Modern dance is the perfect antidote to long hours sitting and puzzling over IT problems. I am in two modern dance companies and find that my two jobs compliment each other beautifully -- each one refreshes me from the difficulties of the other.
I also tutor high school students in math, and I occasionally do work as a ninja for hire.
Use Protege-2000. It's functionality eclipses that of FM Pro. It is well-tested and in wide deployment. It is trivial to make UI plugins and other kinds of deep additions in Java, but hardly ever necessary. It is free and open source. It has a paid team of developer that fix problems proptly and provide support.
And it supports any SQL database as a backend, and inserts a "semantic data modeling" layer in between the DB and UI that allows you to do very sophisticated things in a common sense, non-db-nerd way.
Funding agencies in the USA (NSF, NIH) and Europe have recently decided to target the construction of such software, and many competing projects have been given grants, most of which involve the production of open source software.
Relevant keywords are "eScience", "Experimental Data Management", "Experimental Metadata", and to some extent "Grid Computing".
I work for one such NSF & NIH funded project at Dartmouth College. We're developing such a tool : Java-based, completely open, available at sourceforge, currently in alpha, to be released for fMRI use in July, but designed from the start to be generalizable for all of experimental science. This is built on top of a pre-existing framework for semantic data management and modeling from Stanford.
I'll try to list some of the features relevant to your needs:
the thing will organize all your data across all experiments and sports a nice Java API, annotations, a set of interchangable & sophisticated query engines, and java plugins for supporting, among other things, application specific tasks, application specific rendering widgets for data, and new backend data formats.
currently supported backend formats include: RDF, DAML+OIL, XML, text files, and SQL databases.
we should have cluster job submission support integrated in by july, but it depends on your cluster set-up. currently this is presented to the user by way of executing "processing pipelines" for data. If this metaphor doesn't work for you, you may have to write some additional code for us!
since the experimental designs are represented in a prolog-style knowledge-base, it would be very simple to put some intelligence in about how to "run" or "execute" a given class of experimental designs and do a lot of automatic reasoning or planning re: dependencies. In fact, I think that someone at Stanford has already done this, but I'd have to look into it.
Finally, I would like to stress that our project is one of many, and that if it doesn't meet your needs, within a year there will be many competing "eScience" toolkits.
You may contact me for more information by reversing the following string: "ude.htuomtrad@exj".
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I also tutor high school students in math, and I occasionally do work as a ninja for hire.
An easy way to get into modern dance is to do Contact Improvisation. That's how I started. Guido von Rossum, who wrote python does it too.
http://protege.stanford.edu/
Use Protege-2000. It's functionality eclipses that of FM Pro. It is well-tested and in wide deployment. It is trivial to make UI plugins and other kinds of deep additions in Java, but hardly ever necessary. It is free and open source. It has a paid team of developer that fix problems proptly and provide support.
And it supports any SQL database as a backend, and inserts a "semantic data modeling" layer in between the DB and UI that allows you to do very sophisticated things in a common sense, non-db-nerd way.
* it brings the marvelous and surreal into the everyday world much more effectively than more conventional visual or performance art
* unlike most guerrila theatre, it is democratic in that everyone who wants to can be "on the inside"
* it is an active, participatory, and creative pastime
* it is empowering, and yet doesn't carry a particular ideology
* it gets people out of their ordinary routines and ways of being
* it has an action-adventure supercoordinated flair to it that I love
etc
I think it has a revolutionary potential to make life in human cities much more colorful.
I hope that participation becomes at least as popular as yoga, all over the world.
Funding agencies in the USA (NSF, NIH) and Europe have recently decided to target the construction of such software, and many competing projects have been given grants, most of which involve the production of open source software.
Relevant keywords are "eScience", "Experimental Data Management", "Experimental Metadata", and to some extent "Grid Computing".
Here is a paper which lays out the program of research.
I work for one such NSF & NIH funded project at Dartmouth College. We're developing such a tool : Java-based, completely open, available at sourceforge, currently in alpha, to be released for fMRI use in July, but designed from the start to be generalizable for all of experimental science. This is built on top of a pre-existing framework for semantic data management and modeling from Stanford.
I'll try to list some of the features relevant to your needs:
Finally, I would like to stress that our project is one of many, and that if it doesn't meet your needs, within a year there will be many competing "eScience" toolkits.
You may contact me for more information by reversing the following string: "ude.htuomtrad@exj".