The NY Times had a great article on the Origin of HeLa cells, a commonly used cell line that anyone who has spent time in a lab recognizes. Sadly, the tremendous value of this resource came at a price of patient rights and consent. It was a different era for consents and patients rights, but as scientists we should still take notice.

A flawed study linking autism and vaccines has finally be retracted, although not before it was used by the anti-vaccine lobby to justify endangering millions of children by frightening their parents into opting out the vaccine. Predictably, autism rates did not decline but cases of preventable childhood diseases increased...

I'm getting started with designing a new Drupal theme using Zen. However, a first step needs to be to set up a development environment on my Mac, so I can use local tools and not keep messing with a production (glorified hobby) server.

We all know the importance of good passwords, and how dangerous it is to reuse passwords between websites. One breach and your whole weblife is open, right? So the alternative is random passwords for each website. That's great - strong, secure - but what if you need to get log in and you don't have 1Password or Keepass (etc) available?

After reading the most recent issue of Nutrition Action Newsletter, I decided it was time to do something about my office - or more specifically, my desk. Although standing desks are nothing new (they've been around for hundreds of years), our increasingly sedentary lifestyle highlights their utility.

In the morning, my Macbook is usually asleep - and plugged into the hub that connects it to the Time Machine disk. I usually just grab it and go - leading to the dreaded 'disconnect' message when I wake it up at work.

Now, I have a solution - to eject the disk when my Mac goes to sleep. You'll need SleepWatcher, a cool little program from Bernhard Baehr. It is compatible with Leopard, but appears to run fine on my Snow Leopard system. Install SleepWatcher and the startup item.

I've started the Java course created by Sang Shin at http://www.javapassion.com/javaintro/. I'm very impressed - the pacing is pretty good, there are exercises and homework, a forum for questions and comments, and it's free! What a great resource to learn from.

Java has come a long way since I took a class back in 1996.

computers

So, my faithful Macbook Pro died a sudden death a few weeks ago. I had AppleCare, but of course it was voided due to a spill two years ago. Did the spill cause the death? I doubt it - the machine has run great for two years after the spill. But, I can't deny that there was a spill so... no AppleCare.

Wow, first time I've run into a memory chip that died in the machine. And of course the POST said it was fine, despite the fact that Memcheck86 showed it dead in a couple seconds. So, that's the backup server back up.

Still had trouble getting the RAID1 working again... constant "device in use" warnings when I tried to assemble.

Thanks to some suggestions on the Drupal website, I've improved the modifications to a) have Subscriptions honor the $node->moderate bit, and b) have Modr8 send out Subscriptions when a node is approved.

This still requires a patch to modr8 so that subscriptions gets called when the approval form is submitted, but uses a module for the rest. Also it pulls the real $node values from the database, rather than creating a skeleton from the form info.