Mailund on the Internet

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.

Ok, it turns out that the pre-conference meeting we were sure would be held today is not until tomorrow ... guess we will go sightseeing today then

I'm packing now, getting ready for the Biology of Genomes conference in CSH.  I've never attended this conference before, but I am quite excited to be going this year.

I probably wont have much time for blogging while there, so it might be quiet here for the next week.

I'll go and finish my packing now.  I need to check in at two but the bus connection to the airport is pretty crappy on a Sunday so I need to leave relatively early.

A while back I complained about my problems with developing applications using Boost in Xcode.  Between then and now I had a long period where I couldn't even get Boost compiled on my Mac.

Now, however, I've found that there is a CMake based distribution of Boost.  This is great since CMake can Xcode projects directly, which makes it easy to make sure the libraries build will work with projects I make directly in Xcode.  Which incidentally is also why I was happy to see Bio++ move to CMake.

My only problem now is that I have a bunch of old software based on Automake that uses Boost.  They don't seem to play well together on my Mac.  I should port those to CMake, but first I need to learn how to use CMake, and time is not something I have plenty of at the moment.  Maybe this should be a project for the summer holiday.

Does anyone know of any scripts that can assist me in converting Autoconf/Automake configurations to CMake?