NMPDR Development Blog

The version 20 web site is now available on the Development Server. Nothing has been tested, but if you don't look at it too hard it should work fine.

There is now an online Flash tutorial available that describes how to use the tracing system. Included are sections on how to enable tracing, how to configure it from the web console or the command line, and how to put tracing statements in your code.

The URL is http://www.figresearch.com/movies/Tracing.html. A link to it is listed on the sidebar of the NMPDR Development Blog. The tutorial works in Firefox on the Mac and the PC, and Internet Explorer on the PC. It does not yet work in Safari, due to a problem with Safari being unable to recognize the Flash Player version. (It's always something.)

The tutorial is divided into several small sections that can be viewed individually, so that it should not be a burden to read through it. The first time you load it, the introductory animation will play a portion of Ellie's Favorite Fugue, so turn the volume down if you don't want to hear it. After that, you will be taken directly to the menu.

The attribute control panel has now been fixed so that it will display properly in the Safari browser.

• There is now a FIG method (get_group_key_info) that returns the names and descriptions of the attribute keys in a group.
• Updated the commentary page for chromosomal clusters to get the evidence codes in a single batch rather than one at a time.
• Fixed the homolog clusters page to use an NMPDR template.
• Created a search for all the docking results for a PDB. This is the first search that returns objects other than features, which is an important advance.

There are still some things to be fixed, but I'm working on it.

The NMPDR cover pages have been moved to nmpdr-1 from web-1. Combining the servers makes all sorts of things easier and faster. The new development server address is http://nmpdr-1.nmpdr.org/next/.

Over the weekend, the power will be turned off somewhere because of something, with the result that nmpdr-3 and web-3 will be unavailable. Therefore, this coming Friday (May 18), we will be redirecting http://www.nmpdr.org to point to the development server. There will therefore be no development server over the weekend. Since this is also my development sandbox, I will not be working on the 18th and 19th. On Monday the 20th, I will meet with Bob and Bill again to restore the normal order of things.

The key thing is that this time there will not be a Staging Server. Instead, we have to hammer on the Development Server as much as we can from now until then.

NMPDR version 20, the first to use our new single-server technology, is now live. There is now a much shorter delay before the search progress page shows up, and this makes the whole thing seem snappier and more responsive. A word search for Vibrio presented the progress page after 10 seconds and completed the search (47912 results) in only 28 seconds. Searches with smaller result sets (eg dnaK) respond in only a few seconds.

Bill is currently working with the configuration to reduce the 10-second delay, but now that the entire NMPDR web site is on a single server, we have a lot more options than we did before.

• New Development Site loaded: May 28, 2007
• Latest code and data copied to Staging Site for beta testing: June 11, 2007
• Version 21 published to Public Site: June 15, 2007

Schedule subject to change due to proms, graduation ceremonies, and other seasonal parenting obligations.

Version 21 of the NMPDR is now loading on the Development Server. The current target date to go live is June 11. The load is expected to finish around May 28.