Thinking about ways to improve the performance of some of my web servers I've begun to toy with Memcached.

On Wednesday morning I had the distinct pleasure of seeing a group of students in the Computer Science department at the University of Toronto giving demos of tools and software that they have been developing over the past few months.

Greg Wilson and others are running a survey on how scientists’ perception of and use of software is changing.

I've put the first version of "tvwidget" into Google Code. This is a HTML-only widget to display large evolutionary trees (you can see how my thoughts on how to do this unfolded by following my earlier posts starting with Visualising very big trees, Part V). tvwidget itself is a C++ program that takes a tree and generates the image tiles and Javascript for the viewer.

Alexis Stamatakis and Jacques Rougemont have released RAxML BlackBox, a prototype Web-Server for RAxML which is attached to a 200 CPU-cluster located at the Vital-IT unit of the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics. You can upload your data and the cluster will mul it over for up to 24 hours, so typically you can analyse alignments up to 1,000 to 1,500 sequences at present.