• Peer reviewed Cheminformatics #2: Code review for the Chemistry Development Kit

    Peer review is an important component of open source development, and recently there was the discussion the other way around, if open source is required for peer review. Depends on your definition of peer review: No, if you restrict peer review to what it is in publishing (see Re: Open Source != peer review ); Yes, if we really want to speed up cheminformatics evolution and assume unrestricted, open peer review where reviewers can openly publish there review report with all the greasy details (see Peer reviewed Chemoinformatics: Why OpenSource Chemoinformatics should be the default ).
  • Cheminformatics Benchmark Project #1

    Yesterday’s blog about Who says Java is not fast?!? caused quite some feedback (thanx to all commenters!) with several good points. Of course, a table like that in the cinfony paper (see also the comments in the blogs by Noel (the author) and Rich). Many things determine why the CDK might be fastest in that table for SDF iterating. Suggestions have been that OpenBabel and RDKit may be doing much more than simple reading; Java might actually take advantage of the second core for caching file content.
  • Who says Java is not fast?!?

    While performance tests actually show that for even core numerical calculations Java is at par with C in terms of speeds, and sometimes even hits Fortran-like speeds, people keep think that Java is not fast. I only invite you to test that yourself.
  • Short variables and lack of comments...

    … a source code reviewer nightmare. The must-read lwn.net ran a nice open letter to a Linux kernel developer. I’d like to cite this bit about code review (see also Re: Open Source != peer review ):
  • Parallel building the CDK

    Some time ago, I added parallel building targets for CDK’s Ant build.xml. Now that I am setting up a Nightly for the jchempaint-primary branch, and really only want to report on the CDK modules control and render, I need the build system to use a properties files to define which modules should be compiled.
  • Software is a Method (Meme)

    it provides a recipe to approach (scientific) questions let’s you cook up a (scientific) answer you can use it as a black box (like an orbitrap) you can refine existing methods (well, some can, others don’t) it has an error (but I do not believe it is normally distributed)
  • Scripting JChemPaint

    Today and tomorrow, Stefan, Gilleain, Arvid and I are having a JChemPaint Developers Workshop in Uppsala, to sprint the development of JChemPaint3, for which Niels layed out the foundation already a long time ago.