Mailund on the Internet

Hi guys.

I’ve been away for quite a while.  The main reason is that my RSI has been pretty bad, and I am going through some physiotherapy that I need to complete before I dare pick up the usual load of computer time, and the blog is just part of the workload that is easiest to give low priority.

Anyway, I just have a quick announcement before I go back to hiding again: I was just offered tenure! I’m meeting the dean to negotiate on Friday (but I’m probably taking any offer I can get, so there isn’t that much negotiation after all).

Speaking of tenure, here’s some interesting blog posts, mostly critical of tenure:

• Tenure
• Tenure: An idea whose time has gone
• What if universities get rid of tenure?
• Let’s just get rid of tenure

I can’t really say that I disagree with these, but as long as the tenure system is in place, I’m just happy to have it. I’ve managed to get funding for my own research and my own salary for the last five years, and maybe I could continue with that, but it is nice to know that the day when I hit a dry spell of grants being granted, I’m not immediately thrown out of the uni, which has been the case until now…

I’ve heard they were planning on moving to a new paper submission system at PLoS for a while, but now it seems to be finally happening, starting with PLoS ONE.

This is really good news.  The existing submission system at PLoS is really cumbersome. I seriously considered submitting elsewhere halfway through the submission of my latest paper just because of how annoyed I got with the web interface.  I know, that is a silly reason, and I did submit to PLoS Genetics and was happy with everything except the submission system.

I swore, though, that I wouldn’t go through that process again and wouldn’t submit to a PLoS journal unless I could get a co-author to do the actual submission. Now I have to try the new system to see how it is, and I already have a paper in mind…

I hate spammers.  I really, really hate spammers!  I think they should be shot on sight.  No trial, just instant execution.

I haven’t been around the blog for a while because of RSI, and while I’ve been away, Akismet seems to have let 20,000 spams through.  I usually get a few thousand spams a month, but I guess the spammers smelled blood once some of their comments came through, and within the last couple of weeks, yeah, I’ve been spammed twenty thousand times.

I’m really in the mood to track some of those spammers down and club them to death.

Especially since it is going to take me ages to get rid of the spam again.  I’ve tried to get Akismet to recheck all the comments, but I can only make it check the pending comments and those 20k spams are, for some reason, not checked.  So I have to delete them manually.

I can delete around 100 at a time, more than that and I get an error from WordPress.  And it is not exactly fast deleting 100 comments, so I am not looking forward to doing it 200 times.

I really, really, really hate spammers

These days I find myself converting between “coalescence units” (a time unit of 2Ne generations) and “substitution units” (time measured in expected number of substitutions) several times a day.   It is not really much of a problem to do, but my brain is simply not wired to do arithmetic in my head, so I usually fire up R or Python for this.

I am learning Objective-C and Cocoa these days, more for fun than anything else, but I figured that I could write a small unit conversion application to get some use out of it.  I mentioned this to Kasper, but he suggested that I write a dashboard widget instead.

I have never used Dashcode before, but I fired it up this morning before I headed for the office, to get a feeling for how it works, with the intention of writing a widget during the week.  It turns out it is extremely easy to work with, though, and within half an hour I had a complete conversion widget coded up.

The only thing I don’t quite like about it yet is that when I do the conversions it doesn’t present the results in the text field in scientific notation, so I get stuff like 1000000 instead of 1e6 or 0.0001 instead of 1e-4, which makes the conversions somewhat harder to read.

I’m sure there is a way to format the numbers, but my Javascript-fu is not up to it.  This widget is the first Javascript I have ever written.

Hat tip Amir.