I’m looking forward to hanging out with my awesome coworkers, my Ruby friends from all around, and giving a lightning talk on the BioWeatherMap Initiative at the ActiveResearch “Science on Rails” evening (Tuesday at 7:30pm).

Update: I’ve uploaded my talk from ActiveResearch to SlideShare:  “BioWeatherMap at ActiveResearch.”

CodeCon was a fantastic experience – San Francisco was enjoyable as always, and it was stimulating to be around so many incredibly bright folks. Thanks again to Len, Bram, and all the organizers for putting it together and for hosting the BioHack! track.

I hope to record the talk material with Kay and Mac, titled “DIY Synthetic Biology: From Design to Construction with New Model Organisms,” so that it is available online in the near future.

I’m primarily interested in building equipment for do-it-yourself biology, such as an inexpensive, high quality gel electrophoresis apparatus.

– cut to Thursday, Jan 8 –

…and today was the second night.  There were notably fewer people tonight, but it rocked anyhow.  I learned how to use the Bridgeport mill to do basic manual milling and how to use the digital readout, turned some aluminum in a lathe, and watched an intro to MIG welding.

Then, with Alex’s help, I put together a variable DC power supply with a variac, bridge rectifier (three of them, actually – but only because we blew two), and a resistor+capacitor to smooth the resulting voltage.  Photos:

Gel box power supply, variable from ~0-200VDC. Variac is on the left; AC voltmeter, bridge rectifier and RC mounted to the board on the right.

Bridge rectifier plus RC with drain resistor for gel box power supply

Variable DC power supply, all snug in a shelf. Goodnight!

Next week I’d like to test the power output on an oscilloscope, and start working on building a “draft” of an enclosure.

1. Built and delivered awesome web applications with thoughtbot, and will help to roll out a beginning Rails thoughtbot training course later this January.
2. Attended RailsConf, RubyConf, the Lone Star Ruby Conference, and spoke at Boston.rb on Clearance, a small auth plugin for Ruby web apps.
3. Started learning more biology in earnest by taking a cell- and micro-bio course at Harvard Extension and working with DIYbio.  While the lecture is a very good one, as lectures go, I preferred the lab to the lecture and, as such, intend to do more hands-on learning in 2009.  A few projects I would like to undertake include:
   1. Working through Shoestring Biotechnology: Budget-Oriented High Quality Biotechnology Laboratories for Two-Year College and High School.
   2. Working on at least one piece of equipment with DIYbio folks, such as Open Gel Box 2.0.
   3. Participating in a DIYbio iGEM team.

If you are interested in keeping tabs on what I’m up to, I’d suggest either my twitter feed or the DIYbio Google Group, as these are my highest-touch interactions these days.

and

http://groups.google.com/group/pradiptas-rolodex

Check out diybio.org and, if you’re in the Boston area, drop by our meetup next week!  Read Jason Bobe’s summary of the first meeting at the DIYbio blog, and keep an eye on the DIYbio mailing list for details.

I got to hang out with some of the team at RailsConf, see some top-secret Tee-Bot designs, go on some exciting Portland excursions and adventures, and I might have even learned a little Ruby or Rails along the way.

1. Go grab m2wp.py.
2. Download m2wp-mysql.diff. (Update 6/6/08: fixed the missing trailing newline)
3. Run patch m2wp.py m2wp-mysql.py.diff -o m2wp-mysql.py.
4. Now you can run python m2wp.py -h and you’re off and running!

A less effective method is to transform Mephisto’s Atom feed into RSS, and import that into WordPress. This is a pain, because the feed does not contain comments, but here is how I did it before I discovered m2wp.py:

1. Get the XMLStarlet command line XML toolkit.
2. wget http://atom.geekhood.net/atom2rss.xsl
3. wget http://mymephistoblog.com/feed/atom.xml
4. xml tr atom2rss.xsl atom.xml > rss.xml
5. Go to http://mywordpressblog.com/wp-admin/admin.php?import=rss
6. Import your rss.xml
7. Pull comments over by hand.