Showing posts with label desktop. Show all posts
Showing posts with label desktop. Show all posts

Saturday, February 02, 2008

Synchroning KDE settings; Plasma updates

First of all, thanx to all who gave replied to my previous blog item KDE 4.0.0: no Yukuake for Kubuntu?"! I got my desktop machine run KDE4 now, with Yakuake and with being able to lock the screen.

Now, regarding the taskbar; I haven't placed it on top of my screen, as I could not find those coordinates adz21c was talking about. That's really a minor thing. Now, the Plasma taskbar has seen many improvements over the last days, like the two row taskbar, and the ability to make is somewhat smaller.

Riddel wrote a tool to synchronize KDE settings between machines. It's actually amazing that in the era where KDE is able to have a central architecture for 'personal information' (Akonadi), and we have technologies like bzr, svn, that we still have to hack workarounds to synchronize our desktop environments. Of course, I already have the data of my desktop synchronized via repositories, but things as far from automatically done...

The tool made by Riddel is such a workaround, a really promising one (looking forward to the Kubuntu package! BTW, does it support both KDE3 and KDE4?), but it is surprising that it is not the default yet.

Friday, June 01, 2007

The GSoC has started: towards a chemical desktop

This Thursday the GSoC students started to work, and Alexandr posted his plans for the chemical semantic desktop. Alexandr's work will be based on the Strigi/Nepomuk framework, and Liquidat just wrote a very nice status report about it.

Saturday, April 14, 2007

GSoC: towards a chemical semantic desktop

Now that I am officially a Google Summer of Code mentor for KDE's participation, it was more than time to get my KDE4 install up to date. Meanwhile, Jos' Strigi toolkit is well integrated already, and Jerome has updated the chemical kfile plugins to the new Strigi based architecture.

I was talking to Phreedom on IRC about ontologies used by Strigi, and added one for chemistry. It currently has the fields chemistry.inchi, chemistry.molecular_formula, chemistry.molecular_weight, chemistry.pdbid, and chemistry.xray_resolution, but more are expected to be added. I already updated kfile_chemical to make use of these fields, and updated it for a few fields from the more generic ontologies in Strigi.

Extracted metadata
Strigi currently focusses on metadata only, as do the kfile_chemical plugins: they extract metadata from the file, and do not generally create metadata based on the file (actually, Strigi calculates sha1 hashes). These are typically fields like molecular formula, title, X-Ray resolution (in case of PDB files), identifiers (e.g. InChI, PDB id), etc. However, there can be a lot more interesting information in those files, which require some more tought. For example, PDB files cite one or more publications, which might be present at ones hard disk too. The idea is here, that Strigi actually links the PDF with the publication and the PDB file. This is where Nepomuk comes in, and where Strigi is currently disabled. Similarly, any general organic chemistry publication will mention many molecules, each of which might have other publications discussing them, or even have 3D coordinates or other properties defined.

Created metadata
Another interesting thing one can do for chemical documents, is calculate metadata: for example, calculate InChI's for mol/xyz/hin/... files, using OpenBabel. Or Rule-of-Five properties, e.g. using the CDK. This is where the GSoC project comes in which I am mentoring, and on which Alexandr (a former CUBIC student) is going to work.

Oh, and like most desktop search tools, it can simply work on your HTML cache too, so that all these cool things will work on the webpages you search too. That should trigger some more ideas :) It does for me at least.