Posts

Recently, I am continuously being amazed by how a seemingly simple task is actually implemented in a sophisticated way. I guess I am just taking so many things for granted just because it was implemented and refined to an extent that I don’t even feel it.

Being a student again takes a longer while than I expected to get used to, which gives me a long hiatus in my posting, but also puts me in a different and stimulating environment.

Openly shared data is invaluable. It provides a way for others to test reproducibility of analysis and reduces the need of repeated screening experiments. Besides, these data is also an excellent training ground for amateurs like me.

One classmate complained about having trouble subsetting a data frame to keep non-zero rows, like: # I don't want rows of zero here! non_zero <- rna_seq[wt != 0 && mutant !

In my field, many of the literatures are behind the paywall. Though my institute get subscription for most of them, I am sometimes not in the lab when I need to check something.

I updated my R packages the other day, and not surprisingly, one package failed to compile. This time, it was XML. The error message suggested configure: error: “libxml not found”, but homebrew suggested I had installed libxml2 and had it up-to-date.

Oftentimes, the sample I deal with is full of noise or confounding factors that I am not interested in. For example, human specimen is doomed noisy because the race, age, sex, occupation, or the life story of the subject would have influenced the results.

I have an evergrowing pile of unread but interesting paper in my download folder. With the size growing from several hundred MB to more than 2 GB, it is becoming hard to find a pdf file when I really need it.

I received a “call for paper” e-mail today. The publisher claimed they became interested in my work in a conference I just attended, and they also wrote if I am interested in being a member of the editorial board, I could send my CV back.

What you are going to find here A minimal introduction of the awk command in Linux and Mac (For Mac user, installing GNU awk might be necessary. It introduced some new functions like sorting an array with asort().