Jerome Pansanel contributed new patches for kfile_chemical; on Monday actually, but I have been busy with other things, among which a presentation I have to give next Monday for some 100+ analytical chemists. The patch adds support to KDE for five new chemical MIMEs: XYZ, Mol2, SMILES, VMD and GenBank. Therefore, I just released a new version (0.10), and added an announcement to Freshmeat.net.
Today is my 31st birthday, nearing half-point now (statistically seen). Also, by now I should have had my scientific moment of glory, otherwise I can forget that Nobel prize. Oh well, forget it. Have you seen those small advertisements on this page (RSS users, please visit the website :)? Funny links they give. The system is very nice btw: it awaits google indexing of the blog and then decides which ads are relevant.
Yesterday I had some spare time before going to a meeting about the Woordenboek Organische Chemie, so I was boldly going where no one has went before: getting the CDK module core independent of the data module.
A good functional molecular editor is of much important to the chemical web. There are a few small download sized editors around. JChemPaint has been available as applet for some time now, but the download size has been large. The situation has improved considerable over the past months, and the download size upon which the applet now shows up in your webbrowser is down to 538kB. A live demo is available from www.chemistry-development-kit.org.
Less then three months before the end of my contract of my PhD project. And not nearly done yet. Weekends are now spend on wrapping up bits of experimental research into something like a coherent article. And even lot’s of calculations to do to answer the open questions. FreeMind is helping me organize thoughts. Opensource chemoinformatics is a welcomed diversion now and then.
This week there was an interesting article in the Dutch Intermediar about viagra. They cite an article in Environmental Conversation and state that it saves the environment as it greatly reduced the market for animal parts from the traditional chinese medicine that address the same problem as viagra does. Viagra: good for the environment, good for you! ;) You don’t see this often, though.
CDK News 2.3 is scheduled for this month, and origanally planned to be distributed on the CDK5AW event. So, it’s a bit late. But the editorial process is converging… I realized that I forgot to mention the requirement for InChI’s whenever molecules are given.
I’ve just uploaded kfile_chemical 0.9 . It has new translations for ES and DA, and plugins for InChI files. It will extract the InChI string as meta data (and will thus be used by the KDE desktop search Kat , and the InChI version number. Thinking about this, it might be useful to extract all layers as meta data, so that one can search on chemical formula and even connectivity, and find all matching structures.
The Jmol FAH team has just entered the Top 800 of most active Folding@Home teams. And they started monitoring contributions on a user level. Thus, I can now see how active I am within the team. And so can you! Join the team, and let’s get into the Top 500!
After asking about it, Tom explained me how Taverna can pick up the apiconsumer.xml file from jars: just copy it into the root directory of the jar package. Easy as that. So, users now only need to copy the cdk-taverna.jar into the taverna-workbench-1.3/lib/ directory and have a nice chemoinformatics workbench environment. I’ll upload the jar to CDK’s project page right now.