Double the Difference minus labor cost

We just booked a hotel in Miami through Hotwire for $209 per night.

However, once we found out who the booking was through, we decided to double check the price. As it turned out, booking directly through the hotel, was cheaper:


So, after researching their "double the difference" guarantee, we filled out their form to a link with the booking.
The next day, we got an email back rejecting the claim because it was an employee price.

Am I too cynical, do I think Hotwire is just trying fob us off hoping we will give up and not bother with the claim? After a quick google search for "hotwire double rate guarantee", the 4th link seems to indicate this is not the case:
Hotel "Best rate guarantee" programs, My experiences..... (2nd comment)

Time will tell - is this going to be another small claims experience?

Added The New Friend Connect Bar

I just added the friend connect bar down the bottom of my blog! Enjoy all the social network goodness that it displays!

Pubget made the MIT library cool list

Courtney Crummett has recently added Pubget to the MIT library libguide's cool tool section.

The libguides are a way that MIT librarians can provide resource links and tips to help students and faculty get the most out of the MIT library.

As mit.pubget.com links directly into the MIT Library holdings, it can help users get right to the PDF full text from a PubMed/Medline search.

See:
http://libguides.mit.edu/medicine
http://libguides.mit.edu/biology
http://libguides.mit.edu/bioinfo

Harvard Catalist Profiles

I just found a new project at Harvard based on the Catalyst CTSA grant. It is a social network for researchers.

If you look at Dr. Ramy Arnaout's Profile, you can see the similar people as well as a place for him to maintain his publications.

In IBM we had a similar system called Blue Pages and this looks very similar for the research space instead of the enterprise.

Not to die thanks!

An American was knocked unconscious in a serious accident while traveling in Australia. The ambulance took him to a local hospital for treatment.

While he finally woke up he asked the nurse, "Was I brought here to die?"

"No," said the nurse. "You were brought in here yesterday."

Human genomes as email attachments

A new paper by Scott Christley, Yiming Lu, Chen Li and Xiaohui Xie is available and talks about additional compression abilities available at the genome level.

They identified 4 ways to reduce the size:
1. Only use the number of bits needed;
2. Store relative instead of absolute positions;
3. Generalize variations and store the variations; and
4. Store non-random repeats as such.

If I get some time, I would really love to try out the code they provide in the article.

Human genomes as email attachments

Pubget: Vreeman RC. Festive medical myths. BMJ 337:a2769 (2008)

Many holiday hazards are as just myths. A review in the current issue of the BMJ cites some of your fears that can scientifically be crossed off any holiday worry list.

Pubget: Vreeman RC. Festive medical myths. BMJ 337:a2769 (2008)

Bill Gates makes $1000/minute ... really?

I just came across a really dodgy get rich quick ad from google.



However, according to Forbes, he has been one of America's biggest billionaire losers where he actually just lost $12.3 billion in the last 11 months.

So, if there where 335 days between January and December 2008, and there are 86400 seconds in every day, this means he actually lost $422/second or just over $25k/minute.

Compared to that, I am actually doing just fine - no need to get rich quick if that is the benchmark :)

Yet another reason to exercise

From this paper:

Exercise-induced suppression of acylated ghrelin in humans

it shows that exercise actually suppresses your appetite.

"In conclusion, this study demonstrates that plasma acylated ghrelin concentration is reduced during an acute bout of tread- mill running, and this lends support for the role of acylated ghrelin in appetite suppression during and immediately after exercise."

When it comes to vaccines - why take more?

It seems that only half does flu shots are need according to this study published in Archives of Internal Medicine.

Half- vs Full-Dose Trivalent Inactivated Influenza Vaccine (2004-2005): Age, Dose, and Sex Effects on Immune Responses. Arch Intern Med 168:2405 (2008)

Conclusions: Antibody responses to intramuscular half- dose TIV in healthy, previously immunized adults were not substantially inferior to the full-dose vaccine, particularly for ages 18 to 49 years.

Live close to your friends and hope they are happy

It seems such common sense, but so does a lot of things once they are studied. Here is a really interesting paper on the dynamics of how happiness spreads through your social connections.
To me, the summary seems to be to live close to your friends and family and make them happy. If you do, you increase your chances of happiness also.

Dynamic spread of happiness in a large social network

This also follows on from other work that shows the spread of obesity, smoking, and other health effects.

Pubget now on Solr

The latest version of Pubget has been rolled out and it is now based on its own search index. It has over 18 million medical and scientific papers index with over 6 million PDF paths ready for use.

The index is now Solr based and thus uses a new lucene based query syntax. To search only open access articles, you can use the query string access:open or alternatively you can limit your results by institution (e.g. access:ucsf, access:harvard, access:mit, etc).

I have been really impressed with Solr and its new 1.3 distributed sharding feature. It has allowed the use of low cost machines, amazon ec2, and s3 services.

Send a card to President Obama

Be one of the first to send your thoughts, ideas, and congratulations to President Obama. Send him a card and help Jack Cards reach their goal of donating $1 million to charity. Yes We Can!

Mysql and Ruby on Rails with OSX Leopard

To get mysql working on leopard. Run:


sudo env ARCHFLAGS="-arch i386" gem install mysql -- \
--with-mysql-dir=/usr/local/mysql --with-mysql-lib=/usr/local/mysql/lib \
--with-mysql-include=/usr/local/mysql/include

then

cd /usr/local/mysql/lib
sudo mkdir mysql
sudo cp libmysqlclient.15.dylib mysql/libmysqlclient.15.dylib

It is a hack, but got it to compile for me.

Fishing on the weekend - loads of fun

I have just synced my camera so can post some of the photos:
This is the first day's catch.

and this was from the second day.

It was a nice weekend break and Kim even did a little relaxing on the beach (without getting sun burn).

Amazon S3 down again

Here is the thread on their forum:

http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/thread.jspa?threadID=23285&start=0&tstart=0

It is making some of my sites look bad as I chose to put all the css and images on S3 so they would be severed up in a distributed fast manner. However, that speed is not being appreciated right now as it is not working.

My task this week will be to design a backup plan or move the css and images.

UPDATE: I have a backup plan now - which is nice. Amazon is also back up after 7 hours of downtime so I have turned off the backup service. One positive thing is that I now have a backup plan that can be turned in within minutes.

Simple email alert error page.

Mongrel, Apache, mod_proxy and Rails do go very well together. However, there are times when it can break down. While you can rely to some degree on monitoring tools, if a user is given an error page, it is nice to know as soon as it happens.
One good way to do this, have the error page, trigger an email alert letting you know some basic information so that you can debug and figure out what has gone wrong.
When mod proxy cannot connect to the mongrel cluster, it will return a 503 error page. Apache lets you specify this to be a cgi script so that you can bounce them to a cgi error page that packages up the environment and emails it to an administrator.

Here are 4 steps to follow to use this technique:

Step 1: Write a cgi error document

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use CGI;


my $query = new CGI;

my $sendmail = "/usr/sbin/sendmail -t";
my $reply_to = "Reply-to: REPLYEAMAIL\@REPLYDOMAIN.com\n";
my $subject = "Subject: Apache Error Page\n";

my $content = "SERVER_SOFTWARE = " . $ENV{'SERVER_SOFTWARE'} . "\n";
$content =  $content . "SERVER_SOFTWARE = " . $ENV{'SERVER_SOFTWARE'} . "\n";
$content =  $content . "SERVER_NAME = " . $ENV{'SERVER_NAME'} . "\n";
$content =  $content . "GATEWAY_INTERFACE = " . $ENV{'GATEWAY_INTERFACE'} . "\n";
$content =  $content . "SERVER_PROTOCOL = " . $ENV{'SERVER_PROTOCOL'} . "\n";
$content =  $content . "SERVER_PORT = " . $ENV{'SERVER_PORT'} . "\n";
$content =  $content . "REQUEST_METHOD = " . $ENV{'REQUEST_METHOD'} . "\n";
$content =  $content . "HTTP_ACCEPT = '" . $ENV{'HTTP_ACCEPT'} . "\n";
$content =  $content . "PATH_INFO = " . $ENV{'PATH_INFO'} . "\n";
$content =  $content . "PATH_TRANSLATED = " . $ENV{'PATH_TRANSLATED'} . "\n";
$content =  $content . "SCRIPT_NAME = " . $ENV{'SCRIPT_NAME'} . "\n";
$content =  $content . "QUERY_STRING = " . $ENV{'QUERY_STRING'} . "\n";
$content =  $content . "REMOTE_HOST = " . $ENV{'REMOTE_HOST'} . "\n";
$content =  $content . "REMOTE_ADDR = " . $ENV{'REMOTE_ADDR'} . "\n";
$content =  $content . "REMOTE_USER = " . $ENV{'REMOTE_USER'} . "\n";
$content =  $content . "CONTENT_TYPE = " . $ENV{'CONTENT_TYPE'} . "\n";
$content =  $content . "CONTENT_LENGTH = " . $ENV{'CONTENT_LENGTH'} . "\n";

my $to = "To: YOUREMAIL\@YOURDOMAIN.com\n";

open(SENDMAIL, "|$sendmail") or die "Cannot open $sendmail: $!";
print SENDMAIL $reply_to;
print SENDMAIL $subject;
print SENDMAIL $to;
print SENDMAIL "Content-type: text/plain\n\n";
print SENDMAIL $content;
close(SENDMAIL);


print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
print <

Step 2: Place it in your script alias path and set it as the error document for 503 errors

...edit your httpd.conf file...
ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ "/var/www/cgi-bin/"
ErrorDocument 503 /cgi-bin/error.pl

Step 3: Allow it to run (chmod a+x error.pl)
Step 4: Tell modd proxy to leave /cgi-bin scripts alone

...insert before your RewriteRule that proxies requests...
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/cgi-bin

Pubget is on the iPhone

For those Doctors, that love their iPhone, you can now run your Pubmed and Pubget [latest] searches and still get to the PDF right away.
You can read more about it on the pubget blog, or visit pubget.com/mobile on your iphone.

Pubget Blog Launched

I have launched a new blog on Pubget.
http://pubget.blogspot.com
I will be keeping this updated with the latest features, events and news for Pubget. If you are in medical/biological research or practice and you use Pubmed - this new service will save you time. Check it out, it is currently working for open access articles as well as licensed ones for MGH, MIT or Harvard users.

Lily Bean

Grand opening