The brain is a 1.5 kilogram mass of jelly, the consistency of tofu, you can hold it in the palm of your hand, yet it can contemplate the vastness of space and time, the meaning of infinity and the meaning of existence. It can ask questions about who am I, where do I come from, questions about love and beauty, aesthetics, and art, and all these questions arising from this lump of jelly. It is truly the greatest of mysteries.

Neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran on unlocking the secrets of consciousness and behavioral neurology (Edge.org, February 21, 2012)

(See also: edge.org/conversation/adventures_behavioral_neurology)
(See also: edge.org)

These are a few of my favorite things.

(See also: YouTube: Lego Space Shuttle)
(See also: BLOG entry about the project)

I work at the National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP). My group is responsible for the HapLogic III application, a Java server that matches and ranks patient HLA types to donors. As Technical Lead I am responsible for the underlying architecture of the software program and overseeing work being done by other software engineers on the project. I act as a mentor for new programmers, as well as for all members on the development team. I serve as the interface between programmers and management. I also lead morning stand-ups (Agile methodology) and coordinate our activities with other federated enterprise services.

We are a J2EE, JMS, XML, EJB 3.0 shop with Oracle based data sources. This position leverages my knowledge of application framework, servers, security, databases, object-relational mapping, as well as Oracle, BEA Weblogic, IBM Websphere MQ, and Business Objects. This position also builds on over a decade of graduate and consulting work in bioinformatics and life sciences.

But why do I find it inspiring?

Despite the usual politics and misunderstandings. Our engine searches to match donors to an average of 350 patients a day. Volunteers, both inside and outside the company, hand carry marrow from donor to patient. There is a very real sense that we are doing something important and there is urgency in our process.

Today, I was asked to join the running team for Be the Match / Be the One Run in Minneapolis, MN, May 19, 2012. I’ll be there, I hope you can participate in your city.

Configuring a virtual WiFi access point with my netbook in Windows 7 turned out to be easier than I expected. I boot into LINUX and tether the netbook to the internet over a bluetooth connection to my Blackberry regularly, but I’ve not tried it under Windows 7. This hasn’t been required, until now.

Occasionally, when we travel abroad we rent USB cellular data cards to track the weather and keep in touch. I’ve yet to find a card or service that works predictably with my LINUX kernel of choice. Sadly, this drives me into Windows 7.

You can do this from the command-line. Open a command line with administrative privileges and type:

	netsh wlan set hostednetwork mode=allow ssid=NAME key=PASSWORD

Replace ‘NAME’ and ‘PASSWORD’ with something that makes sense to you and your users will remember. Start the access point with this line:

	netsh wlan start hostednetwork

Stop the access point with this line:

	netsh wlan stop hostednetwork

You can share an existing connection to this interface by going to the ‘Properties’ of a connection, select the sharing tab and enable ICS by choosing the corresponding virtual WiFi adapter.

While this has a certain stark elegance, it is a bit involved and requires more steps than you might want to do on a daily basis. There is an Open Source option that simplifies this considerably.

Virtual Router is a free, open source software based router for PCs running Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2. Users wirelessly share any internet connection (Wifi, LAN, Cable Modem, Dial-up, Cellular, etc.) with any Wifi device (laptop, smart phone, iPod Touch, iPhone, iPad, etc.) Devices connect just like any other access point using WPA2 encryption.

I’ve found this to be pretty handy. What do you use?

(See also: virtual router)

I’m collaborating with a very small team to develop business process tools for an energy risk management company. One of the developers was not as comfortable with the UNIX command-line interface and wanted to know if I could set up a GUI.

It turns out, you can. Assuming you have shell access to the instance, this is the easy way to do it. Log into your instance and load the following packages:

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop
sudo apt-get install vnc4server
vncserver :1

Launching VNCserver will prompt you for a password. When your VNC client of choice (I use Chicken, based on Chicken of the VNC by Jason Harris) connects, you see a terminal window in the desktop. Type the following command to start your gnome desktop:

nohup gnome-session &

This will launch the gnome desktop session manager and bring you to an UBUNTU desktop you might recognize. Most of the base configurations are exceptionally small machines. Launching a desktop is pretty taxing, launching a browser is paralyzing.

You should know there are more efficient ways to an UBUNTU windowing system. Installing the entire ubuntu-desktop will create a collection of tools that you may never use, making your storage footprint quite a bit larger. If you do not want all the desktop tools you can install only what you need.

There are also a range of remote desktop servers and clients available. I chose the Chicken fork of VNC. You might like to investigate FreeNX, or any of the other flavors of the VNC family.

Once the correct EC2 tools are installed, the proper keys are generated, in the right directories, the instance behaves like any other remote server.

I’m interested to learn what our burn rate will be for the services we’re developing. What I see so far is encouraging.