Monday, November 30, 2009

Australia: Research hopeful for fast growing rice

http://www.abc.net.au/rural/news/content/200907/s2621031.htm

http://beta.irri.org/news/index.php/rice-news/australia-research-hopeful-for-fast-growing-rice.html
ABC Radio Australia: A James Cook University researcher is working as part of an international team to develop faster growing rice. Professor Jim Burnell is one of a group of 26 researchers who are working to increase the rice plant's growth rate and reduce the amount of water and fertiliser the plant needs. By changing the biochemistry of rice plants, professor Burnell's team are hoping to enhance the photosynthetic process in rice making it grow up to 50 per cent faster. "If we can introduce what we call the C4 pathway - photosynthetic pathway, into rice, which is a C3 plant, we should also be able to increase it's water use efficiency and it's nitrogen use efficiency, so that you could grow plants using less water and less nitrogen fertilisers," he says.

Thursday, November 26, 2009

Sorting dictionary values in Python

Python dictionary value sorting:
http://wiki.python.org/moin/HowTo/Sorting#Sortingbykeys

If the invocation of key returns a tuple, second and subsequent items in the tuple will be treated as sub-keys in the same way that Python generally sorts tuples:

>>> L = [('d', 2), ('a', 4), ('b', 3), ('c', 2)]
>>> sorted(L, key=lambda x:(x[1], x[0]))
[('c', 2), ('d', 2), ('b', 3), ('a', 4)]

Monday, November 23, 2009

Yokozunas - highest rank in sumo

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asash%C5%8Dry%C5%AB_Akinori
Asashōryū Akinori (朝青龍 明徳?, born September 27, 1980 as Dolgorsürengiin Dagvadorj, Mongolian: Долгорсүрэнгийн Дагвадорж) is a sumo wrestler (rikishi) from Ulan Bator, Mongolia. He is the 68th yokozuna in the history of the sport in Japan and became the first Mongolian to reach sumo's highest rank in January 2003. He is one of the most successful yokozuna ever,[1] and has won 24 top division tournament championships to date, equal third on the all-time list. In 2005 he became the first man to win all six official tournaments (honbasho) in a single year.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hakuh%C5%8D_Sh%C5%8D
Hakuhō Shō (白鵬翔?, born March 11, 1985 as Mönkhbatyn Davaajargal, Mongolian: Мөнхбатын Даваажаргал) is a professional sumo wrestler (rikishi) from Ulan Bator, Mongolia. Making his debut in March 2001, he reached the top makuuchi division in May 2004. On May 30, 2007 at the age of 22 he became the second native of Mongolia, and the fourth non-Japanese overall, to be promoted to the highest rank in sumo, yokozuna. He has won eleven yusho or tournament championships to date, second only to his yokozuna rival (and fellow Mongolian) Asashōryū amongst active wrestlers.

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Isaac_Asimov - Science Fiction author

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Asimov

Isaac Asimov (born Isaac Yudovich Ozimov, Russian: Исаак Юдович Озимов; c. January 2, 1920[1] – April 6, 1992), was a Russian American author and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, best known for his works of science fiction and for his popular science books. Asimov was one of the most prolific writers of all time, having written or edited about 500 books and over 9,000 letters and postcards.[2] His works have been published in nine of the ten major categories of the Dewey Decimal System (the sole exception being the 100s: philosophy and psychology).[3]

Asimov is widely considered a master of the science-fiction genre and, along with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke, was considered one of the "Big Three" science-fiction writers during his lifetime.[4] Asimov's most famous work is the Foundation Series;[5] his other major series are the Galactic Empire series and the Robot series, both of which he later tied into the same fictional universe as the Foundation Series to create a unified "future history"

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

igraph - python graph library

http://igraph.sourceforge.net/index.html

Introduction

igraph is a free software package for creating and manipulating undirected and directed graphs. It includes implementations for classic graph theory problems like minimum spanning trees and network flow, and also implements algorithms for some recent network analysis methods, like community structure search.

Features

igraph contains functions for generating regular and random graphs, manipulating graphs, assigning attributes to vertices and edges. It can calculate various structural properties, graph isomorphism, includes heuristics for community structure detection, supports many file formats. The R and Python interfaces support visualization.

Python logging

Python Logging
http://blog.tplus1.com/index.php/2007/09/28/the-python-logging-module-is-much-better-than-print-statements/

import logging

# Log everything, and send it to stderr.
logging.basicConfig(level=logging.DEBUG)

def g():
1/0

def f():
logging.debug("Inside f!")
try:
g()
except Exception, ex:
logging.exception("Something awful happened!")
logging.debug("Finishing f!")

if __name__ == "__main__":
f()

Monday, November 9, 2009

Japanese conjugation

A Japanese Conjugation Builder
http://homepage3.nifty.com/jgrammar/grammar/bldverb/index.htm

Japanese Verb Conjugation Table
http://www.reikialoha.com/raymond/learning-japanese/verbs/

Thursday, November 5, 2009

Semantic MediaWiki (SMW)

http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki

Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) is a free extension of MediaWiki – the wiki-system powering Wikipedia – that helps to search, organise, tag, browse, evaluate, and share the wiki's content. While traditional wikis contain only text which computers can neither understand nor evaluate, SMW adds semantic annotations that let you easily publish Semantic Web content, and allow the wiki to function as a collaborative database.

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Perl

http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2002/04/10/mod_perl.html

http://search.cpan.org/~jmm/Heap-0.80/lib/Heap.pm

http://search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/id/J/JM/JMM/Heap-0.80.tar.gz

% perl Makefile.PL PREFIX=$HOME

% make
% make test
% make install # if you 'su' then to quit su mode
% make clean

export PERL5LIB=$HOME/lib64/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/x86_64-linux-thread-multi/:$HOME/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8

% man stats
% export MANPATH=$HOME/man/:$MANPATH
% man -M $HOME/man Heap
% man --manpath=$HOME/man Heap
% man --manpath=$HOME/man AI::Pathfinding::AStar
% perl -e 'use lib "$ENV{HOME}/lib/site_perl"; use Heap;';
% perl -e 'use lib "$ENV{HOME}/lib/site_perl"; use AI::Pathfinding::AStar;'

http://www.perlhowto.com/extending_the_library_path

% export PERL5LIB=$HOME/lib/site_perl/