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.

Together with Christoph, Christian and Jerome, I will be representing the Blue Obelisk movement on the first First Workshop on Chemoinformatics in Europe with the topic Research and Teaching . Though I wonder what this theme excludes? Development? Can’t imagine that commercials companies will not be represented as usual. Moreover, it will likely include some bioinformatics too, unless you consider that to deal with sequences only.

Geoff Hutchinson blogged about his OS/X ChemSpotLight, an indexing tool for chemistry documents. It’s like, but more advanced than, the kfile_chemical and Kat I have been working on (with others) for the KDE desktop (see earlier blog items). ChemSpotLight currently does more than the KDE tools: it adds Spotlight comments. I assume these are like the Linux extended attributes, used for example by Beagle.

Yesterday I installed the Eclipse Web Tools Platform again, and now succesfully, using the Eclipse update mechanism, on my Kubuntu dapper eclipse install. Because it has a validating XML editor, the one last thing I still needed jEdit for. (I do miss the vertical selection feature of jEdit, though.) It signals me of errors, and allows autocompletion.