McGill WebVPN bookmarklet

When you’re on a paywalled page, you can use this bookmarklet to view it through McGill’s VPN, which requires your McGill ID and password. Drag the following link to your toolbar:

Use McGill WebVPN

When you’re on a page that you can only view through McGill’s VPN, you can click the bookmark to do so.

For the nerds, the raw code is:

javascript:location.href='https://webvpn.mcgill.ca/'+location.href.replace('http://','http/').replace('https://','https/')

mekentosj Papers

Papers is an application to help you find, organise, read, and search all those PDFs that you accumulate during research. It is written by two nerds—sorry, scientists—in the Netherlands (and now UK), and won an Apple Design Award in 2007.

I downloaded the demo to help me with a biochem assignment. So far it only searches PubMed, but that’s been enough for me.

And the verdict is: it’s sexy. Sexy enough for me to pay for.

Yeah.

Queen's U. proxy bookmarklet

“Great, I found the article I was looking for! But wait, what’s this? I can only see the abstract? Oh yeah, I forgot to log into the proxy.”

If this happens to you as often as it does to me, you might be interested in using this bookmarklet: Proxy it. Just drag that link to your bookmark bar. When you click it, the page you’re on will reload through the proxy.

Calculating the area under the normal curve in Ruby

Summary: Attached is a pure Ruby implementation of the AS66 algorithm (Hill 1973), ported from the Fortran code available here. It estimates the integral of the normal distribution, defaulting to the area under the right tail.
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BioRuby's Bio::FlatFileIndex compatibility with BioPerl's Bio::DB::Flat

Summary: Attached is a diff that allows Bio::FlatFileIndex to access BDB flatfile databases created by BioPerl’s Bio::DB::Flat. I have not changed the way BioRuby creates its databases, so this likely breaks access to BioRuby-created flatfile indices.
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