Lately I have been thinking about how to effectively communicate ideas over presentations. This has turned to be a key element when trying to convey the benefits of jumping on the Meandre wagon. Presentation Zen is a very interesting resource for methods, techniques, and example on how to convey and communicate ideas. I am working on revamping some of my Meandre presentations trying to be able to get the points across easily.

R has gained a lot of traction on the scientific community for data analysis, modeling, and exploratory work. I just run into a post by Michael E. Driscoll in his Data Evolution blog about how R is used in Google and Facebook. Nothing new, but what got my attention was ParallelR. If you have been using R for large problems, I am pretty sure you have been wishing that there was some parallelization capabilities. ParallelR targets the problem, and it definitely an option to check out. ...

One of the main handicaps I keep running over and over with Twitter is that there is no concept of groups. The usual story goes along these lines: You get forced to create accounts that behave as groups, make their updates private, and then ask the members to request to follow, and once they follow, that’s it. Yes, a bit convoluted. Yesterday, I ran into GroupTweet that basically automates this process. It still creates a new user account that works as a group fan but, at least it makes the process easier. ...

Since summer 2007 I have been twittering. It started as way to have a conversation with a bunch of friends scattered all over. Since we were not discussing any world-changing topic, my updates have been kept private. Lately, I have been receiving requests to follow me. So, instead of polluting my original intent, @xllora is now my public Twitter. Hope this gets things a bit simplified. I still wish that Twitter would one day allow you to have a better access control, but, oh well, it is what it is right now. Also, I added my @xllora tweets below :D ...

I am currently working on the distributed execution of flows as part of the Meandre infrastructure—as a part of the SEASR project. One of the pieces to explore is how to push data between machines. No, I am not going to talk about network protocols and the like here, but how you can pass the data around. If you have ever programmed MPI using C/C++ you remember the tedious efforts that requires passing complex data structures around between processes. Serialization is a way to take those complex structures into a form that can be easily stored/transmitted, and then retrieved/received and regenerate the original complex data structure. Some languages/platforms support this functionality (e.g. Java, Python), allowing to easily use the serialized representation for persistency or transmission purposes. ...