The Ferryman

Greetings from OpenTox class in Buea, Cameroon

#OpenTox A la Koh! Njuah! Aleh Aleh! Greetings from the #SETAC #Africa workshop group here to the #OpenTox community. We find the tools interesting and would like more workshop activity and tutorials in the future. We are interested in applying tools to assessing the quality of our water, pollution from pesticides, effects of petroleum products on our communities. We are interested in assessing toxicity data, predicting acute toxic effects, evaluating longer term effects on human health such as development and reproductive toxicity, and applying ecotoxicity models for environmental risk assessment of our ecosystems.

OpenTox workshop, SETAC Africa - day 1

We managed to get quite a bit of software installed at the #OpenTox workshop at SETAC, Africa on Tuesday on about 25 laptops or so belonging to the group. But we still have to get a couple of final machines to setup.

As now we can work on some problems, we decided at day's end we could continue the workshop again today, although that was not originally planned, but why not. Perhaps we can run all week, until we all get tired out :)!

Our main challenge and delay with the Virtual Appliance installation was the final installation patch Roman and Nina discovered was needed over the weekend, as this was required to fix the removal of ontology service files from the temp directory upon a virtual machine restart. At least we can fix that bug in a nicer way for next time.

However yesterday, the final installation step required going onto the net for every machine in turn, which took most of the afternoon! We did not have any internet for several hours, but we finally were able to send a group member Anyi with cash down to a provider office to charge an account she had, which we were able to use in the afternoon (Thanks Anyi for saving the day!). It was not so reliable or fast a connection but we eventually got through on it, but only one machine could be on at a time.

It will be helpful if we can figure out the shared file folders facility between the Virtual Appliance for linux and Windows - but did not have time to do that yet.

Also, we installed and ran Bioclipse live over the one internet connection at the end of the afternoon and had it go out and fetch OpenTox resource and model information, and live for an example. We did it (just about)! I pointed out the new login profile setup Egon has just recently setup, and perhaps we can get that done for the group today.

Philip Judson also joined us and we were able to get Derek and Meteor setup on machines too. Based on his experience, he gave a nice overview on some factors we have to reflect on in using such in silico programs and methods!

Eventually the bus came and took us home - tired but at least installed :)! We will try to continue today!!