During the workshop in late February we had discussions about possible implementations of Taverna work flows to automate specific processes to make our life easier. One specific example we discussed was the reduction and initial analysis of Small Angle Neutrons Scattering data. Here I want to describe a bit of the background to what this is and what we might do to kick of the discussion.

There are a number of links I wanted to blog about, but never really had time for yet. Here’s a short review of a them. Bio::Blogs is a series of summary/review articles of bio related blogs, and definately worth putting in your aggregator. Maybe someone is interested in setting up a Chemo::Blogs for chemistry blogs? My del.icio.us (social bookmarking) network informed me about HTML Slidy, an XHTML based PowerPoint replacement.

Bling! Bling!. Mark Wielaard announced the GNU Classpath 0.92 release, with the following changes: an alternative awt peer implementation based on Escher that uses the X protocol directly. Various ImageIO providers for png, gif and bmp images. Support for reading and writing midi files and reading .au and .wav files have been added. Various tools and support classes have been added for jar, native2ascii, serialver, keytool, jarsigner.

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 , but slow. I also tested Taverna which now also starts up, but has an XML parsing error too: Exception occured whilst loading RDFS!