Trends in Human Antibody Development - Charts

I operate the TABS Therapeutic Antibody Database which help biotechnology companies working in the field of antibody development. TABS represents the most comprehensive resource in this field.

With all that data available, I have compiled summary statistics that show the growth of this area of biotech over the years. I have made charts of those trands and have made those freely available on the TABS database site. You can find all the charts HERE.

Here is an example showing the number of active projects per year

You can get a free 30 day trial account at TABS.

TV Eye - a way to view YouTube videos without all the clutter

When you view a video on youtube.com you get not only the video, but a bunch of suggested related videos and often times a lot of comments and other text. All this clutter gets in the way of what you want to do - simply watching the video.

So I wrote TV Eye, a simple service that embeds your desired video in a simple, plain web page, with none of the usual clutter.

To use, go to youtube.com and find the video that you want to watch. Copy the URL for the video and paste it into the form on TV Eye.

The service is really simple and the code is distributed freely under the temrs of the MIT license. You can get the code at Github at https://github.com/craic/tv_eye.

Installing Ruby in Docker Images

Docker is a great way to package applications with all their dependent libraries etc and then deploy them easily on various hosts. It builds on tools like Vagrant.

I am interested in using it to package Ruby applications built with Sinatra or Rails.

The preferred way to build a Docker Image is to write a Dockerfile that contains instructions that load an operating system, installs system packages, copies user code, etc.

I am building my Images on top of Ubuntu 14.04, the current Ubuntu Linux release. A problem with most of the Linux distributions is that the packages that install Ruby are often one or two releases behind. In this case the packaged Ruby is 1.9.3 and the current release if 2.1.2. In many cases this would not be a problem but if you want the latest version then you have do a bit more work and, specifically, compile Ruby from source.

Once you have the Dockerfile working then this all happens very smoothly but it took me a while to get all the pieces working together. So I wrote up two versions of a minimal Sinatra application along with the Dockerfiles needed to get them to work.

The code is on Github at https://github.com/craic/docker_sinatra_examples

The Docker Images are on DockerHub at
https://registry.hub.docker.com/u/craic/docker_sinatra_example_1/
and
https://registry.hub.docker.com/u/craic/docker_sinatra_example_2/

The first example installs the packaged Ruby (1.9.3)
The second compiles and installs Ruby 2.1.2 from source.

I hope these examples help you get up to speed with Docker quickly.

Clean up unused Docker Containers and Images

Docker is a great way to package applications with all their dependent libraries etc and then deploy them easily on various hosts. It builds on tools like Vagrant.

In Docker you create Images that contain your code, the OS, libraries, etc and Containers which are the instances of the Image which you actually run.

Docker does not do a good job cleaning up old Images and Containers and when you are doing a lot of developing this can become a problem. Various people have proposed ways to handle the issue. The best of the web posts that I have seen is http://blog.stefanxo.com/2014/02/clean-up-after-docker/

Here is a slight restating of those solutions which work for me on MacOSX.

To clean up non-running containers

$ docker ps -a --no-trunc | grep 'Exit' | awk '{print $1}' | xargs docker rm


This removes any containers where the Status contains the string Exit. I have seen containers with no status which perhaps have crashed or hung. You just have to remove these manually.

Once you have removed unused Containers you can then remove unused Images. If you try this the other way round you will get errors that the Images are still in use.

Unused Images look like this in the output of 'docker ps' - they are the ones with <none> as the repository and tag

craic/sinatra_example            v1                  f9d2702eb2f7        2 days ago          481.3 MB

<none>                           <none>              196afed3dded        2 days ago          378.5 MB

<none>                           <none>              56f86f0a985e        2 days ago          378.5 MB

<none>                           <none>              011f588e88db        2 days ago          586.8 MB

To remove them use this command

$ docker images -f dangling=true -q | xargs docker rmi

If you are using Dockerfiles to build your Images (recommended) then you can always rebuild an image should anything get removed accidentally.