e-Science Central Updates

We're noticing that from time to time the website is experiencing problems and not responding.  It appears as though the Apache web server is doing something strange but we're not sure exactly what.  The problem appears to fix itself after a couple of minutes so please do try refreshing the page if you experience this. ... [read more]

(0 Comments)

Thanks for your patience over the last few weeks, we've now performed the server maintenance and moved to a new version of e-Science Central and Inkspot.  There are a few changes to the front end and back end which are worth mentioning: You can now register and sign in with OpenID or your Google/Yahoo account.  If you are already registered with the same email address as your OpenID you'll be prompted to 'link' your accounts.  A HTML 5 workflow editor has replaced the Java Applet.  The Java Applet was becoming an increasing problem to maintain and a recent Java update completely broke it (for no good reason!).  Users also experienced problems with the Applet when using VPN and so we've replaced it with a HTML 5 canvas implementation.  There are still a few visual problems that need ironing out but it is functional. We've moved to a new version of the workflow engine in the back end.  This has been necessary in order to maintain versions of each service in a workflow (you can now select which version of a service to run from the workflow editor), improve the security around services, and provide better help.  The workflow servers in the back end are now running on Eucalyptus which will allow us to scale better.  There are two problems associated with this move.  Firstly, the existing workflows will no longer run.  If you need help porting and old workflow to the new system, drop us a line and we'll gladly help.  Secondly, not all of the services have been ported (yet).  We're working to port the other services but haven't done them all yet.  If there is something that you would like and is not there, please let us know and we'll try to do it immediately. ... [read more]

(0 Comments)

We are planning some maintenance of e-Science Central, Inkspot and OpenQSAR.  Unfortunately this means that the sites will not be available on the following dates: Monday 12th July from 9am to 6pm Monday 19th July from 9am to 6pm If all goes well, everything will be back up before 6pm on these dates.  The maintenance is to allow us to move the servers to a different data centre and migrate to a new version of e-Science Central and Inkspot. ... [read more]

(0 Comments)

Some of you have already spotted that there is now a mobile version of e-Science Central and I want to write a few words about it.  It started life as a demonstration of how to use the e-Science Central API for a collaboration project.  It's a completely separate application from e-Science Central, only using the public API and no internal methods only available to us as core developers.  It happens to be hosted on the same server but it could be moved to a completely separate server, there is no co-location requirement. ... [read more]

(4 Comments)

I've fixed a bug in the blogs where you got an error when trying to create a new blog.  Also, if there are problems saving the post it should timeout after 7 seconds and allow you to 'get at' the text to copy it elsewhere. ... [read more]

(1 Comment)

This afternoon we had a problem with the application server.  Unfortunately the server crashed and had to be restarted.  We took the opportunity to apply some updates before restarting it which should improve performance.  Apologies if anyone was working at the time and lost any work.  We're aware of one person who was writing a blog post and the 'Save' action hung.  Saving should timeout if there is a problem and allow you to at least copy the text to somewhere else.  We'll investigate why this didn't happen. ... [read more]

(1 Comment)

The other large update we hoped to get out before Christmas is notifications when you receive messages or someone comments on your blog post.  This is turned off by default but you can enable it from the Settings page.  There are three options available: ... [read more]

(2 Comments)

This is one of the major updates we hoped to get out before Christmas but time (and a bug introduced during a merge) got the better of us.  You can now mark blog posts as 'read' and when looking at the list of blogs an unread count is displayed.  We'll add to this functionality over the coming months so that you can only display the blogs with new posts and so on. ... [read more]

(1 Comment)

R Now has syntax highlighting as explained in a previous post.  An example is given below (code taken from http://www.mayin.org/ajayshah/KB/R/index.html) visualisation <- function(p0, s, mu, labelstring) { N <- 10000 x <- (1:(N+1))/250 # Unit of years while (1) { plot(x, ranrw(mu, s, p0, N), ylab="Level", log="y", type="l", col="red", xlab="Time (years)", main=paste("40 years of a process much like", labelstring)) grid() z=locator(1) } } ... [read more]

(1 Comment)

The pages associated with Notes, groups and search have had small visual tweaks to bring them in line with the rest of the site.  I think the site is now consistent (although someone may point out something we've missed). ... [read more]

(1 Comment)