This evening I have been looking at with the KNOPPIX customization howto, and ran many of the interesting commands. I’ve setup a environment with Kalzium, OpenBabel, CDK, jython, PyMOL, and for development I included gcj and Eclipse. At some later point I will include kfile_chemical too, but I want to make a deb package first.

OK, just back from the first German Chemoinformatics Conference, which I enjoyed very much. A rather interesting program, and lots of interesting posters too. You can read the programme online, and will not spend too many words on that (at least not now). But what I will do is point out some interesting posters here.

This sunday starts the first German Chemoinformatics Conference in Goslar. It’s an interesting programme , with presentations on the InChI, PubChem, 25 years of chemoinformatics, the chemical semantic web, and much more.

Not so long ago, it was decided that KDE 4.0 will use SCons as a configuration and building tool, instead of the autotools and make: the common ./configure && make && make install which has served the open source community very well for so long.

Yesterday I reviewed an article which published a QSPR model which looked something like:

The great thing about open source is that… it’s open.

I just read that the Kubuntu team wants to include Kat in the dapper release (scheduled for April 2006). Kat is (to be) the KDE equivalent of Google’s desktop search bar.

On the 7th International Conference on Chemical Structures Jeroen Kazius has a poster on finding discriminative substructures, that is, molecular fragments which can be discriminate between two acitivity classes. The software is released as Gaston , is written in C++ and has the GPL license.

Some time ago Rajarshi Guha introduced R bindings for the CDK (see his CDK News articles), and today I tried to install his rcdk package that makes it happen.

Most Dutch chemists have their annual Lunteren meeting, so do I. Lunteren is a small village on the Veluwe where nothing much can be done, except for listening to the presentations. I participate in the Lunteren meeting for analytical chemists, i.e. HPLC, MS, GC and all their combinations upto and including HPLC/MS/MS, and since a few years the Lab-on-a-Chip stuff.

Just finished applying the latest spelling error fixes to CDK News 2.3 . Took me some three hours to finish it up the 12 pages, which has mostly to the need to recompile the PDF after each change to make sure that nothing in the layout got broken.