http://www.mfasold.net/blog Just shouting my thoughts out Tue, 01 Mar 2011 12:27:31 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en There a basically two options on how to place arbitrary images as a point symbol into a plot in R. If you want to use a raster images such as GIF, JPG or BMP, opt for the "pixmap" package.  You will have to convert your image into the PPM format ... http://www.mfasold.net/blog/2011/01/place-an-image-into-a-r-plot/ I wanted to use my Android device for GPS offline mapping to avoid paying excessive roaming fees abroad. It turned out that is not only difficult to filter the appropriate maps app out of dozens which are available on the Android Market (an overview is given here), but also that ... http://www.mfasold.net/blog/2010/09/best-free-offline-maps-application-for-android/ Here are some impressions from our inspiring trip to Laos. . . [gallery] http://www.mfasold.net/blog/2010/09/laos-photos/ One of my dear readers, C S,  has pointed out to me the R package latticist. In the beginning I was sceptical, since the package is merely more than an interface to existing visualization routines. However, I now consider it astonishingly useful and use it almost every day. The reason ... http://www.mfasold.net/blog/2010/07/the-latticist-package-for-r/ Have you ever had the problem of re-finding how you created this particular image or that specific result of your recent bioinformatics project? I did, and not only once.  In his article "A quick guide to organizing computational biology projects", the distinguished scientist William S. Noble gives great advice on ... http://www.mfasold.net/blog/2010/06/project-organization-advice/ One of my greatest fears is loosing my photo collection, those irretrievable links to good memories. Other physical media (CD, HD) to be stored at home aren't save either, therefore I'd like to have an online backup solution. Windows Live Skydrive features 25GB free storage for files up to 50MB ... http://www.mfasold.net/blog/2010/02/free-photo-backup-to-windows-skydrive/ Scientific data commonly comes in tab-separated textfile format containing comment lines. What is the best way to read this data? Analogous to the recipe given by skip.montanaro, use a commented file decorator as follows: import sys, re import csv class CommentedFile: def __init__(self, f, commentstring="#"): ... http://www.mfasold.net/blog/2010/02/python-recipe-read-csvtsv-textfiles-and-ignore-comment-lines/ Read this post about how to reload your pdf document. This is particularly useful when you are creating a new document with LaTeX. Sweet, I was waiting for that functionality. http://www.mfasold.net/blog/2009/12/a-reload-button-in-adobe-acrobat/ Ein jeder (Hobby-)Koch benötigt ein gutes Kochmesser. Im Weblog Lifehacker wurde vor kurzem ein Messer empfohlen welches eine sehr gute Qualität besitzt, aber statt 100-200$, wie vergleichbare Produkte, nur rund 30$ kostet. Das vom schweizerischen Hersteller Victorinox hergestellte Messer scheint jedoch in dieser Form nur in Amerika erhältlich. Zumindest fand ... http://www.mfasold.net/blog/2009/11/kochmesser-schnappchen/ Emacs usually takes quite some time to fully start up. However, as described in the great blog Emacs-Fu, Emacs 23 can now be started in the background as a daemon. This allows to fire up a new Emacs instance really fast. Thanks djcb! http://www.mfasold.net/blog/2009/11/use-the-new-emacs-daemon/