On the weekend we finally moved into our new “home”. As previously said, it is a small nice house, offers 3 double and 1 single bedroom + dining/living room, kitchen with all mod-cons and a wonderful garden. The best thing is, that it doesn’t belong to an agency – the landlord is a professor here at Cambridge University, that’s much better and nicer!

We moved on Friday and Saturday with the help of Steve, Allyson and Martin, including their cars. THANK YOU for all the help. There were 9 big car loads, unbeliefable, as we don’t have much stuff anyway.

On Sunday we wanted to sort out the house, furniture and saddle a bit. Most stupidly I had a stomach flu or at least I’ve eaten something completely wrong, so Sunday and Monday was of no use to me at all. Dani & Peter (thanks!) tried to sort out as much as possible.

Now, a week later we are more than happy. Sure, we need to buy some more furniture and some need to be removed, but we feel very comfortable.

More comments about each room can be found in the description of each photo! Enjoy browsing the album!

The last weeks I worked on a mobile version of Pauker. This is from my point of view the best flash-card learning software available (of course with a proper licence: GPL).

Pauker is a * completely free flash card based learning application, * written in Java, * using the leitner cardfile system, * available in Dutch, English, Esperanto, German, French and Polish and * works offline without the need of an internet connection.

We used it at university and I still use it to improve my English :) The most annoying thing is, that your and also my day has only 24h. I assume, that you are almost always busy in front of your computer / machine / cluster, for whatever you may have to do …

I figured out that this was at least true for me. I also realized that the daily bus shuttle to the Sanger Institute is not used at all in terms of “doing something”. I can’t read on the bus – I get sick. But I can look from time to time to my mobile and probably check some words. The idea of MiniPauker was born, a mobile brother/sister of Pauker.

OK. Then in December I hacked a quick’n dirty version of a MiniPauker prototype. It worked. I used J2ME which is a very limited Java. The last couple of weeks, whenever I had the time, I worked a bit on a proper beta version. I will make it available and you can use it on your mobile. Well, you need to have a mobile which supports J2ME (MIDP2) and the JSR75 Java extension, whereas the latter is only supported in the more expensive mobiles with a file system. But a file system is necessary, as MiniPauker is exchanging files with Pauker, which is cool (at home you use Pauker, otherwise MiniPauker, but with the same files). I just added the full compatibility to Pauker …

Well, you might think it is a small app. In fact it is. But it costs time and as this project is not my main business, it needs time to evolve. Sorry for the delay (some people keep asking for the mobile version of Pauker), but hopefully you’ll get a nice little app soon!

Check the MiniPauker Sourceforge site, you’ll find any news there (no files available yet!)

My rotation project II is almost done now. Next week is finishing and write up (paper-style report which gets evaluated). It was another great rotation project. I really enjoy my time at the Sanger Institute :)

I don’t want to talk too much of this project, as there will be a big paper at some point, also incorporating all the work I have done. In short I worked on graph clustering and annotation validation, using relative entropy, Fisher’s test (which uses the Gamma function as an approximation) and a “home made” heuristic score. All this is used for mining clusters for the biological meaning. More about that later …

Besides the “rotation project Nr. 2″ all PhD students attended the graduate lecture series. This is a Sanger intern program about various relevant research topics. I have to say that I have learned more biology in the last 5 month than ever before in my life. This is good, as I am/was very computer science oriented and the lack of knowledge in (molecular biology) has to be filled. Sometimes it is quite hard to understand the bio-papers, but the more you know the easier it is to pick up new stuff and add it to the big picture. Quite nice to see that :) Also the Journal Club helps extending the own limited view of the research world and thanks to friends at Sanger or Wikipedia it is almost always possible to prepare for a paper (starting from scratch, following some medium level stuff and then understand the message of the paper – details are often too much :)

Anyway, the last month a lot more things happened. Probably I will tell you later. For today it is enough. Well, I let you know that we are currently moving house, which is EXCITING :)