Coursera

Today I enrolled for the gamification course on Coursera. It's a regular course with homeworks and tests, the video lectures are awesome and I also bought the book already.

Which also reminds me that I have a ton of things to write in here about some other books that I've already read on Kindle. I will let survival of the fittest decide which project will see daylight.

So I leave this, from Why School?: How Education Must Change When Learning and Information Are Everywhere (Kindle Single) by Will Richardson:

One of the challenges I give the schools I work with is this: “How can you make sure that every student who walks on graduation day is well Googled by his or her full name?” 

On a side, the gamification definition from the FTW book.

Gamification: the use of game elements and game-design techniques in non-game contexts.

Processing genome using Flex and Bison

Is it possible? Has anyone ever tried?

I'm looking at a bacteria right now, just downloaded 2.8MB of ATCG madness. Wondering if DNA is a regular language.

XKCD Time Strip

I want to download all the pictures featured on the time strip. I think that the image name is cryptic using Skein. But, there is an easy way: people are uploading the drawings on the XKCD Wikia. So I installed wget on Windows8. Tried this without success. Any ideas?

 for ($i=50; $i -le 55; $i++)  
 {wget --wait=1 -r -P . -A png "http://xkcd-time.wikia.com/wiki/File:Time$i.png"}  

The png images downloaded are corrupted.

Simple Python to Batch search CAZy Database

This code may be old. please follow here to the most up-to-date version: https://github.com/ericoporto/CazyBatchSearch

Yes, a way to use a table to search the Carbohydrate-Active enZYmes Database. Below the Python 2.7.3 script.

'''
Copyright 2014 Érico Porto

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You may obtain a copy of the License at

    http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.
'''
from __future__ import print_function  
 import httplib  
 def findEnzymeInCazy(enzyname):  
   conn = httplib.HTTPConnection("www.cazy.org", 80)  
   conn.connect()  
   conn.request('GET', "/search?tag=4&recherche=" + enzyname)  
   lines = conn.getresponse().read().split('\n')  
   for i,line in enumerate(lines):  
     if ( '<tr><td><a href="http://www.cazy.org/' in line ):  
       linkLine = lines[i]  
       j = linkLine.find( '"http://www.cazy.org/' ) + 21  
       k = linkLine.find( '.html"', j )  
       return linkLine[j:k] # beteween first and second double quotes  
   return None  
 f = open('saida.csv','w')  
 print("enzima     ; rankdomal", file=f)  
 print("enzima     ; rankdomal")   
 for line in open("enzylist.csv","r"):  
   pieces = line.split(";")  
   enzyname = pieces[0].strip()  
   enzyInCazy = findEnzymeInCazy(enzyname)  
   if ( enzyInCazy != None ):  
     print(enzyname.ljust(15) + '; ' + enzyInCazy.ljust(20), file=f)  
     print(enzyname.ljust(15) + '; ' + enzyInCazy.ljust(20))  
   else:  
     print(enzyname.ljust(15) + '; ' + "not found!", file=f)  
     print(enzyname.ljust(15) + '; ' + "not found!")  

So, you will need a file named enzylist.csv for this to work. Here take this:

 BAI68730
 BAH05588
 ACV62532
 EAL90874
 ABG47447
 ACT04224

So if you run it, you should get something like:

 python .\enzymtable_simple.py  
 enzima     ; rankdomal  
 BAI68730    ; GH57  
 BAH05588    ; GH94  
 ACV62532    ; GH94  
 EAL90874    ; GH13  
 ABG47447    ; GH18  
 ACT04224    ; GH51  

So all should be good. Yes I run Python on Windows 8 using PowerShell. Just add the Python folder to the PATH variable, and all should run well - and also, PowerShell is much faster and easy to use than CMD.

Google Treasure Hunt

Throw the numbers on the browser for going to the gps location. Start researching on the wikipedia about Willian Kid or other pirate.

Example:
Meat | -21.53,46.05
Squid |  34.61,137.7
Boat | -28.30,-57.30
Aligator with letter C | -37.85,-25.83

Right now I could find C R and V if I remember correctly.

Small tip on faster learning when audio is required

Use 1.5x speed. Thanks LifeHacker