Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Wednesday, April 23, 2003

Ordering Encyclopedia Britannica -- Comment()
I ordered a copy of the DVD version of Encyclopedia Britannica 2003, which was discounted heavily at Amazon.co.uk. Currently I don't have an encyclopedia on my iBook, so I decided to try EB. The user reviews at Amazon.co.uk were sharply in disagreement, so this may be a disappointment. But at least I'll have one rerefence work on my portable.

EBI guides on bioinformatics -- Comment()
Here are pointers to bioinformatics guides and tutorials at EBI:

The EBI 2can bioinformatics resource: "This site provides short and concise introductions to basic concepts in molecular and cell biology and bioinformatics. The main emphasis is placed on making it as easy as possible for the user to understand which tools and databases are available from the EBI and from sites belonging to it's collaborators."
2can Tutorials: "Learn how to use the tools at the EBI to find out more about your Nucleotide or Protein sequences. You will be guided through a series of exercises using sample fragments of sequence. To gain more information about these sequences, you will use a variety of tools to compare the sequences to databases and analyse them."
2can Glossary
2can Sitemap

Fighting spam -- Comment()
Here are two good articles on Bayesian filtering against spam e-mail:

-- Comment()
IBM expands high-performance computing: "IBM has broadened an effort to sell high-performance technical computers, expanding a largely server-centric unit to include storage, software and services and giving the group a consolidated sales force." [Google Technology News]

Ten years ago: browsing the web with Mosaic -- Comment()
Yesterday was 10th anniversary of NCSA Mosaic, the original graphical www browser which opened up the web for users: "On April 22, 1993, a group of students at the University of Illinois released a piece of computer code designed to get information from various public networks. [...] Little did they know that their pet project, a humble application named Mosaic, would fundamentally change everyday life. While Web browsers with graphical interfaces had traded hands among academics years earlier, Mosaic was the first to be widely adopted and introduce the masses to the Internet." (via Slashdot)

My anniversary on the web is still a few months away. I wrote about this in March: "I had been keeping a mathematics-related Gopher service since 1992, and during the summer of 1993 I converted the service to the web format." See also an essay about my first five years on the web.

Where spam originates? -- Comment()
Slashdot discusses spam: "The Center for Democracy and Technology has recently put together a really neat paper studying the methods by which spammers get your email addresses. The report posted otherwise unused email addresses in a variety of locations, using different techniques for visibility (ie HTML encoding vs plaintext) and then watched what accumulated after six months. They generated some interesting results into the methods by which spammers can track you (with publicly available websites containing your bare email address being the most popular method) and even some techniques to stop spam, such as HTML encoding your email address."