Ensembl very kindly distributes their databases on Amazon as public datasets in a variety of forms. The most straightforward to use is the set of MySQL database files that can simply be copied into a MySQL server's data directory and they will..

Yesterday I found a strange thing - a piece of open-source bioinformatics software that only needed minor tweaking before it would run. Top marks to the authors, although they might like to read the following to learn how they can make it absolutely..

Here are the slides I just presented at the Cloud Computing Workshop at Bio-IT World Europe 2010 in Hannover, Germany. Other speakers included Dave Powers from CycleComputing, and Glenn Proctor from the EBI, both of whom presented very interesting..

Reading an article on the BBC website ('Computers show how wind could have parted Red Sea') this morning reminded me how sometimes our understanding of the world can change.  Here is a case of what many people would have thought of as  being a..

In February 2008 I attended a BioHackathon held at DBCLS in Tokyo to work on semantic data in open-source bioinformatics toolkits. My role at the time was to represent BioJava along with my erstwhile BioJava colleague Mark Schreiber, and the two of..

BioMart will be previewing their new 0.8 version during a dedicated workshop at GMOD Europe 2010.

It seems that in the world of bioinformatics, the concept of outsourcing work to third-parties (except where the third-party is an academic collaborator who will do the job for free!) is still in its infancy and so projects that involve this..