniently have stored in your purse. You break it on a nearby fire hydrant, creating sharp pieces of glass. Before I run away from the crazy lady with a broken beer bottle, you manage to cut my ankle deeply, which sends me to the ground. “You want this m**f*** pretzel? Huh, huh?” you say in an angry voice. In the distance someone is calling the police.
I am falling unconscious from falling down, and so I cannot answer if I want a pretzel. In response to my silence, you stuff bits of pretzel in my mouth in your crazy rage, suffocating me and killing me in the process. You remain victorious and eat the other half of your pretzel while you wait for the police to arrive.
7. Now you are obligated to reciprocate if you ever get your own journal