Sunday, January 07, 2007

Firefox userscripts for chemistry, new chemical mime types, OpenBabel builds and Eigen

I has been some time since I blogged on this channel, as I had little to mention lately. Last two weeks have been interesting, however. With 3D molecules in Kalzium (and other things) in mind, Eigen was developed, which saw its 1.0 release this week. Carsten put OpenBabel 2.1 in Novell's RPM build service, bringing important chemoinformatics algorithms to ones desktop. Chemical awareness of our desktop environments is further tightened now that Daniel made a new release of the chemical mime types package, and now also provides a webpage with known chemical mime types.

If you consider Firefox to be part of a desktop, then I hope to have thrown in some interesting developments too. In the last few weeks I worked on semantic markup of chemical compounds in web pages, and corresponding Greasemonkey and server side JavaScripts to handle this semantic markup. Both scripts automatically link to Google search and PubChem to increase the chemical integration of your desktop. Now, big questions: is there a Konqueror equivalent for userscripts? At least the server side version works.

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