The Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) is very powerfull, and takes a lot of architectural things of your hand when developing a bio- and chemoinformatics GUIs. Bioclipse is based on it. One thing the RCP offers is a Help View which works with plain (X)HTML files, and one neat feature is the context help. It is help shown in the Help View when one focused on a specific GUI element.

With chemometrics in mind (QSAR, data mining, …), I have started working on matrix support in Bioclipse, because the matrix is the important step between (bio-)molecular content and statistical analysis. I implemented this such that the actual matrix implementation can be freely chosen, that is, bc_statistical provides a IMatrixImplementation extension point.

David Strumfels posted news about the Useful Chemistry CMLRSS feed . He explains how this feed can be accessed using Jmol and Bioclipse. The latter are accompanied by two AVI movies: one about creating a new OPML file, and one about accessing the CMLRSS file from the OPML.

I started a spin-off blog earlier this week: kemistry desktop environment. It will deal with integration of chemistry on opensource desktops, with KDE as one of them. Today, it features an overview of earlier blogs on the subject in this new blog.

In reply to interesting comments to my previous blog on Strigi and xAttr support in KDE4, I would like to suggest the following mockups, which I would find very useful. The deal with the ability to store keywords, for example, not but necessarily using xAttr. I have no idea on how to implement these mockups, so any help or pointers are appreciated.

Peter Corbett from Peter Murray-Rust’s group at the Unilever Cambridge Centre for Molecular Informatics visited Christoph Steinbeck’s junior Research Group on Molecular Informatics at the CUBIC today, and spoke about the status of Oscar3, a chemistry text mining program with the Artistic License.

With some help, I got the kfile stream analyzer for Strigi working. This means that Strigi will now index the meta data fields defined by the kfile-chemical plugins. The problem why it was not working earlier, was that it segfaulted on every creation of KDE classes. That’s something I really hate about C/C++: the lack of stack traces, though valgrind was helpful. It turned out that adding the below line fixed all.

The Dutch version of the Google Summer of Code, Programmeerzomer.nl, announced today the five students participating. I was happy to see that Rob Schellhorn was selected with his project proposal for a Ghemical plugin for Bioclipse. Like in the Google original, both the student and the mentoring organization are funded, 3600 and 400 euro respectively.

Desktop searching has become a hot topic (some earlier blogs ), now that years of data accumulated on ones hard disk: PDFs, OpenOffice.org documents, Latex manuscripts, old Java source code, digitized music, and a lot of chemical files. Well, on my hard disk that is. Unlike piles of paper, a computer could search this data, but due to the size an index is required. What’s KDE4 going to offer?

Just wanted to make sure this news made it to the Blue Obelisk Planet too: David Strumfels reported that he extended MS-Excel with CDK functionality . I wonder how difficult it would be to do this with Kspread or Gnumeric?

Recent Developments of the Chemistry Development Kit (CDK) - An Open-Source Java Library for Chemo- and Bioinformatics (green OA) discusses (reasonably) recent additions to the CDK. It appeared in issue 17 of this years Current Pharmaceutical Design volume, after being too long in the queue after being accepted; but I am happy that it is out now.