Life of a Lab Rat

In my copious spare time (hah) I would have liked to get to grips with programming, in a real language such as C or ObjectiveC. I did have a fiddle just before leaving the UK, and indeed was able to wrestle PERL to create some useful (no, really) web-based applications such as the Protein Calculator and the Codon Usage Wrangler.

PERL has its uses but I'm really interested in learning an object-oriented language that I can easily integrate with Apple's wonderful Xcode environment to make shiny applications for my shiny Mac. It's a hobby thing. The problem I have had — aside from the lack of time — is the absence of a worthy adversary, I mean project. So the Protein Calculator and the Codon Wrangler came about because there was a need for those functions in the lab, and how I implemented them seemed the fastest and most accessible way at the time (we had some Other OS users in the lab and I was not going to beat my head about cross-platform code).

But the good folk at MacResearch (confusingly also at http://www.macresearcher.com/ but not http://www.macresearch.com/) have come up with two shiny new online tutorial courses. The first is an Applescript tutorial, which is excellent news for scientists working on an out-of-the-box Mac and who maybe are not as geeky as I think I am. But the exciting development (to me, at least) is the full-on Cocoa for Scientists gig that Drew McCormack has started up. And Drew promises to give lots of real world examples.

Yum, Cocoa.

And in one of those strange coincidences I see today that there is a new , open access journal in the stack, Source Code for Biology and Medicine. I shall watch this, from the battlements of Black Towers (sorry, Ricardipus), over steepled fingers, with interest.

Footnote: I have realized that Firefox 2 has a built-in spell checker. That, and the fact that MovableType's javascript is broken, are two reasons to use Firefox. Safari serves me well for everything else.