Monday, December 10, 2007

Greatest Collecting Locations I

These amazing Salt Pillars are from the Dead Sea, Israel and seem to be an ideal collecting location for extremely halophilic Archaea.



Image from the research of Dr. Richard Shand at Northern Arizona University.

Monday, December 3, 2007

morphbank browse scraper

Just in case you would want to add a little www.morphbank.net image scaper to your Web page. It returns the url to embed the image into a Web page and the link back to the morphbank record. Using nifty php client url library functions (curl). Any morphbank image browse query will work. Just find the browse you want and cut and replace the returned url in place of the one below.

$ch = curl_init();
$timeout = 5; // set to zero for no timeout
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://www.morphbank.net/Browse/ByImage/?tsn=655371');
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, $timeout);
$data = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);$regex = "/Image \[(.+?)\]/";
preg_match_all ($regex,$data,$match);
foreach($match[1] as $id )
echo '<a href="http://morphbank.net/Show/?id='.$id.'"> <img src="http://morphbank.net/Show/?id='.$id.'&imgType=jpg" /></a>';
?>

Works ok for a small number of images, will really bog down a web page

Saturday, December 1, 2007

Check that Acronym

OTU

Acronym Definition
OTU Occupational Therapy Unit
OTU Office of Technology Utilization
OTU One-Time Use (disposable)
OTU Operating Time Update
OTU Operational Taxonomic Unit
OTU Operational Training Unit
OTU Optical Translator Unit (Lucent)
OTU Optical Transport Unit (IEEE)
OTU Outcome Tracking Unit
OTU Output Terminal Unit
OTU Over to You
OTU Oxygen Tolerance Unit

OTU OTU!