great primers on computational biology & stuff

http://www.liacs.nl/~hoogeboo/mcb/nature_primer.html

informative discussion on variable scope control in R

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6216968/r-force-local-scope
This somehow magically works, but I need to comprehend.
environment(fun) = parent.env(environment(fun))

my experience with installing Rgraphviz on Ubuntu (10.10)

make sure libgraphviz-dev is installed. It is needed for some header files (e.g. gvc.h)
then
biocLite("Rgraphviz", configure.args=c("--with-graphviz=/usr"))
the reason is that at least on my computer the dot program was in /usr/bin, but not in /usr/local/bin as Rgraphviz defaults