EFABIS in Slovenia

Last week I have been involved in setting up local node within EFABISNet (using EFABIS). We are partners in EU funded project EFABISNet and our node is the first one. It is up and running at efabis.bfro.uni-lj.si. Translation to slovenian is far from complete and we are trying to do our best. Looking forward to get any comments on the site.

Update on 2011-03-30: new website address.

Survival analysis applied to animal breeding and epidemiology

I was out of the office for a while, so there has been no posts. I attended short course by Vincent Ducrocq on Survival analysis applied to animal breeding and epidemiology. The course was really great! We had lectures in morning and practicals after lunch. We have used his program called Survival Kit, written in FORTRAN 77. It is a nice program and can be used on big datasets and last but not least available for free at link. Now we have the know how to start the analyses of longevity in our farm animals.

New version of connectedness

Spent some time on R package connecetdness and rolled up a new version (0.2.2). It has been quite a while since last update and list of changes is quite long. I have also written a vignette! Check the news.

NTFS with Linux

As a Linux user I always had problems with NTFS drivers for Windows disk/partition. I used drivers that come with a kernel, but only read was supported. Now, we can have also write support with NTFS-3G. Debian users can simply type

aptitude install ntfs-3g

NTFS-3G site shows how to use this "driver". Now I have the following in my /etc/auto.mnt

flash -fstype=ntfs-3g,gid=usb,umask=002,sync :/dev/sda1
slimwin -fstype=ntfs-3g,gid=usb,umask=002,sync :/dev/sda1


This also means that I can safely reformat my USB stick from VFAT to NTFS and no more "problems" with long filenames. I was unable to format USB to NTFS. I followed this note.

Finally, this is one barrier less for use of Linux. Great!

Open access

It seems that Open Access is gaining its momentum more and more and I think it is right so. After all we are all paying taxes and should have access to research results. Here is the BBC news about this link.

Openness is also gaining its momentum in the field of software, where Open Source has made tremendous progress in last, say 5, years. It seems that we will soon have open and well documentet formats for our files. This is very important since closed formats can be an evil after few years when nonone has access to old versions of the program. Link to one of many Slahdot news.

Tamara sent me this:

Science vs faith

Yep, it would really be wise if some actions (not only revolution part) from left would be used in right part of the picture. But sometimes I think that a lot of "holy" wars were and are fought mainly because small group of people have particular position.

Book search

Finding and buying a book can be very fast due to Amazon and similar sites. But I was impressed how fast I was able to find an illegal copy on the web. There was no need to search the torrents, emule and similar file sharing stuff. Take a look at

http://rapidsharebooks.blogspot.com/index.html
http://anuvinu.blogspot.com/index.html
http://linkgrabber.blogspot.com/index.html

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