I just finished with the third homework assignment for Bioinformatics, and I'm rather proud of this one. I managed to get enough free time to finish it (and the extra credit), and it's done cleanly and prettily. It took me a bit longer to finish than I anticipated because the assignment gave an algorithm for a certain part that was actually incorrect, but once I figured it out and devised a correct algorithm, things came together rather well.
On the laptop front, apparently one of the many tweaks I made to the system broke it in a very strange way: programs that use xresources no longer can parse colour names. Possessing much arcane knowledge, I inspected /usr/share/X11/rgb.txt (which is there and looks pretty normal) and made sure showrgb could see it (which it could). So.. xterm is useless to me right now, as:
tremor:~$ xterm -fg grey -bg black Warning: Color name "black" is not defined Warning: Color name "grey" is not defined
and the resulting window is all black. I can still specify colours by providing the hex name, but that's a pain and I really should just figure out what's going on. perl-Tk is also seriously mangled. Apparently some folk have managed to get FC5 happy with the stuff needed for my video card/screen, and in an RPM format no less -- when I get the time, I'll have to check that out. Oh, and Windowmaker segfaults as soon as it starts. I wonder what exactly I did to screw up my system this way. It may possibly be the results of my (stupidly) letting the ATI installer run and then my (more stupidly) attempting to undo its changes by hand. It may be something else. My present way to attempt to cope with this is to run scripts iterating over all packages and verifying them against the system. If this doesn't work, I'll just do a fresh copy onto my external HD and do a fresh install again. Meh.
For the first time ever, I have a laptop that can go to sleep, as Fedora5 has the magic needed to do that automagically. It's interesting (although it, for reasons I don't entirely understand, logs me out).
jwz had a rather amusing summary of the movie Closer:
Wow, I hated this movie. More specifically, I despised every character in it. It's a story set over a number of years in which two couples keep cheating on each other with members of the other couple. There's a whole lot of repeated "I need you, I can't live without you" dialog, which, every time, just left me thinking, "ok, why?" Which maybe was the point, but in the end it was just an exercise in watching hollow, untrustworthy people repeatedly betray each other, and really, who gives a shit.
I agree with him on it, partway, in that the characters really were all despicable, but they were also rather interesting in a Kundera-esque way. I am rather sensitive to portrayals of infidelity (and I don't think I could ever see John Lennon as being a particularly good person overall because of it), but with a bit of initial adjustment, I can still usually enjoy a film that portrays it. In particular, the film Kinsey comes to mind as having been worth seeing for its exploration of various conceptions of sex as well as the historical saga of Dr Kinsey itself.
I'm really enjoying the mustard I got in Paris a little over a year ago (wow, time really does fly..). It's a pity in some ways that I've gone mostly veggie again -- I don't know what mustard is normally eaten with apart from meat (it's decent with Rye bread..)
oy.. tired.