What a busy year it has been so far, a leap day hardly seems enough to help me catch up! I started off the year with a meeting in Cambridge, England on Semantic Physical Science which was hosted by Peter Murray-Rust. I ended up leading the working group on CML and the developing a roadmap to move forward. Peter blogged about this on my birthday (by chance) and you can see the video of my summing up of the results, along with all the other videos from the final day.
While I was back in England I took the opportunity to visit friends and family, along with a day trip to Liverpool to meet with Abbie and Jens. While I was there we discussed some plans around alternate inputs for Avogadro for an upcoming MP visit at the end of January. I found some time to blog about that on the Kitware blog, and Abbie wrote up the visit on their site. I think engaging more people in chemistry is important, and whilst I don't think the interaction is ideal at the moment I was pleased to see them enjoying it. The Kinect is something that many groups can purchase, and if it helps engage a wider audience in science I think that is a great thing.
I am very excited about the work we are doing in Open Chemistry at Kitware. We have been bringing web sites and testing online, and have begun engaging more people in the development process. The official announcement of our Phase II funding went out in January too, and I set up an Open Chemistry group on Google+ if you would like to follow new developments there.
I am especially excited after meeting some people from EMSL at the Semantic Physical Science meeting in Cambridge about the possibilities of working with NWChem more in the future. The open source license they switched to last year is of a very similar liberal nature to that of many of the open source projects we work on at Kitware. There are a large array of techniques available in NWChem, and interest in correlating computational and experimental observables.
We have also been extending Gerrit to support topic branch reviews, and switched VTK to use it for all code submissions. You can see proposed topics and they will trigger automatic build tests using CDash@Home for members of the core group. The Open Chemistry projects are also using the same Gerrit server for code review, and I am adding automated build testing of topics as I find time (any more leap days would help).
As my extra day draws to a close I realize there is still so much more I should get down. I will aim for more discipline in adding more regular entries here, you can follow my Google+ updates if you would like more updates on open source, open science and the life of a scientific software developer.