and

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

DIYbio is an organization for the ever expanding community of citizen scientists and DIY biological engineers that value openness & responsibility.  DIYbio aims to be an “Institution for the Amateur” — an umbrella organization that provides some of the same resources afforded by more traditional institutions like academia and industry, such as access to a community of experts, to technical literature and other resources, to responsible oversight for health and safety, and an interface between the community and the public at large.

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.

Bricklet currently consists of:

• A proposal for a Part Description Language
• A proposal for a Parts Sharing Framework that supports a web of registries, selective publication, document revisioning, and provenance/attribution.

Our intent is to implement ideas from the synthetic biology community and the BioBricks Technical Standards Working Group. We want to exercise these ideas with the hope of gaining insight into both their advantages and limits, with the intent to iterate in the future. Eventually, we may like to submit our ideas as patches to a project like Brickit to reuse existing functionality and build development mindshare.

We are tracking the requirements, design, and implementation on the Bricklet page at Google Code page. Mac and I will be presenting our progress at the Standards and Specifications in Synthetic Biology Workshop at the end of this month.

I gave a session that introduced synthetic biology, iGEM, their motivations, and surrounding issues. I’ve uploaded my slides in PDF (1.5MB): Synthetic Biology at BarCampRochester.

Here are a few takeaways from some of the sessions I attended:

There was a great session and discussion about intellectual property: copyright, patents, and trademarks – in particular how these apply to software and why patents aren’t necessarily evil (although the patent duration is surely out of touch with the speed of the software market). I’ll be reading more about Open Innovation, with an eye toward its applicability to both software and science.

Al Biles led a brainstorming session about the nature of creativity and what it means to be creative. This was an open-ended discussion with an exploratory nature, and was quite enjoyable. Al differentiated between P-creativity, which is an act that is original from an indivudal’s perspective, and H-creativity, which is an act that is original with respect to all known history. He also recommended Margaret Boden’s “Dimensions of Creativity.”

I learned about the difficultly of accessing supposedly open governmental data in the US due to its distribution in proprietary or obtuse formats. Consider a database that is made accessible by taking screenshots from within the Oracle admin tool, printing these out, scanning them back in, and distributing the lot as a PDF. Fighting the good fight, there are projects like those at the Sunlight Foundation that focus on making this data more readily accessible.

Then, there are projects like EveryBlock, which collates such data and lets you filter it by location, so you can learn about happenings in your neighborhood from crimes to business licensing to permit issuances. This is a great trend, and I hope to see it grow both in the domain of making data accessible and making it useful.

Following up on the political theme, I was in a thought-provoking session called “So you want to become a lobbyist?” that took a look at the importance of some of the “nuts and bolts” political issues like redistricting, and how effective grassroots movements are on a local scale (the consensus: very effective). Remy made an interesting point that grassroots means person-to-person, whether that’s door-to-door or online.

Sam & Katie gave a refreshing talk about relationship branding: 2 cool kids = 1 cool brand: thinkskinc.com.

Justin Thorp has a great post that he wrote post-BarCamp about starting your personal branding in college that is spot on. Having attended a fair number of conferences, I was also caught slightly off-guard by the lack of biz card trading. Go go day job plug for business cards!

Finally, if you’re in the Rochester, NY area, definitely check out the Society of Lectors, a group of folks who hold regular meetings to give BarCamp style presentations on a wide gamut of topics. Go brush up on your presentation skillz, and learn something new!

They are, of course, not linear.

And each one generates many artifacts.

…many, many, many artifacts.

Wouldn’t it be nice to keep track of all these? (Especially in a distributed team!)

1. GPS devices need more information about real-time traffic information. The best source for this is other GPSes that are also stuck in traffic. If they could communicate, they could intelligently route traffic to optimally spread traffic over primary and alternate routes. There are products that do this. iPhone and Android would also be excellent candidates.

2. To share this information, they need to be networked. They can form an ad-hoc wifi network when near one another and nodes with internet connections like internet phones and nodes near municipal wifi (which could be embedded into traffic lights?) can act as up/down links to a central database of traffic information.

3. In lieu of available real-time information, devices could sync with the central database by docking. A Bluetooth-enabled GPS could send its daily traffic recordings to your phone, which syncs itself to your computer when you carry it inside to home or work, which communicates this information to the internet. Pattern recognition is applied, and then traffic patterns are downloaded via the same channels to your GPS. It can use the traffic patterns to avoid areas of likely congestion during your route. (And you could cut out the middleman if your phone is your GPS.)

• imma chargin mah mRNA!
• teh central dogma: it goes “VRMMMMMMMM”