Flags and Lollipops

Monday, October 31, 2005

Passing the time with Google Video

Was pootling around on Google Video and found this presentation about BioKnoppix (the bootable Linux CD with a whole bunch of bioinformatics tools on it) by Humberto Ortiz-Zuazaga and Carlos Rodríguez, who were the originators of the project.

I've never actually used Bioknoppix (have used plain old Knoppix for sysadmin stuff, though). Seems like a good idea, especially in conjuction with a 1Gb flash drive where you can store all of your scripts and analyses.

On a different but related note, Google Video also picks up all of these live surgery webcasts, which I didn't expect. Is it for the educational value to other surgeons and medical students? To sell the equipment used..?

Comments and trackbacks Feel free to post your comments Anonymous Neil Blogger Stew . This post has trackbacks.

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2 Comments:

At November 01, 2005 12:55 AM, Anonymous Neil said...

I've always struggled to understand the rationale for a Live CD in this context. I can understand booting from a CD to try something out without committing to a full installation. I can also understand it in the case where someone has limited resources (e.g. one machine with a pre-existing setup that they don't want to reconfigure). And of course, a bootable CD for repair has saved my systems on more than one occasion. But I'd have thought that most people who were serious about computational biology would have one or more dedicated machines for this purpose, with sufficient storage for their data?

Love the live surgery though.

 
At November 01, 2005 8:51 AM, Blogger Stew said...

True... I was thinking of students in public computing labs which only run Windows XP (as is the case at my institution).

That and hijacking Windows boxes to make an impromptu cluster by burning a dozen LiveCDs with openMosix on them.

 

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