Statistics

You like statistics? Me too! My favourite tool is R. If you are familiar with the S-language you’ll like it. Anyway, it’s a heavy wight among the freely available statistical tool but after some reading you will get an idea how to use it effectively. You can find some EXAMPLES what R can do for you. If you prefere a GUI I can recommend Rcmdr (R Commander) or much better RKWard. Although the later one is still under heave development it’s already quite useable and moreover extensible even for a user with little programming skills. The later one has also some real advantages over Rcmdr. To name a few:

* syntax highlighting
* auto completion
* warnings if there is something wrong with your data in the table
* output as HTML
* suggestion to commands
* …

Therefore RKWard is perfect to learn the R-language.

Do Science!

To do science with your computer as a handy tool I recommend the following resources:

* Debian Linux
* Quantain

For all purposes of computational biology refere to:

* selab
* boincsimap
* EMBOSS

Knowledgebase of biological pathways
* REACTOME.org

kahvi.org

If you are passionate about free electronic grooves you should definitely visit KAHVI.ORG. Though not open source songs from there are free of charge while providing in most cases a good quality (subjective).

Mission: to gather and
provide free electronic grooves
area of operation: internet
(statement by kahvi.org)

If you know any other sources of good free music, please let me know.

The Joy of Writing

In the past day I wrote a couple of text for work and private purposes. And today I made use of the CLI tools diction and style that should help me to make some text I wrote better. What can I say? Those do! As a non native English speaker it is sometimes hard to find mistakes and at least for English diction was of great help for me. Both are well known “old” standard UNIX commands.
How to use it? Just convert your text to pure *.txt if you not already have it. Then fire up a command line interface. Since I run KDE I prefer Yakuake because of its easiness.
Then I first used style to get an overview over my text.
Just enter:

style -L en "input_text_file.txt"

The output will help you to understand if changes in the sentences may be useful. But remember you still have to decide yourself. If you consent proceed with diction to find misused, bad or wordy diction.

Enter:

diction diction -L en -s "input_text_file.txt"

The “-s” option will make some suggestions for better wording (if there are any). This will also help you to understand what might be wrong with your text.
The output will be shown in stdout (screen usually). If you want to have it in a new text file just enter:

diction diction -L en -s "input_text_file.txt" ~> "new_text_file.txt"

Nevertheless, don’t expect any wonder. These tools are just an aid for lazy writers.