Recovering Android Photos with Linux

As noticed by others on the Internet, it is possible to recover photos from an Android phone that were deleted. It is impossible, as far as I know, to recover the full resolution photos. You may, however, recover the thumbnails and those are often large. This also allows you to recover photos which weren't saved, like those from text messages. The problem though is that methods I found while googling require you to edit the image files in a hex editor. For example, as demonstrated in this video. I've instead written a python script which automates this greatly simplifying the fact that you need to recover all the pictures to find one in particular.

Update on Amino Acid Interactions

A few months ago I wrote a post about amino acid interactions. It showed how much the different amino acids like to be in contact with one another. Now, in celebration of my upcoming paper in Chemical Science, I've updated the figure for surface interactions. It is shown below.

I have a website now

I've finally put together a website about me and my research. You may view it here andrew-white.com.

A server job dispatcher using SQL in C

OK, imagine this: you would like to execute some jobs on your server, but you don't want a fancy job dispatcher. You just want to put some parameters into a SQL table and have the table updated when the job is done. Perhaps you have trouble imagining that. However, that was my fantasy while writing a webapp in codeigniter, a lovely php framework. I had some statistics to calculate and I didn't want to calculate them in codeigniter, so I wrote some R scripts. The scripts are time consuming, so you can't just call them from the server process. If you do, the webpage will stop loading and wait for the scripts to finish. Well, just run them in the background and update the page with javascript when the scripts are finished, right? Not if there are one hundred people using the server at once. You need to control the number of simultaneous jobs. Hence the need for a job dispatcher.

Amino Acid Interactions

I couldn't find a nice table of amino acid interaction energies, so I created one from crystallography data of thousands of protein. Here are the results and an explanation of how I did it. There is also a black and white version in the article which could be nice for printing. I don't know, I printed a pdf but blogger won't host pdfs for me.

Protein Chaperons and Polymer Confinement

In this post, I'll mention briefly some places to look for polymer physics information and the systems I'm studying.