Not so long ago, it was decided that KDE 4.0 will use SCons as a configuration and building tool, instead of the autotools and make: the common ./configure && make && make install which has served the open source community very well for so long. SCons is different in several ways.

I just read that the Kubuntu team wants to include Kat in the dapper release (scheduled for April 2006). Kat is (to be) the KDE equivalent of Google’s desktop search bar. This is great news for us chem-bla-icians, as Kat has support for full text searching of chemistry files! Let’s see if I can get the Kubuntu team to package up kfile_chemical too, which will extend Kat (and KDE in general), with extraction of meta data from chemical documents.

Jerome Pansanel contributed new patches for kfile_chemical; on Monday actually, but I have been busy with other things, among which a presentation I have to give next Monday for some 100+ analytical chemists. The patch adds support to KDE for five new chemical MIMEs: XYZ, Mol2, SMILES, VMD and GenBank. Therefore, I just released a new version (0.10), and added an announcement to Freshmeat.net.

This week there was an interesting article in the Dutch Intermediar about viagra. They cite an article in Environmental Conversation and state that it saves the environment as it greatly reduced the market for animal parts from the traditional chinese medicine that address the same problem as viagra does. Viagra: good for the environment, good for you! ;) You don’t see this often, though.