Posted January 5th, 2009 by Spicy
With the new year and some much need down time to work on some side projects, I have some fun news.
First, I am close to releasing an Alpha version of my newest iPhone application. The details about the app are very hush hush, but it’s really cool and should be lots of fun to use. I do need some Alpha Testers, however, and if you have an iPhone and a desire to test barely funtioning-cutting edge software, please email me at thespicychicken@gmail.com.
Seconds, I wanted to let all of you know that work on Customize will continue. I have found some much needed time to get the website server back up and running as well as fixing the app for 2.2. Stay tuned for more news on that.
Happy new year! -Spicy
Tags: alpha software, app news
Posted December 9th, 2008 by Spicy
Yesterday I wanted to have my latest tweet be set as my Facebook status message. It seems to me that this is very useful. However, the app that does this isn’t working. So I wrote my own.
If you want to use it, sign up for it here:
http://apps.facebook.com/fwitter/
-Spicy
Posted November 7th, 2008 by Spicy
With the election behind and a collective sigh of relief from the science community we can get back to the good stuff– throwing some fuel into the engine we call SCIENCE! For my part, I got some much needed time to learn about and implement some simple algorithms utilizing CUDA. CUDA is a c-extension from Nvidia for leveraging the massive computational power in your GPU. In my case my GeForce 8600M graphics card in my MacBook Pro.
I have to give some serious props to the devs of CUDA because it is very straight forward and makes programming for the GPU rather intuitive. I have been able to implement the Lloyd’s Algorithm for the K-Means problem in just a few days. The speed increase is graphically represented in the following graph.
In green is the time in seconds required to compute the kmeans solution using the CPU and in red is the time required for the GPU. The variance in the times comes from the nature of Lloyd’s algorithm which, depding on the input, can take a variable amount of time. The GPU times are also varied but it is difficult to see in the figure.
These results are just from running the application on my MBP. If you have a machine with many graphics processors (or many machines each with their own GPU) then you can parallelize this even more and massively boost your computational power. In my opinion the GPU architecture is the future of scientific computing as so many of our computational challenges can be addressed using parallelization.
For those that are interested I will be writing up some CUDA tutorials covering Installation/Set Up, A “Hello World” example, and the full K-Means implementation over at MacResearch.org.
Tags: algorithm, CUDA, GPU, k-means, Science
Posted October 29th, 2008 by Spicy
As a PhD student you start out by doing rotations, quarter-long research projects, in various Professor’s lab. In my rotation I am attempting to learn all there is to know about Chem(o)informatics. I write it that way because there is an apparent dispute as to what exactly to call this field of study (Cheminformatics versus Chemoinformatics). As I do with many problems, I turned to Google for the answer. A quick search revealed that the term Cheminformatics is more prominent. “Ah ha!” I exclaimed. For the all knowing Google could not be wrong and so it must be. However, an itch in the back of my mind made me do a search using Google Scholar. Alas, to my dismay, it showed the opposite. In an attempt to break the tie and resolve this conflict I attempted another search in PubMed. Surely that would settle things. The results of my studies are below.
(Perhaps definatively, my spellcheck says there both wrong.)
Tags: cheminformatics, chemoinformatics, Science
Posted October 28th, 2008 by Spicy
Once again I find myself faced with the need for journaling software. Last time I scoured the internets looking for good (and hopefully free) software for writing down and organizing my scientific studies (and other tasks) in a journaling program. However, I was disappointed in what I discovered. This led to the birth of Journal, a dead-simple Cocoa application for just that.
Journal is not without its limitations however and I again was seeking out an alternative for my work. I have had slightly higher success and probably my favorite app is VoodooPad, which is a native cocoa wiki. Alas, however, the structure of a wiki may not be the best for organizing a linear progression of work (and yet has lots of advantages as well) but compounded by the $40 price tag I was put off. I turned back to my app, Journal, and decided it really wouldn’t take too much work to make Journal a whole lot better. So I quickly implemented some extra features (rich-text editing and image/pdf incorporation) and turned out the next release of this software. My hope is again that some will enjoy it.
You can download Journal 1.2 here.
Tags: journal, release, Science
Posted October 28th, 2008 by Spicy
Was just wasting some valuable time on Reddit and found this little gem. It was in response to Philly voters facing adversary to vote for Obama.
It’s this type of thing that reinforces my faith in humanity. I think we shall make it.
Tags: fun, lolcatz
Posted October 27th, 2008 by Spicy
Collaborate was an experiment in design to development. I recently had the need to utilize a collaborate text editing program and used a rather nifty one named SubEthaEdit. While this did allow a friend of mine and myself to edit a document collaboratively it was quite restrictive since it did not accept any Rich Text Editing. You may be thinking, well yeah, then just use Google Docs, or some other shared document program. However, sharing is not quite the same as real-time text editing and something more was needed. I happened to be on Jabber at the time and realized that it would be even cooler if I could create a system that just used existing chat protocols to faciliate collaborate. A quick search for “cocoa xmpp framework” yeilds this very handy set of code.
I spent some idle time coming up with a basic OOP architecture that would be conducive to the task at hand and would also have the ability to be easily extended to other chat protocols. From first thought to the product you see here it was about a week, however most of the programming was actually completed in about three days (with time for eating, sleeping, etc). While this program isn’t the fanciest app out there it does allow you and friends to edit Rich Text Documents in Real Time over Jabber (GTalk) and is loads of fun to boot.
The first release (version 0.1.0) is available for download here.
Tags: app, cocoa, collaborate
Posted October 19th, 2008 by Spicy
TheSpicyChicken Blog is a place for my musings on science, programming, and whatever else. TheSpicyChicken iteself is a small software company resonsible for some popular iPhone apps and other scientific and fun OS X software. Use the list of links on the right to browse throgh different projects that in released or in development.
Tags: General, introduction
