The last twelve months or so, I have been doing two jobs (excluding hobbies of mine, such as Chemical blogspace): my postdoc in the group of Christoph Steinbeck on computer aided structure elucidation, and finishing my PhD.

Days #3 and #4 of the CDK Workshop have been quite busy indeed, and I have not been able to summarize them so far. After a rather interesting day #2, the third day was the last one with scheduled presentations. Kai Hartmann showed how he used the CDK in his systems biology research, and contributed the code he wrote to predict Gibbs energies based on fragment contributions.

Just announced: the RSC goes semantic ! Colin Batchelor was here at the CUBIC last autumn, where we discussed issues involved, mostly relating to experimental section of organic chemistry syntheses, and NMR and MS spectra in particular, so I knew that this was coming our way. The announcement writes: RSC Publishing, the publishing arm of the Royal Society of Chemistry, is pleased to announce a new initiative for its journals.

Because of other obligations, I was unable to attend the first day of the CDK Workshop, though Christoph had set up Skype so that at least I could hear the talks from Prof. Berthold (Konstanz, Germany) about KNIME and Prof. Zielesny about CDK-Taverna. Today, Miguel Rojas and Stefan Kuhn discussed their research. Miguel showed the state of mass spectrum prediction using the CDK and the MEDEA plugin for Bioclipse.

Today at the OSMB we had again a good lunch again, and Rachel Sterne joined our table. She works at a New York based start up Ground Report, which is a news website where anyone, including bloggers, can post news stories. Not links to news stories, as on Slashdot, but actual news stories. Stories that can be committed are not restricted to any topic, or country, or whatever.

The second day just started of the Open Source Meets Business, and now actually listening to the PHP talk, but here is a short update on day 1, which was the investment summit. It was not so crowded, but especially the talks from the venture capitalists were interesting. During lunch we actually talked to one in person, which was insightful. I will be putting up links to interesting sites mentioned during this conference on my delicious account.

Today I leave for a two day visit at the Open Source Meets Business conference in Nürnberg, where Christoph will speak about the Chemoinformatics OpenSource Initiative (COSI). If you happen to go to that meeting too, let’s try to meet!

For each CDK News I try to write up what CDK related literature has been published recently, but I failed to do so for the last two issues. In order to not postpone writing it up until close to the deadline, I will write up things here, so that I can copy-paste it later for CDK News.

Mitch blogged about a comment Bethany Halford, Associate Editor of C&EN, left in The Chem Blog. She is writing an opinion piece on chemistry blogs, and is wondering why I blog, whether I use a nickname, and if my employer knows I blog. So, here goes. Why do I blog?

Yesterday I blogged about how to include the new del.icio.us tagometer on a www.blogger.com blog, just like Improbulus did last December as I discovered later. Felix asked me how it could be done on the new www2.blogger.com template system.

Some days ago I read about the del.icio.us tagometer, which is basically sort of save as I had before on this blog. The tagometer, however, shows some interesting properties of the blog items, like the number of people who bookmarked the item, and what tags they used. The tagometer help does not show how it can be integrated with blogspot.com (where this blog is hosted), but with the source from 0xDECAFBAD I got it working.