Connotea & Postgenomic complaints

I was catching up on my Bloglines subscriptions and came across Tiageo's 'Pissed with Connotea' post about some complaints he had about some NPG products. I was going to reply in a comment but figured that T's points are worth addressing here, too.

1. [Connotea] Performance and downtime: Sometimes to submit a citation takes ages, or the service is down (although, regarding downtime, it seems to be getting better).

Yeah. This is something that has plagued Connotea recently though it is getting better as you say. Unfortunately the solutions aren't as easy as you might think. Ian Mulvany - who runs the site - was saying earlier that they're looking at adding a new server this week, which should help.

2. Postgenomic: When I tried to use it, it was mostly down. Want anedoctical evidence? If you search now (as of the posting date of this entry) for postgenomic on google, the cached page says: “Unable to select database”, nothing more.
3. Postgenomic again: A few months I submitted my blog. I got no answer at all.

These are also fair enough but I should point out that Postgenomic isn't an NPG product - it's run by me. NPG do let me keep developing it during work hours.

What I'm saying is - don't blame NPG, blame me. ;)

Downtime hasn't been a problem for Postgenomic recently, I don't think (I check it every day and it has been fine) but there *was* a long standing issue to do with firewalls and TCP/IP expiry timestamps that I won't bore you with - suffice to say that it meant that pages wouldn't load correctly on some platforms and that it's fixed now.

I know about the Google thing. It's a bit embarrassing but I haven't gotten round to doing anything about it yet..

re: not replying to your email... I'm normally quite good at getting back to people quickly (no, really). I found yours again and my excuse is that I was on a plane to SFO when I read it - must have put it on the 'to do' pile and forgotten about it. Sorry. :(

As a side note you're listed now.

HTH.

Talk by Tony Hey

Tony Hey from Microsoft came to NPG today and gave a talk about e-science. Four points about his visit:

1) He wasn't evil - in fact he was quite nice and had eminently sensible attitudes towards open source and interoperability, amongst other things.

2) myTea, the electronic lab notebook system mentioned before elsewhere on the bioinformatics blogs (can't find a link, suggest you don't use Google Blogsearch if you want to find one), looks nifty, although he was talking about it in the context of a chemistry lab.

3) He showed a table from webometrics.info, which is a site that measures how well different universities are using the web. The table in question was a ranking of universities worldwide based on the number of citations of papers produced there (I believe). His point was that universities that pushed free digital repositories of their papers did better in such rankings, as evidenced by the University of Southampton - home of EPrints - sitting in the top twenty. The University of Edinburgh came 28th - ahead of Cambridge and Oxford (either ERA has gotten much better since I was there or Cambridge and Oxford have sucky repositories, is all I can say).

4) Tony's talk used a couple of slides borrowed from an earlier Bill Gates presentation. Either Bill Gates is a slideshow wizard or he has a special employee (a PowerPeon?) to prettify things up for him. No jazz or zen, but lots of gradients and snappy graphics. I was impressed.