November 2024 - Dave Tang's blog

Ensembl Gene IDs to gene symbols

bioinformaticsDavoNovember 14, 20240

For converting Ensembl Gene IDs to gene symbols, using biomaRt is often recommended and indeed it is what I typically use. However, recently I needed to use Ensembl version 112 and could not get {biomaRt} to work with this specific version. Here’s what I tried: Used listEnsemblArchives() to find the host URL for version 112,…

Running a fork bomb

funDavoNovember 1, 20241

Since it was Halloween and all, I shared an article with some scary Linux commands that one should never run to some of my colleagues. One of them was a fork bomb, which looks like this: :(){:|:&};: In Bash, a function is defined like so: function_name () { commands } So the fork bomb starts…