Guy Mahieu’s Blog

About a year and a half ago, we started working on a project to implement a new kind of visualisation method for my current employer, Johnson & Johnson.The goal was to visualize very wide sets of data in a very condensed way to simplify the analysis process. Trevor Howe came up with the concept of a pie barchart diagram he named VlaaiVis (see image on the right). The basic idea is that you can define a ‘preferred profile’, the boundaries within which the data values are satisfactory to you, and the data will be visualized relative to this profile. Every row in the dataset is a pie, and the closer a bar is to the outer rim, the better the value for that column fits your profile.

The other members of the development team for this project were Max Hillaert, Alain Hufkens, Raf Franco and Gabriel Lozano-Moràn. Pieter Vugts and Christophe De Baene created the initial proof-of-concept application.

The department recently decided to make the application publicly available, and the website has gone public now.

From the VlaaiVis website:

VlaaiVis is a visualisation tool originally developed for multifactorial structure activity relationship (SAR) data. Each circle represents a single compound and each slice of the ‘pie’ represents a normalised response to a particular assay or property. An unlimited number of compounds may be visualised simultaneously. The tool seeks to provide a simple and rapid visualisation of single or multiple compounds during any phase of the drug discovery process. In a broader sense, it fits any kind of data for which a target preferred profile could be determined.

If you’re interested, you can download a free version, more information on how VlaaiVis works can be found in the online help pages.

This weekend I bought a TomTom navigation system, I chose the GO 910 because it is easy to update, works well and has a lot of nice extra features (bluetooth handsfree, mp3 playback, …) When I came home and hooked it up to my pc using the USB docking station, avast gave with a warning that it detected a virus.

Naively, I assumed that a brand new device could never be infected with a virus, and ignored the warning thinking that avast was over sensitive about some TomTom component. This was not the smartest thing, because soon I realised that there was indeed a virus on the TomTom harddrive, and I couldn’t open any of my drives from explorer anymore.

I did some surfing and noticed that a lot of people had this problem, there even was an official statement from TomTom, saying they know the problem exists, that it wasn’t all that bad, and that all antivirus software would spot the threat. They also mentioned that: “the virus does not impact the navigation performance of the TomTom GO 910″; good to know when no drives on my PC will open through Windows Explorer…

A good thing I probably know my way around computers better than the average TomTom customer, it still took me quite some time to realize exactly what happened and fix my system.

I must have missed something, but how can a company get away with keeping a known virus-infected device in stores? Why can’t the infected devices be tracked and cleaned by TomTom before a user has to find out the hard way?

Related links:

• daniweb
• news.com

I’ve had to create md5 hashes in php before, which can be done by simply using the md5() function. Because I always try to avoid reinventing the wheel, I googled for an example on how to compute these kinds of hashes from c#. It directed me to the Microsoft knowledgebase, article KB307020, but that didn’t work as expected.

That particular article shows how you can compute the MD5 hash of a string and then display the resulting byte array as a new string containing the hexadeximal representation of each byte. Since I needed to compare the hash to a string that was generated by a script on a linux machine, I was especially interested in the ByteArrayToString method from the knowledge base article. I have pasted it below, see if you can spot the error:

static string ByteArrayToString(byte[] arrInput)
{
  int i;
  StringBuilder sOutput = new StringBuilder(arrInput.Length);
  for (i=0;i < arrInput.Length -1; i++) 
    {
      sOutput.Append(arrInput[i].ToString("X2"));
    }
  return sOutput.ToString();
}

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