Monkeyshines

Category: Coding

  • LyX: LaTeX, the Easy(ish) Way

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    James
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    Introduction I’ve resisted learning TeX/LaTeX for years; I appreciate the principle, but I baulk at the idea of learning another language, particularly one which requires a bunch of opaque commands at the top of each file. I like a nice GUI, and Word, for all its faults, does give you lots of control if you…

  • The War-and-Peace-O-Meter

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    James
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    Some years ago I asked for War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy for Christmas; a new translation had just been published, and that seemed as good a reason as any to tackle this metaphorically and literally immense book. I do a lot of my reading on the bus, which has tended to put me off…

  • T1DBase: gene models

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    James
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    I recently wrote an overview of T1DBase, an online resource for the type 1 diabetes (T1D) research community (Hulbert et al. 2007; Burren et al. 2011). I shall now describe one of the more interesting of my contributions to the project, calculating and graphically displaying gene models. In the month since I first started writing…

  • Book Battle: Fathers and Sons vs Eve Green

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    James
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    I recently read Eve Green, by Susan Fletcher, on the strength of it garnering glowing reviews and having won a major award. I was utterly underwhelmed, and looked to Amazon to see what real people thought of it. Opinion is divided: it’s either a beautiful, mysterious evocation of Wales or a dull trudge through an…

  • T1DBase: type 1 diabetes, and my part in its downfall

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    James
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    Apropos of a new T1DBase publication (Burren et al. 2011) (in which I am kindly acknowledged), I thought I’d write a bit about some of the work I did there (Hulbert et al. 2007). I envisage this being the first of maybe three instalments, so before going into detail about the specific projects that I…

  • Countdown Timer – JavaScript

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    James
    in

    Countdown to Binky’s BirthdayFirst Blog Post HereChristmas: The JavaScript demonstrated here (countdown.js) can countdown to a particular date. If the date is annually recurring (e.g. a birthday), then it’ll countdown to the next occurence; if it’s a specific year (e.g. a holiday, in the vacation sense of the word), when the date has passed it’ll…