Back to blogging

I’ve been away from my desk (and this blog) for a while now, but thankfully all of the payroll mixups have been ironed out! I’m happy to be working on MM again, and excited to be presenting at Rocky ’09 next week. I’ve been focusing mostly on getting my presentation in shape, and have gone through several iterations of my slides already. I think  have the basic idea of what I want to say down, but I’m hoping to fine tune the delivery with Rob and everyone else sometime this week.

I’ve never given a talk at a conference, nor have I attended this particular conference, so I hope that my presentation fits in. Mentally I think I fall more on the computer science side of things, so I’m unsure of how to make my presentation appeal to both the biology- and CS-minded attendees. I’m confident that by the time I present, we’ll have all of that sorted out though!

As far as MM itself is concerned, Rob went out of his way and did a whole bunch of code to make my job easy with the new JSON storage cgi. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get his new code to agree with android (well, that’s technically a lie, I did kind-of get it working, but apparently you can’t have URLs that are thousands of lines long). Today we went back to the drawing board and did it the ‘hard way’ wherein I hand-code the cgi form with a bunch of yucky string manipulations in java. That code seems to be working nearly perfectly! 🙂

I hope to have the code fully operational within the week, but I may have to stop and prioritize the Rocky preparation. It all really depends on when and how often I work with others in the lab on my presentation. Regardless, I’m really excited to have the ball rolling again with this project. I can’t wait to see what people think of it at Rocky; I hope they’ll be impressed by what we’ve done!