Mailund on the Internet

I upgraded to Snow Leopard today.

I’m planning to experiment with OpenCL to see if I can get some performance improvement there, especially with our CoalHMM code where we need all the performance we can get to analyse genome wide data.  I don’t expect to do much there right now – I will leave that to Andreas who is working on our HMM framework – but as our models get more complex we will need to improve on the hotspots here and there so I will eventually have to code something on those parts and I might as well get some experience with it.

Anyway, I haven’t gotten to that yet, so far I am busy trying to get all my old code up and running.  So I’m recompiling the various libraries I have, and right now I’m having some problems with Boost.  I keep getting seg faults with Boost’s unit test framework, which is a bit of a bummer.

At least I think I have Bio++ up and running now.  That is the framework we use for all the bioinformatics stuff in our CoalHMM application.  One of the main developers of Bio++ – Julien Dutheil – is a post doc here at BiRC and also the main developer of CoalHMM.

I had quite a bit of problems linking with Bio++ in Xcode projects, but by using automake builds instead of the Xcode framework for the compilations that seems to be solved.  I need to figure out how to use the LLVM backend to g++ there, though, to see if it is as fast as I’ve heard it would be.

Anyway, aside from programming stuff I don’t have much to say about Snow Leopard yet.  It is, after all, mainly a “under the hood” version of OS X, so there is not much in the user experience to notice.

Well, I had to reinstall the iStat menus and there will probably be more once I notice it, but that is about it.  Other than that it all works just as Leopard.

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Found this in search engine hit in my stats this morning:

Nope “chimpanzees more chromosomes”.

Compared to humans anyway.

Our chromosome 2 is chimp chromosomes 2a and 2b (thus named after our chromosome).

Actually, it is us that have one less chromosome, really.  The gorillas and orangutans also have chromosomes 2a and 2b, and our chromosome 2 has bits of telomere inside it, so all evidence points to that our chromosome 2 is a fusion of two chromosomes.

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John Hawks gives advice to college freshmen:

Third, never, ever, under any circumstances call a professor by his or her first name. You may think he’s cool with that. You’re wrong. And if he is cool with that, well, you’ve just transported yourself into one of those British mysteries where the Oxford professor is always surrounding himself with handsome young undergraduates.

I recognize the description there at the end, but as far as I noticed, everyone was on a first name bases in Oxford while I was there… but of course, I was there as a post doc and might not have noticed what happened around undergrads.  It is a very hierarchical place, so it could be true.

Anyway, around these parts it is direct opposite.  Don’t call your professor by last name.  That would be considered odd.  Everyone here is on a first name bases.

Well, my friends call me by last name, but that is more of a nickname than to be formal.  My very best friends call me Dr. Mailund.  Again, that is in jest not because my friends have much unusual respect for me.

It is more of a joke, really.  While I studied briefly in Adelaide, Australia, I noticed that all the door signs said Dr. This or Prof. That and I found that very funny, so when I came back I started calling people that.  Often to their annoyance, if anything.

It spread a bit as a joke, but never more than a joke.

It might be good to keep in mind in the US or UK, I don’t know, but here you are better off calling your teachers by first name.

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