New Blogs #9

Has it already been 6 months since New Blogs #8?!? Time flies... 22 new blogs since then:

• Water in Biology (entry in Cb)
• NEBIOQ-UP (entry in Cb)
• Benoît Jacob (entry in Cb)
• MacinChemBlog (entry in Cb)
• NMR Analysis, Processing and Prediction (entry in Cb)
• Drug Discovery with Quantum Pharmaceuticals (entry in Cb)
• Homebrew and Chemistry (entry in Cb)
• Periodic Tabloid (entry in Cb)
• Tim Vandermeersch's chemical blog (entry in Cb)
• CSEARCH NMR-Database (entry in Cb)
• 1CellPK (entry in Cb)
• SimBioSys Blog (entry in Cb)
• Swain Library News (entry in Cb)
• some kind of blog (entry in Cb)
• A Chemical Sabbatical (entry in Cb)
• Lightnir's blog (entry in Cb)
• C&ENtral Science (entry in Cb)
• Daneel Ariantho's laboratory » Chemistry (entry in Cb)
• practical transmutations (entry in Cb)
• The Eccentric Chemist (entry in Cb)
• Chempedia.net: The Daily Molecule (entry in Cb)
• Philosophy to Chemistry to Elucidation (entry in Cb)

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HELP! MySQL optimizations needed

Chemical blogspace has been closed down; that is, they seemed to have locked down access to the database. As you might have noticed, I have taken steps to reduce the problems with the database, but these were mere temporary fix ups. The real problem is the database design and, in particular, the SQL queries. These are too slow. Euan, the original author of the software, has already been looking into the problem he himself is encountering too, for postgenomic.com it is. But, I do not have time right now to fix those slow SQL queries :(

Therefore:

HELP!

The source is available and email me for a dump of the database.

60 day old blog posts still important?

Last week some of you noted that the Chemical blogspace was no longer nicely updated every X hours. The code is not optimized for performance and the number of old posts (about 10k in 6 months!) made the update_posts.pl break down. Or really, the DreamHost service killed the process after taking too long. Fair; it's the online way to keep the systems from not breaking down over one website. I already had split up processing the first 75 blogs and the rest into two separate jobs.

So, now I made a more radical change, and deleted old posts older than 60 days. That's ancient history, not?

Blog Awards with two Cb candidates

There is a weblog 2007 award voting thingy, where two blogs participate in the Best Science Blog section which are aggregated on Chemical blogspace:

• In the Pipeline
• Sciencebase

The can use some help:


You have to hurry, the deadline is the 8th.

New Blogs #8

It has been a bit quite with new blogs items during the summer, but 15 new blogs have been added since New Blogs #7. These are the new blogs that entered Chemical blogspace in the last month:

• Drugs and Poisons (entry in Cb)
• Liberal Arts Chemistry (entry in Cb)
• Brandon's Super-Dynamic Blog of Things, and Stuff (entry in Cb)
• ConcreteChemViz (entry in Cb)
• Computational Organic Chemistry (entry in Cb)
• Trapped in the USA (entry in Cb)
• Staudinger's Semantic Molecules (entry in Cb)
• ChemRadio (entry in Cb)
• Dutch summer of code - jchempaint (entry in Cb)
• ACS Fall National Meeting in Boston (entry in Cb)
• Agile2Robust (entry in Cb)
• Chenomx Blog (entry in Cb)
• National Chemistry Week | October 21-27 | 2007 (entry in Cb)
• OPEN CHEMISTRY WEB (entry in Cb)
• Sigma-Aldrich's ChemBlogs (entry in Cb)
• University of Ottawa NMR Facility Blog (entry in Cb)

Quite a few temporary, thematic blogs this time; that's a new evolution of blogspace.

InChIKey now added to Chemical blogspace

Using the InChI webservices as introduced by Anthony earlier, I added InChIKeys to the Chemical blogspace Molecules section:

BTW, the molecules were picked up because the (1-3)-beta-D-glucan - How moulds can make you wheeze and sneeze and What I'm up against... items linked to the glucose entry in wikipedia.

IUPAC/InChI joins the Microsoft BioIT Alliance

On the CHMINF-L mailing list it was reported that the IUPAC InChI/InChIKey project joins Microsoft BioIT Alliance. Quoting:

The establishment of the BioIT Alliance in April 2006 by Microsoft and leading organizations in the life science industries was very much a reflection of this scenario, and the Alliance has now been extended to include a major Scientific Union, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC). The importance of IUPACs contribution to the enterprise lies primarily in the responsibility of this organization for establishing standards for transmitting chemical information.

I am political quite illiterate, and have no idea why the BioIT Alliance could not use InChI or InChIKey without this mashup. However, I am comforted in the knowledge that the IUPAC InChI/InChIKey project will make sure the Microsoft will not use the InChIKey as drug identifier, which would give very nice (but letal) Millenium-bug like situations when that unlike key clash was found ;)