Got a demo version of TogetherSoft's java Control Center: it is a bloody good software. Only sux because i) it is pretty expensive, ii) its demo licence is only for one week (!), iii) worst of all, my company will not buy it because (see i) ). Would be nice to use it for free for open-source projects.

Yuppie, I translated some java stuff to awk (for sake of perversity but actually for some other practical reasons.) It can calculate the combination and/or the permutation of a vector.

Have a look at here if you need such a code or at the original java implementation.

New disk, new hopes. My 32G disk is almost full, so I had a new 36G (both SCSI). It was more difficult to find the proper screws than to mount it in bash. I do not know why do I need a three days long training course to install something into the new PC houses.

Well, using Linux seems that the MOSIX-patched kernel is not happy neither with ext3 or xfs so I had to use reiser on the new disk. It is not the best choice for PostgreSQL databases, but still prooved to be useful. I uploaded 116 tables, 116*100 rows each and an additional 116*100 rows (alltogether 1,357,200 rows). For such an upload a vacuum should be useful after every few hundred thousand I think. The kernel panicked in the middle of the job, reiser still saved at least half of the data. After vacuum PG was happy with thee rest of the data. Uploading the same stuff into Oracle by sqlload also OK by now (well, that was my first ora job ;). And seems it is as quick as with Postgres. Presently I am testing the upload and trying to load everything into one table ;P

bayes1=# select count(*) from allsd;

count

--------

500500

(1 row)

Seen Lotr with my elder daughter: eh, my impression was that the producer just want to stuff as many as possible monsters into the three hours. After the 324534th ugly guy who needs a good dentist it was just simply boring :-/ . Furthermore, I can not find out what are people afraid of in a forest, especially during evening. I spent most of my life in the middle of a forest and after becaming a teenager and forgetting all the trolls and crocodiles climbing up under my bed I realized that it is quite safe to sleep/do anything in a forest. Well, in Hungary there are no bears and wolves though some insects can bite you.

Wrote a perl script that can insert an .sd file with many structures into a PostgresSQL database (or practically into any database with DBI). Since our company is preparing IPO, I hope I can place it as an opensource something 'cause we have to advertise ourselves somehow and proove that we are really working hard (even during holiday ;) . If you are a computational chemist, probably you know what an .sd (SD) file is (see MDL pages for more info) and realize that such an utility can be handy.

Well, Cactus asked me to give my thoughts about the debate on "dead or dormant" free software. As you can see, I spent the last half year on closed projects giving nothing to the common only benefiting from freely available softwares. Not repeting his views my impression was that as someone gets more experienced with -any- software, [s]he needs less help, therefore spends less time on mailing lists/irc/etc, gives less help to newbies. And writes less open software :/ .