One of more wierd interests is following American politics, and especially American presidential elections. I am not even sure why. There is this long standing fascination with the USA, which must have started at around 8 or 9 when I got a Dutch translation of Uncle Tom's Cabin. I still remember crying at the ending. It led to a interest in American history, especially the Civil War and race relations.

I am still fascinated how the US makes a hero out of Martin Luther King, and at the same time votes Nixon in power. More recently, the election (if you can call it that) of Bush has astonished me. I actually was in the US when that whole dispute played itself out, and I still can not understand how he got 50% of the vote. Now I see that somebody like Howard Dean seems to get a lot of traction for the Democratic nomination. What I can see from here is quite encouraging.

A quick link to Apache Axis, the Java implementation of the SOAP protocol. I have been using this quite intensively in the last few weeks to create SOAP services to the Ensembl data.
Ensembl provides an interface to all the data of the Human Genome Project. In the underlying database all the mapping information for genes, exons, introns, etc. is stored. One of the projects I am involved in at work is to build pipelines for additional mapping information.
SOAP seems to be working very well to integrate Java and Perl based information sources together. I am not so sure if it usable for high throughput pipelines.

Note to myself: stop starting every post with "So"

So I spend the last 45 minutes trying to figure out how to add comments to this section. Completey unnecessary, because I do not expect anyoe to read this, but that is of course not the point as every nerd on this planet can tell you.

Thanks to BlogSpeak I seem to have something that works. I will test it out to see if the comments actually appear. Now I only hope that that BlogSpeak stays online for a while.

I do not expect to get any comments, but I do reserve the right to remove any comments that exceed my (wide) limits of good taste or annoyance.

So, trying to write my first entry, and I get immediately hit by writer's block. This blog is an attempt to record (mainly for myself) my current interests. Most blogs seem to be tightly focused on one thing (i.e. politics, technology, etc.) This one is aimed more broadly, and is therefore of less interest to outside viewers. A list of topics that will crop up:

• Programming, mainly Java and Perl and associated technology


• Politics, mainly American: it is like looking at a (very slow) trainwreck as it happens


• Science Fiction


• Go or WeiQi or Baduk