Bioinformatics

I've been tinkering with a flash project recently. Actually haxe , so it's only linux tools -- VI, and the command line -- not the GUI interface people normally associate with flash. This post is a summary of how to get started with haxe using only the command line, and a project containing flash stuff I want to remember. To start, here's a gist of shell commands that will set up haxe on an ubuntu machine. The installers from the haxe website work fine for windows and mac (and I think 32 bit linux). Haxe has a slightly different syntax from actionscript 3, but for most things it is identical. These docs are very good, and better than the adobe site, I have that page open always when working with haxe. I also grabbed an "actionscript.vim" from the internet somewhere and put it in ~/.vim/syntax/ for syntax highlighting and added this line to my .vimrc: autocmd BufRead *.hx set filetype=actionscript Then compilation and code is simply a matter of following this . ...

The PNAS article linked here found subjects could improve IQ with training. I've written a simple flash version of their protocol over a couple long evenings in haxe /flash. The article methods list 2 stimuli, a moving box, and spoken letters. The test subject is to respond (click in my case) when the box position or the spoken letter is the same as it was 2 time steps ago. Where 2 is increased as the subject gets better. I didn't do sound, I just show a big letter. Clearly, the logical thing to do is use it for a couple weeks and then implement the sound when I'm smarter. (I've never really used swfmill , but I think that'd be useful here...) The article is ambiguous about when the letter is to sound, I've made both the letter and the box appear at the same time. The default, as in the article is to have 3 seconds between events, and to show the box for 0.5 seconds. I also add some indication of whether the answer was correct (green +) or not (red -). That act...

All my flash tinkering has been in VIM-- no IDE, no XML, just actionscript. It's a little tough to deal with the adobe compiler as it takes about 11 seconds to compile a large project like modestmaps on my machine. That's not good for a guess-and-check programmer. The typing does catch some errors. The worldkit project compiles instantaneously with mtasc (the predecessor to haxe )--likewise for the as2 branch of modestmaps. The flash compiler shell drops the compile time for as3 modestmaps to under 3 seconds, so I've added this to my .bash_aliases: alias fcsh="/usr/bin/rlwrap /opt/src/flex2/bin/fcsh" the rlwrap is to use readline in the flash shell--meaning I can just press up-arrow to get the previous compile command. By default, one has to paste or type the entire command again. With that, it's close to a reasonable workflow.

Mash Flap I started looking into flash mapping stuff lately. For the patch I submitted to worldkit, Mikel gave me commit access! So, now the svn version of worldkit can be compiled with mtasc by typing "make". I feel unreasonably proud of that, given that much of what I did was some global search and replace stuff in VI, and then read and fixed mtasc compiler errors until they went away. It was good fun. Michal Migurski saw in that same post that I mentioned modestmaps and gave me some good ideas on getting WMS going. I just figured out how to get that working and posted a message to their overly web2.0 forums. Hopefully someone with some real actionscript skillz will clean it up. A mapping library without a good WMS interface is much less useful for most of the stuff I do. I haven't decided whether to use modestmaps or worldkit, or both. The time stuff the Mikel has done in worldkit is very cool and I haven't really looked at that yet. But I have a tim...