• A chemistry extension for spreadsheet(s)

    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

    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.
  • Blue Obelisk in Obernai at Chemoinformatics in Europe

    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.
  • Molecular indexing on the KDE and OS/X desktops

    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).
  • XML validation on Eclipse with Web Tools Platform

    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.
  • A live life-sciences CD

    November last year, I reported my plans to develop a live CD with all our favorite chemo- and bioinformatics software. Bioclipse requires Java5 and sort of still depends on the Sun JVM (I will experiment with classpath-generics later), but is now distributable with operating systems. So, I made a Kubuntu derived operating system with OpenBabel, Jmol, PyMOL, Bioclipse, and, on systems level, the chemical MIMEs and kfile_chemical, wich extends the desktop with chemistry awareness. In addition, I added the Blue Obelisk Data Repository, all CDK News issues, and the full NMRShiftDB data in CML format.
  • Taverna runs with Classpath 0.91

    Classpath 0.91 is released with 1.45 million lines of code and with 98.96% coverage of Java 1.4.2, and 99.82% of java.swing. Or, as Dave calls it: 0.91 rocks! JChemPaint runs again (they fixed the XML parsing problem), and Jmol still runs <i class=”fa-solid fa-recycle fa-xs”, but slow. I also tested Taverna which now also starts up, but has an XML parsing error too: