Dealing with scientific literature has been one important theme in Chemical blogspace. For example, ranking articles and how to store your personal PDF archive has been topics of discussion. In this blog I will summarize bits of the discussion, and my personal view on things.

I just finished setting up a Blue Obelisk section for Chemical blogspace, as future replacement for the current Planet Blue Obelisk (unless someone wants to take over that webpage). The only thing really missing is a RSS feed for recent posts for just the Blue Obelisk member blogs (BTW, just email me if you want to be listed as BO member with your blog too; the BO community is very open!).

Now that my CUBIC desktop machine is shutting down, I made the necessary backups, among a mail.tar for my mail correspondence of about a year. About 500MB in size for almost 8700 files. Strigi is a perfect tool to help me find messages in this archive, as it will recurse into the .tar archive, and even into email attachements.

Mitch just launched ChemRank, a website where we can comment on and vote thumbs up or down for scientific articles. Good initiative I think.

Some time ago I wrote a small Perl script to convert a decision tree created with Weka in the ARFF format to Java source code, for use in the ionization potential prediction in CDK. The advantage is that Weka is no longer used are runtime, and that there is no model that needs to be loaded and interpreted. Instead, it is simple Java code that does the work, much faster.

I use Google Analytics to analyze the visitors of my blogs and of Planet Blue Obelisk too.

I just read on Planet Blue Obelisk Peter’s disturbing news (via Suber ) that Wiley thinks it can copyright a set of numbers (also known as data). That is a sad milestone in scientific publishing. It reminds me of the recent internet hype about a long number recently flooding the internet (and notably del.icio.us) related to watching DVDs you legally bought.

Getting back on microformats (see yesterday ), I added my hCard to the bottom of my blog:

Peter blogged some days ago about microformats and how they could be used in chemistry. Being late and a bit absent minded, I added a short comment that Chemical blogspace supports microformats for chemistry , and that chemistry is harvested from that, and actually semantically distributed again using CMLRSS.

After handing in a new draft of my PhD manuscript with my co-promotors last friday, and a week before we leave for Sweden, it is time to start finishing up the material for my one hour workshop on chemoinformatics in general and QSAR/QSPR in particular for the Bioclipse Workshop.

About a year ago Pedro wrote a Greasemonkey script to add comments from PostGenomic.com to table of contents of scientific journals. Noel extended it with support for Chemical blogspace (see also this earlier item). Now, the later website is maintained by me, and I extended the aggregator software with molecule support, for example to show hot molecules on the frontpage (at some point my patches will be backported into mainstream.