February 26th, 2013
In recent iterations of GNOME terminal, the active tab is nearly indistinguishable from the inactive ones. That makes it harder to navigate when you’ve got a bunch of terminals open simultaneously. Fortunately, GNOME uses a modified CSS scheme to control theme appearance, and that makes it easy to highlight an active tab. Here’s how.
Create (or edit) ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css. Add these lines:
@define-color ubuntu_orange #fb9267;
TerminalWindow .notebook tab:active {
background-color: shade(@ubuntu_orange,1.1);
}
Then, exit all open terminals, and then open a new terminal and create a tab. With the above modification, you should see tabs like this:
July 3rd, 2011
This page provides a quick synopsis on how to use three of my favorite Python features together:
- virtualenv, which provides a standardized mechanism to isolate python environments (including in WSGI setups)
- pip, which facilitates packages installation in virtualenv environments or otherwise
- ipython, a terrific interactive shell with readline and debugging support
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April 16th, 2011
Google’s implementation of document sharing is completely fouled up. The following is a slighted redacted version of a (formerly) internal email to colleagues to tell them what I learned about document sharing based on interactions with their customer support and folks on the net.
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February 15th, 2011
Hype and evangelism run rampant in technology. That’s not to say there aren’t real and substantial advances, of course. One of my personal mantras is that simple things should be simple and complex should be possible. In other words, complexity shouldn’t come at the expense simplicity. (This isn’t a novel idea, just my own internal rephrasing.) With that in mind, I was amused by the following observation:
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February 12th, 2011
I’m having lots of dropped connections at home. Unfortunately, consumer-grade routers typically have poor monitoring facilities out of the box. Unix/Linux environments have long been able to aggregate logging messages across multiple hosts through a service called syslog. Many routers use embedded Linux and support sending messages to remote systems via syslog. (Emailing logs is supported, but that’s a clumsy option.) This post is a short tip on how to configure a D-Link DI-825 (rev B1) to send system messages to an Ubuntu 10.0 host, but the general method will apply to many routers and nearly all Unix/Linux hosts are capable of acting as logging destinations. Read the rest of this entry »
July 24th, 2010
Earlier this week, the Oversight and Investigation subcommittee of the Energy and Commerce committee of the US House of Representatives undertook an investigation of direct-to-consumer (DTC) testing. To some, this investigation was long overdue; to others, it was a witch hunt by intrusive regulators. In any case, it’s pretty clear that this event will lead to regulatory oversight that will permanently shape genetic testing. Below, I’ve provided a few links with comments and highlights. Read the rest of this entry »
March 4th, 2010
My hosting provider, HostMonster, uses cPanel to enable account administrators to configure their domains and services. By default, Hostmonster and cPanel place web data for the primary domain in ~/public_html/, with subdomains and “add-on” domains as subdirectories therein. That means that files for the primary domain are comingled with the document roots of other domains. The incongruency of that layout causes heartburn for people like me. This post tells you how to relocate those files AND have them served by the original URLs for the primary domain. Read the rest of this entry »
January 27th, 2010
I have three kids. All of them like to climb. Margot seems unnaturally compelled to climb things — no matter how imprudent. (She broke her clavicle at age 2 after climbing up to, and falling off of, the kitchen table.) Unfortunately, our San Francisco postage stamp yard has no good places to climb. Since I spent most of my childhood in a tree, the lack of climbable structures for my kids disturbed me. So, during a recent break between jobs, I built a climbing wall in our house. The kids love it and it was a hit at our recent holiday cookie party.
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January 25th, 2010
As many of you know by now, I left Genentech in September to join UC Berkeley as the Chief Scientist of the Genome Commons. I’m part of QB3, the California Institute for Quantitative Biology (no I don’t understand the abbreviation either).
I’m collaborating with Steven Brenner, Jasper Rine, and Lior Pachter at Berkeley, and Robert Nussbaum and Bernie Lo at UCSF, to address the technical, scientific, clinical, and ethical opportunities associated with interpreting genomic data. It’s an exciting time and an exciting place.
To be sure, I’ll be posting a lot more about that here.
January 23rd, 2010
How is it that someone like me, i.e. with substantial geek tendencies, goes this long without blogging? At one time, I surely thought that the young whippersnappers were wasting their time with this blogging thing. I mean, get real, who’s gonna read this crap? It turns out lots of people do.
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