MacResearch

By Drew McCormack

Snow Leopard brought with it blocks (closures) for the C and Objective-C languages. Blocks at first seem to be nothing more than anonymous, inline functions, but that is only partially true, because they are also a lot like objects, carrying about their context data with them. Once you start playing with blocks, a whole new style of programming opens up to you, and you find uses for blocks in places where you may not have expected them.

This is my list of ten different applications of blocks in C/Objective-C.

Many of you saw our posting and responded publicly and privately to the passing of Warren DeLano, the author of PyMOL. The following message comes from Axel Brunger, Warren's graduate advisor. If you can contribute to the fund to help get it established it would be very much appreciated.

To start MacResearch.org will donate all profits from our Amazon store through the end of the year to the fund.

Update: Many people have requested an alternate way to make donations to MacResearch.org. We've set up an account through PayPal. From now, until the end of the year, all PayPal donations will also go to the memorial fund. Use the link on the right hand side of the page to make a donation.

If you participate in a social networking site, know friends or colleagues that may be interested in contributing, or some other way to help spread the word, it would be greatly appreciated.

Please see below for more information:

Dear friends and colleagues:

It's now been over a week since Warren has passed away. We are trying to
move toward a permanent way to honor Warren's memory and what
he stood for: Open Source Computational Biosciences and molecular
visualization. To do this, Jim Wells and I put together a mission statement
with the approval of Warren's family:

There are two webcasts being put on by our sister organization MacLearning.org that may be of interest to some of you. The first is on medical imaging in education and the second is on Podcast Producer 2. The links below have more information.

The Digital daVinci: Medical Imaging in Education and Information

Podcast Producer 2

The 1.0 Beta version of OpenMM has just been released. OpenMM is a freely downloadable, high performance, extensible library that allows molecular dynamics (MD) simulations to run on high performance computer architectures, such as graphics processing units (GPUs). It currently supports NVIDIA GPUs and provides preliminary support for the new cross-platform, parallel programming standard OpenCL.

Author: Drew McCormack

I have just made available 'Scientific Scripting with Python' via the lulu.com web site as a physical book, as well as a PDF download. Previously, the manuscript was only available on the iPhone via the App Store. It takes quite an unusual approach, in that it is totally focussed on the skills you need to process data in science.

Tom Elliot has posted a series of Xgrid-related posts on his blog. It is an interesting read for anybody trying to set up a small grid on Mac OS X Snow Leopard, particularly if you do not have the Server version. These should serve as a good complement to my now somewhat dated tutorials. It is an ongoing series, so keep an eye on Tom's blog.

It's with sadness that I bring the news that Warren L. DeLano passed away, suddenly and unexpectedly, on Tuesday November 3rd. For some of you, Warren's name will be instantly recognized. For many more, you know him indirectly as the developer of PyMOL. PyMOL, the open source software he began developing as a graduate student, would eventually become his life's work and has become one of the key tools used by structural biologists the world over.

I was recently reading BMC Bioinformatics and came across two papers by Daniel Frank that I thought might be of interest. The first describing XplorSeq a software package that facilitates the compilation, management and phylogenetic analysis of DNA sequences.

As most of you know MacResearch has an Amazon store. If you buy something through our Amazon store we get a percentage of the sale to help keep the site going. We've added Apple's new Magic Mouse (currently pre-ordering). The cost is the same as if you buy it from the main Amazon store.

So if you are considering buying one, please consider getting through our store. You'd be helping us out! Thanks.