The Daily Dongle

New Class: "FlowJo for Integrators" @ 2011Northwest Regional Cytometry Meeting

No single analysis solution is performant enough to handle all needs.  For many institutions, improving flow cytometry analysis comes from integrating with databases and ever more hardware.
As a contribution to the Northwest Regional meeting, Tree Star is offering a "FlowJo for Integrators" practicum.  Spend a day with FlowJo architects Jay Almarode and Adam Treister to get the straight story on what's inside the software.
This one day workshop covers new or unpublicized features of FlowJo intended for advanced users who wish to:

- work with remote file repositories
- deploy FlowJo in a client/server, grid or cloud architecture
- execute FlowJo templates using command line scripts
- understand the various settings for optimizing the FlowJo calculation engine caches
- integrate results of other applications into FlowJo, or FlowJo results into other applications
- utilize FlowDx capabilities to manage calculate comparative gating statistics

Paid preregistration of $200 is required per institution with a limit of 8.  Up to 3 people per institution.
All proceeds will go to the Friday Night pub crawl.  Send an email to learning@treestar.com to sign up.

For more on NRCM, go here.

 

Cheers,

Adam Treister
President, FlowJo LLC

minor changes to Table Editor in next 7.x beta

I'm working on some added functionality to CSV saving/batching from the table editor.  

 

the panel above is found in Edit -> Preferences -> Tables. 

The first one is self explanatory.. if unchecked, you won't get the "mean/average" rows added to your csv output. 

The second one - normally if you batch your table output to "c:\table.csv" and the file already exists, flowjo will create an output file called "table-1.csv" in that same path. 

If the "append" preference is checked, FlowJo will instead append the current table to the existing file's contents (adds after current content, ie at the bottom of the existing file. )  

Anything else here while I'm at it? 

Dongle Transmitted Diseases (D.T.D's) ?

One of the amusing perks of working here at the FJHQ is being witness to the occasional handling of USB dongles which need exchanging. We've had bad batches where the plastic casing comes off, but we've also had good-batch-dongles getting stepped on, or just worn out over the years of use. 

When these arrive, we handle them with gloves and store them up in a big plastic bag in a locked cabinet (obviously not air tight.) 

I'm curious what would be the worst case scenario for handling a dongle that may have been exposed either to unprocessed blood, or live infectious samples? What organisms can jump blood or cell suspension and end up infecting an office worker? 

inquiring minds want to know, comments welcome - also pointers to any published guidelines on handling Infectious Dongles :)

CDW registrations

If you're a flow cytometry developer, enthusiast or have "chief geek" status quo to maintain in your core lab - you may want to look up the CDW meeting: 

past meetings - http://www.sanfordburnham.org/labs/Price/CDW2009/

2010 meeting registration - http://www.sanfordburnham.org/labs/Price/CDW2010/index.html

in addition to the crunching gears of cytometry's best minds in one room, there's also beautiful surroundings to take in, the area is spectacular. I captured a few photos here (and here, here and here) and even a timelapse here (that reminds me, imaging people come to this thing too.) 

how much sheath could a plexed reader run, if a plexed reader could run sheath?

someone posted on PUCL about peoples' experience using the new offerings from the Big Guys, stating 96 well plate reading thruput as the primary concern. I venture that for the same $,  you can improve your thruput/hr by stacking up a few C6's, or Cytek-modified boxes.

Does anyone have some actual maths on this? I'd be curious to know.

WANT !!1

oo shiny 12 core mac

DYI laser (pointer) safety test

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/08/dangerous-lasers-homebrew-spectroscopy-and-webcam-hacking.ars

good.. point? ;)

new FJ-mac beta 9.1b12

addresses several format issues for high-range and non-power-of-two range data.

http://flowjo.com/v9/html/macbeta.html

(may not yet have been updated with the latest info, but the zip it points to is b12.)

see you at ISAC.. err.. CYTO2010

We can't have this at our booth as per Stiff Guidelines, but if you can find Bruno, maybe you can ask him about his...

;)

FlowJo 7.6 Prefs - deployment considerations

Some of our larger sites want to roll out FlowJo via a MSI installer, which we don't yet have (putting it off till FlowJo X.) As a workaround to this we recommend that one user installs the software and then distributes the contents of FlowJo's installed location to other users via a login script. There are registry modifications which associate the program's icons and double-click behavior, these would not be propagated in this mechanism.

The second part of FlowJo installation deals with licensing - First time opening of FlowJo brings up the license dialog asking for a serial number license. If you enter a serial number here, it will be saved to your disk to a file "flowjo75.prefs" in your "my documents" folder. If your institution is on a site license, the serial number will be identical for all regisrered users, therefore, the initial prefs file can also be distributed (with the serial number in place) via a login script. 

FlowJo supports multiple layers of Preferences files locations, some more global than others. Here's the algorithm for how that's currently handled. These alternate locations of prefs files may also be used to aid authentication on machines where multiple people have their own os-level accounts.

• First look in the user's 'My Documents' folder (or user's home folder on mac).  If found, use it for all prefs.
• If not found, look in the flowjo installation folder (if running out of eclipse, look in the project folder).  If found, use it for all prefs.
• If not found, create a new prefs file in the user's 'My Documents' folder (or user's home folder), and use it for all prefs.  Serial number will be blank.
• To get a serial number for authorization, get it from whatever prefs file was found or created beforehand.
• If the serial number is blank, look for the prefs file in the 'All Users' folder (which is not found on mac).  Use this serial number for authorization, or bring up license dialog if absent.