Release Notes: Interim Version 2.5, May, 1999

The previous version of this chapter was written in April of 1996, with minor revisions in October of 1996. The intent was to rewrite it for the next presentation of the course which, at that time, was scheduled for 1997. Since this has yet to occur, I am revising this chapter which, not surprisingly, had become quite dated.

Because the course has not been re-offered, and because the remaining chapters have not been updated, information relating to resources used in those chapters cannot and has not been updated. Thus, links in this section may be broken.

[1] This is Lecture 2 in the GNA-VSNS Course "Biocomputing I: Sequence Analysis"

[2] ASCII is American Standard Code for Information Interchange. The 26 upper and lower case letters used in the English language, the digits 0-9, certain punctuation characters, and 32 "control" characters (e.g. carriage return, line feed, tab, escape) are represented as a 7 bit number. The characters are quite standard, but interpretation of the control characters varies significantly. Because computers deal with units of 8 bits more easily than 7, ASCII characters are frequently encoded in streams of 8 bit bytes, with the 8th bit being set to 0. More recently, the need to transmit languages other than English and the desire to use characters not included in the original ASCII set have lead to the development of 8 bit character sets where the first 128 are ASCII and the second 128 (those with the 8th bit set to 1) are extra. Because these extended ASCII sets are not standard, they may not display correctly. Attempts have been made to develop standard extended ASCII character sets. Most recently, however, a 16 bit character set called Unicode has been developed in which a large number of different languages can be encoded, and it seems that Unicode will replace ASCII as the standard for representing text.

[3] For transferring multiple files, the commands are mget and mput. These will prompt you for each file to transfer unless you first issue the command "prompt = no". (All of these commands are for the Unix ftp client. Your client may be different.)

[4] What is an appropriate question, or more generally, what rules govern how one should use newsgroups? A whole code of "netiquette" has grown up to govern newsgroup behavior. In general, reading the posts on news.announce.newusers is an excellent thing to do. I have saved copies of a couple of the more relevant of these here.

[5] This is only needed for an optional exercise.

[6] Note: The d-Splits calculated at this server may be incorrect!