Paul's Blog

If you're not a fanboy, rich enough, or someone who survived getting shot at a game store parking lot or Walmart during November, you probably don't own a PS3 right now. If you're one of the ones that thinks it's cool, wants one bad, or can't wait until that million units gets shipped from Sony's manufacturers, then maybe you can hold yourself over with the latest PS3 ads.

On the "ever popular" (I'm not sure I've been there before, but I know I'm going back!) PatrickStewart.org, they are reporting that "Sir Patrick" himself will be the voice role of Max Winters in Kevin Munroe's CG animated TMNT.

Those folks up in the cold Canadian north have some scientists at Blueprint, led by Dr. Christopher Hogue at Mount Sinai Hospital's Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute, who have created a new symbolic language called OntoGlyphs.

This new collection of glyphs has 34 functional, 25 binding, and 24 location categories populated with Gene Ontology (GO) terms. It appears that with this awesome new visual language, scientists of the world will now be able to more quickly identify the attributes of proteins, particularly those in the BIND database.



About The Blueprint Initiative
The Blueprint Initiative is a research program of the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute (SLRI) at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto. Blueprint has recently opened an affiliated node in Singapore. Led by principal investigator Dr. Christopher Hogue, Blueprint develops, hosts, and maintains public biological databases and bioinformatics software tools such as BIND, SeqHound, and Distributed Folding. For more information on Blueprint, visit www.blueprint.org.

[Via: Bioinformatics]

If you're an Microsoft fan, and I can be, you'll find that they've got just as many good ideas as the next guy, and then sometimes even more. I love that Microsoft has finally decided to really get behind virtualization. I mean, there are many companies that have done this before, but being able to do this with a native technology from Microsoft, on Microsoft operating systems, is just excellent.

Don't just sit there, get in the game and check out what's new with MS Virtual Server Training. Learn everything you need to know about the Virtual PC and Virtual Server, with this awesome training.

In a recent article over at Blogma, there was discussion about whether or not the Page View and Stat Counter are dead items. In some ways, I think this is true, in others, not really. One has to look at the different ways the numbers are counted. If you have some strictly written HTML and nothing dynamic (like AJAX), then page counters and view counts seem to work pretty well (with the exception that people hitting Refresh seriously boosts your numbers). When you move on to technologies similar to AJAX and other dynamic page functions, you loose the sense of what's going on.

Blogma: Page views, along with unique-visitor counts, are currently the main way to measure Web site traffic. But new technologies like AJAX allow users to get more information from a Web page without reloading, which can throw off traffic data. Now, some industry figures are calling for new metrics.



"The bottom line is that the page view has outgrown its usefulness. The industry needs to embrace change and develop new metrics that measure this new world more accurately," Peter Daboll, Chief of Insights at Yahoo, wrote on a blog.

So the question that Blogma had, and I have too, is this:

Is it time to move on from page views? And if so, what comes next?

[Via: Blogma]

The Search Engine Marketing genius of Apogee has gotten even better in the recent past. As of late, they've just joined themselves to the ranks of SEMPO; a non-profit professional association working worldwide to increase awareness and promote the value of Search Engine Marketing. They've also gotten qualified as an AdWords company through the power of the monsterous big-daddy of all search Google (now a household verb!).

If you like your music twisted, or if you just like to see your music coming out of something twisted, then Tangle has a brand new pair of portable speakers for you!

Visibly they keep their namesake by featuring two speakers which are supported above the speaker base by four twisty, well... Tangles.

The genius Cory Doctorow, from Boing Boing, reported about an interview with bloggers concerning Bill Gates' thoughts on DRM. Apparently, it was received a little strangely, considering his position on the whole thing. Understandably, though. I mean, if Bill Gates is against the way DRM is being handled, and Microsoft JUST opened up the "gates" allowing people to purchase music for their latest foray into the online music sales business, what does this actually mean for the consumer?

Mr. Gates admitted that putting anti-copying technology into media makes it worse. He concluded by advising everyone to just forget about the DRM, by buying CDs and ripping them. Gates also included the statement that no one is satisfied with the current state of DRM, which "causes too much pain for legitmate buyers" while trying to explain the difference between legal and illegal uses. He claims that no-one has done it correctly at this time. He also asserts that there are "huge problems" with DRM. and "we need more flexible models," such as the ability to "buy an artist out for life."

Gates also had criticism for DRM schemes which try to install intelligence in each copy so that it is device specific. His advice for now was: "People should just buy a cd and rip it. You are legal then."

For more on this story, check out the details at Techcrunch

[Via: BoingBoing]

With all of the great stupidity in the blog world, it's only natural that we've reduced an interesting form of communication to something with absurdity.

Bring on the A-List of the blogsphere! Don't worry, this little blog isn't going to be in the top of the Technorati pages, or on Paris Hilton's blog-roll, but I can tell you this: Being a D-list blogger still kinda stings. That's right, it's a shallow attempt at creating Black's fashion world for blogs. But, you can definitely have some fun with it and see where you rank.

A friend pointed me to a site that I thought was pretty cool. It showed a matrix grid (sans Neo), that contained a huge list of sites and services which have been mashed-up together to make a whole bunch of new services. Sure, we've all seen the mash-ups of Amazon and something else. Yes, we all want that RSS feed and Google map of where our packages are when they're shipped with a tracking number. But, the trick is finding these services, or better yet, tapping into the APIs of such things!

Well, the Programmable Web does just that. There you'll find a full matrix of some of the best mash-up stuff out there. If you're like me and you like to code, you'll find you can do some neat things with services you never really thought could mash.

Check it out, it's cool!

[Via: IceOpera]

Given the watch lover that I am, I would - of course - request a watch for the holiday season of gifts. My loving wife would - of course - grant my request based on whichever watch I gave her the picture to see. ... and some link to something like Amazon. Well for a mere $3200.00, on Amazon, you can grab this beauty.

The Tag Heuer Monaco has that true classic look for men. It actually got a bit too popular, as prices came down under two grand. But there is a way out of this. Have a look at this limited Edition Tag Heuer Monaco watch.

Here's an interesting idea: You make a logo for your company. OK, maybe that's not that interesting. How about you make that logo changes based on the state of your company? Now THAT'S interesting!

That's exactly what Michael Schmitz' thesis and presentation theorized at the UDK digital media class. See, this guy has a history of mashing up different kinds of technology, biology, graphics design and all kinds of cool stuff; like he did for his example fonts called "GenoTyp." But this time he took the idea farther (or maybe just in a different direction).


Looking for a suitable design solution, Mika soon learned cellular automata, especially Conway's famous Game of Life, subject of many art pieces. His software basically follows the same rules in creating a dynamic logo for MPI-CBG in time, but the parameters are coupled to certain factors: number of employees = density, funding = speed, number of publications = activity. Different logos are being "bred" and then picked by fitness in relation to the parameters or voted for by the employees. Thus, everytime the logo is displayed on a website as an animated icon or printed out on a letter, it reflects the current state of the lab as a living organism.


How cool is that? Imagine if you used your face as the starting point for the drawing? Either way, I think this particular piece of technology meets art meets Geo-life will be inspiring to other ideas, going forward. in and of itself, I don't imagine this idea will "stick" but I believe the thinking behind it will someday prove benficial in some way.

[Via: WMMNA]