Mailund on the Internet

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?

What an exciting thing to wake up to!  The neanderthal genome has now been published.

Read the buzz about it here:

• Anthropology.net
• Dieneks’ Anthropology
• John Hawks
• Byte Size Biology

while I go read the actual paper.

I converted some old slides from OpenOffice to Keynote for my lecture this morning.  I had to go through a PowerPoint format for this, since OpenOffice cannot export to Keynote, but Keynote can import PowerPoint, but that wasn’t so much of a problem.

However, the conversion messed up one of the fonts.  In particular, it replaced a mono-space font with a proportional font, which messed up my pseudo-code examples completely.

Changing the font to a mono-space one isn’t much of a problem, except that there are tens of pages where I had to do this.  Plus, I couldn’t simply change it on one page and copy it to the other, since I’m changing the colour of various parts of the text between the pages.  You can see the slides here if you are interested.

So I had to click all the text boxes one at a time, go to the font drop down, and select the new font.  Not only is this rather tedious but for someone with RSI like me it is actually physically painful…

Do any of you Mac folks out there know if there is a way to search and replace a font in Keynote?  If not directly, then how about through Automator or AppleScript?