Marcus D. Hanwell's Blog

Over the last two months I have had one of my most hectic travel schedules ever. It started withOSCON, and a panel discussion about "Practicing Open Science". This one was a bit of a surprise, as Bill Hoffman was originally presenting with Will Schroeder and Brian Wylie, from Sandia National Laboratories. As Bill couldn't make it we decided to change the content of my section, and talk about the new open chemistry area that I have been working on for about four years now. Will went first, followed by me and a wrap up from Brian, with a nice flow between Kitware working on open science for over a decade, me growing a new area of open science (now at Kitware) and Brian giving a government perspective on open source and open science. The slides are below and on slideshare if you would like to take a look.

I thoroughly enjoyed OSCON, and would love to attend future events. The toughest thing was deciding which talks to attend as there were often multiple tracks with talks of interest to me. This was also by far the largest and most commercialized open source event I have attended so far, in the beautiful city of Portland, OR. I couldn't stick around for long after the conference as I was flying out to England on the following Tuesday, and on to Berlin, Germany Friday to attend the Desktop Summit. This was my first time in Germany, and I was looking forward to exploring Berlin a little, along with some time to catch up with a few family and friends in England before and after the conference. I talked about "Open Source Visualization of Scientific Data" on the final day of the main conference, and was very pleased to have a large and interested audience. Here I also discussed my work in open chemistry, along with a lot of the other work we do at Kitware in the Scientific Computing group.

I stayed for the remainder of the conference, attending my first KDE e.V. meeting, and was joined by Bill Hoffman towards the end of the week. Bill gave a workshop on using CMake, and I helped out with that, along with taking part in several BoF sessions and meetings. It was a very hectic week, very different feel to OSCON with a lot of great presentations, BoFs and hacking sessions. I also had the opportunity to meet up with Alexander Neundorf who was an intern at Kitware for half a year, and several other KDE developers interested in build systems, software process, testing, coverage and related areas.

Then I was back home for just over a week before braving the elements and heading straight for the path of hurricane Irene. I was invited to the 5th Meeting on U.S. Government Chemical Databases and Open Chemistry where I talked about "Chemical Databases and Open Chemistry on the Desktop". This meeting was very focused on chemical databases and the open chemistry I have been working on so hard for the last few years. It was a great experience to be able to see what others are working on, and discuss possible points for future collaboration. There is some amazing work happening in this area, and this meeting helped me gain greater clarity on how my work at Kitware can fit into the larger picture to significantly improve the landscape in open chemistry.

Thanks to Kitware for allowing me to attend, and funding my travel/other expenses, and to my wife and son for tolerating my long absences over the last couple of months. An even bigger thank you to my wife, Louise, for letting me off the hook on my first missed wedding anniversary so that I could present at OSCON! I had some great news about funding for the continued development of many of the ideas discussed in the slides, and so hope to have much more to talk about over the coming months (and years). This post is already pretty long, I hope to continue developing this work and promoting open science, especially in chemistry, materials science, physics and the bio areas. There are lots of other amazing people working in these areas too, and I feel like we are getting to a point where we can create real change to improve the outlook in scientific research.

Bill Hoffman is also planning to attend, and we will be running a workshop introducing CMake on Thursday. This is my first Desktop Summit, although Bill and I have both attended previous aKademy and Camp KDE meetings. I should be in on time to attend the pre-registration event, and will not be leaving until Saturday. Looking forward to a great summit, catching up with some old friends and making some new ones. Now, I think I should try to get some sleep before my flight tomorrow!

I am currently on a plane bound for Portland, Oregon enjoying the in-plane wi-fi. Will Schroeder, Brian Wylie and I will be talking about "Practicing Open Science" on Friday in the government track. I am standing in for Bill Hoffman who unfortunately could not make it, and will be discussing the work I have been doing to grow open chemistry both at Kitware and outside of Kitware with many amazing collaborators scattered around the world. I am really excited to have the opportunity to talk at OSCON, and would be happy to meet up and discuss this work if you are at OSCON. Will and Brian are both very passionate about open science too, they will both give their unique perspectives on practicing open science. I will be there from this evening and don't fly out until early Saturday morning.

I am very much looking forward to OSCON, and the major difficulty I have had is choosing between the talks that are all happening at the same time. In some cases there are two or three I would like to see in any given slot. I am hoping to attend the KDE release party tomorrow too, please join us there if you would like to celebrate with us.

I am pleased to be able to announce the availability of Avogadro 1.0.3! What happened to Avogadro 1.0.2 I hear you ask...shortly after tagging Michael reported an issue with i18n building/installations. So 1.0.3 contains a couple of very small build system fixes, but see the 1.0.2 release notes for details of most of the fixes.

As always, we appreciate your feedback. There are still a few issues outstanding, but many things were fixed. These binaries are also built against much newer versions of Qt and Open Babel where significant improvements have also been made. There may be one or two more releases of the 1.0 line if necessary (I have streamlined the release process with a view to making more releases), but I would like to focus our efforts on an unstable release for 1.1. Once 1.1 is stable, a 1.2.0 release will be cut and branched. There are lots of new features in master that we would love more feedback on.

At the recent ACS Spring meeting I attended the Blue Obelisk dinner, where I was honored to receive a Blue Obelisk award, pictured below, for my contributions to Open Data, Open Standards and Open Source. This is largely due to the work I have done on Avogadro, Open Babel and other open source chemistry tools.

This was one of the biggest dinners I have had the opportunity to attend, and I got to meet many of the people I have worked with (or used their work), along with several people I had not had the opportunity to work with yet, but hope to in the future. We presented the work we had been doing on Quixote project at the chemical information symposium on chemistry and the internet, after attending the first Quixote meeting the previous week (thank you to Hartree Centre for inviting me to speak there, and sponsoring the event).

These are exciting times, thank you very much to Peter Murray-Rust for presenting me with the award, and all of the support he has shown, along with his relentless passion for open science. I have only been a part of this for a few years, but Peter has been working on opening up chemistry for decades now.

Historically projects have attempted to minimize their dependency list, and often bundle in small third party libraries in an attempt to make things easier for new developers/users to compile their code. In the Avogadro project we have bundled a few really small libraries, but on the whole have maintained a dependency list and tried to keep it smaller. As I work on new code, I see opportunities to break off bits of functionality, such as with OpenQube, but don't want to add yet another thing a new user or developer must download, compile and install somewhere.

Linux packagers, myself included, dislike the practice of bundling in libraries. It means that instead of patching one libxml2, we get to patch one plus the three or four in our tree that have been bundled (often with different version, some local patches). The problem is less pronounced on Linux where package managers are ubiquitous and we are able to provide a list of packages to install, but even there we might be developing against versions not yet in the main distribution repository. This is one of the reasons I have always favored rolling release distributions over the periodic.

CMake's external project module helps us to deal with this issue in quite an elegant fashion. Coupled with meta repositories to bring several source trees together, CMake is able to direct the build of several projects, passing locations between projects and expressing dependencies between the projects being built. This means that something like Open Babel can build zlib and libxml2 before building the main Open Babel library. External projects and CMake allow us to download the source, create the build trees and even direct the build of non-CMake based projects like libxml2.

I have a prototype of this that I just put up to build the core of Avogadro, its working name is Avogadro Squared as I was feeling geeky that day and had no good names. One thing you should note is that everything in there is an external project, and Avogadro is the last one to be built (it depends on all of the other projects). It requires minimal changes to the projects it contains, it uses git submodules for some of the source, and CMake's download and tar functionality for zlib and libxml2. I will be adding options to simply use system versions of the libraries it can build, but Linux distributions etc can continue using the Avogadro repository directly.

As a new developer or user I can checkout the meta repository, have git download the submodules and CMake download the source tarballs. I can then build the entire project, and then continue to work in the Avogadro subdirectory of the build tree after that. That build tree is almost identical to the one I would have ended up with had I not used the meta repository, except it points to the dependencies I just built. I can then use vim, and IDE or whatever I choose to work on the inner projects. This works across Linux, Mac and Windows to get new users and developers up and running very quickly while only loosely coupling the dependencies to the Avogadro project.

I have worked on other larger projects, such as Titan and ParaView that are using this approach to a greater or lesser extent. Titan can actually built Qt, Boost, VTK, protobuf, Trilinos and a host of other dependencies before building the Titan libraries and applications. I think Avogadro Squared is an example of just how minimal a meta repository can be, although I will be extending it with more dependencies it really is just a glue repository.

Since joining Kitware I have had limited spare time to work on Avogadro, and for various reasons my spare time has been more limited than usual too. Since the new year I have been able to start spending more time working on Avogadro, and open source chemistry in general, thanks to an SBIR phase I proposal that was funded last year with the US Army Corps of Engineers. This is exciting for a number of reasons, including the fact that I have the opportunity to prototype exciting new features for chemistry visualization, workflow and data management.

One of the new bits of work I have been doing is to use some of the advanced visualization techniques in VTK such as GPU accelerated volume rendering. Now the code is still pretty rough, and is more a proof of concept. I wrote a simple external Avogadro extension that links to and uses VTK to render the first volume found in the current Avogadro molecule. All of the parameters are currently fixed, I am hoping to get the time to add in more options along with some integration of the Avogadro rendered molecule in the VTK render window. You can view the code here, please bear in mind it is at a very early stage.

I have also been working on several other things such as splitting out the quantum calculation code from the Avogadro plugins, and putting it in a small library. I have called the library OpenQube, right now it only has the base functionality that was in Avogadro but I will be extending it with more features, regression tests and I am hoping due to the decoupled nature and liberal BSD license it will encourage wider collaboration in this field.

There is also the Quixote project which I am very excited about. Meaningfully storing the results of quantum calculations, annotating them and retrieving them within an open framework. This is a growing problem in todays world, and I am working on extensions to Avogadro to allow it to fully exploit the semantic chemical web. This includes some of the previous work to access the PDB and other public resources as well as private databases within groups and organizations.

I think this is going to be a very exciting year for Avogadro, and open source chemistry in general.

Wow, I just looked and I haven't written a thing since January! For those of you who might have been worried, or just wondered what I was up to...here is a quick run down. I am going to start with a little advice, combining starting a new family with moving from academia to industry and moving house it tough I have been really focused on work, home and one big conference, and kinda shut down otherwise.

I hope to remedy that in the coming months, and have started by doing some development for Avogadro and Open Babel. I also got Kalzium in KDE trunk ported to use the system Avogadro library, with some help from Pino Toscano. So KDE 4.5 will feature a Kalzium using the system installed Avogadro, this prompted a couple of bug fixes in Avogadro. So after that I tagged and released a much delayed Avogadro 1.0.1 with several bug fixes.

Way back in March Kitware was kind enough to send me out to the March ACS meeting, where I presented a talk on VTK, ParaView and its use in chemistry. I also gave a talk on Avogadro, and its use as a framework in chemistry visualization, which Geoff followed up with a talk on some applications of the Avogadro framework in his research.

The ACS conference deserves a full post of its own, but I feel like it has been so long I will just summarize a few of my thoughts. There were some other really interesting talks on visualization, and how it can be applied in chemistry. I got a general feeling that commercial software still has too much of a stranglehold, and hope to see that change as we develop powerful open source platforms that can be shared by all. There is a definite need for this in chemistry, and I am doing everything I can to seek some funding to further that cause, failing that I will continue to do what I can in my spare time.

I was honored to meet members of the Blue Obelisk for the first time. Saw some great talks about open science, open data, open standards and open access. I especially enjoyed meeting and seeing Peter Murray-Rust talk for the first time, I found that I share many of his ideals. I think we differ in some places, but life would be boring if that were not the case!

Our son, William, is nearly one year old already! He might be a big part of the reason why I have been inactive. The kinds of sleep deprivation torture you go through with children are indescribable He is thankfully sleeping quite well now, and even took his first two steps yesterday.

We had our first visitors in our new home - friends from Pittsburgh and Washington DC all came up for a weekend. I fired up our new BBQ, an enormous American style with offset fire box. Made some amazing ribs, and shared some of the home brew I made - a portable porter, and an English brown ale (first two batches). We are just getting ready for a trip to Pittsburgh, and then William's first birthday (planning a small party at our place).

Then there is work, lots of exciting things are happening there. I taught my first course at Kitware, going through ParaView plugins. The new CMake book came out (I am one of the contributors to the new edition), and the new VTK book came out at around the same time. Kitware is hiring, so please let me know if you are interested in applying. We have some really interesting projects to work on, most of my time is spent on something called Titan. Last Friday I also pumped the tyres up on my bike, and rode into work for "Bike to Work Day".

I have skipped loads of stuff, but already wrote more than I intended. I will see if I can be a little more disciplined and write more frequently. My current problem is finding time to fit everything in, but I have a new strategy I am working on in order to do better. Life after the big 30 is certainly different. I feel energized again, and hope to be writing about more fun and interesting stuff I am doing over the coming months.

There have been lots of posts about Camp KDE on Planet KDE, along with identi.ca posts and a stream of photos on flickr. It has been a great event so far with some really interesting talks. I especially enjoyed Philip Bourne's talk on open access to data which is very close to my heart, but noted that many parts of the stack used are still closed source. My background in Physics and Chemistry tell me that this needs to change. Open access data without open source tools to create, store and view that data is only addressing one part of the problem. I hope to address other parts of this issue in the work I am doing at Kitware

Celeste's talk was also interesting, and I found out that I may be an OCD interface design guy (many of the points she outlined bugged me in projects I had worked on, especially consistency in interfaces, grammar, etc). Great talk, and illuminating for someone like me who has not worked with anyone in this field before. Then of course there was Till and Alexandra's talk on career opportunities in FOSS, which was a great talk and I found myself nodding along with them. My windy path was not quite so glamourous as rock star or opera singer, but I can certainly identify with them. I instead pursued a degree and a PhD in physics research (largely experimental too), only to find I was extremely passionate about developing software to edit and visualize the data, rather than spending months in the lab.

This is not even the end of the first day, and so you can tell it was a great conference. Jos talked to use about marketing and then Artur presented his take on KDE form the desktop to the pocket. I still really want my own N900 to experiment with taking scientific visualization to the pocket (I have the desktops, laptops and a netbook to play with already). The next morning began with Frank presenting his vision of open source in the cloud, I find myself using the cloud more and more (especially now I have a Droid), but share his concerns and wish to create AGP led alternatives that can be easily deployed by both companies and individuals.

I also really enjoyed Romain's talk on the state of KDE PIM/KDE Windows, with live demos (warts and all). It also nicely segwayed the need for automated testing in order to improve the quality of KDE on other platforms, as well as use our limited resources wisely. I presented my talk on CMake, CTest, CDash and improving the software process in KDE. I think the testing framework can really help KDE developers by providing continuous feedback about platforms not everyone has access to. There are already quite a few KDE projects on my.cdash.org, and I would like to improve that and possibly use subprojects to divide the projects up into manageable pieces.

More great talks from Leo, and we ended the day with plasma talks and demos from Marco and Chani. I don't want to reproduce the schedule, but needless to say we had a great set of talks (all of which were taped and should be available soon). Thanks go out to Jeff and the ground team here for organizing the event so well. Monday was taken up with some more technical talks, Will's talk on the build service is something I would like to use in the future and see if we can get it contributing build/test results to KDE dashboards. The day concluded with CMake training run by me. I really enjoyed the dialog that was present in many of the talks (mine included), and got some great feedback about the training afterwards. I would love to do this again at future KDE events, and from the feedback I received it would seem others would like that to. It was very strange not to talk about any of the scientific visualization work I am doing, one of the first conferences in years where I have not.

Tuesday was the traditional trip day, and we checked out Stone Brewery, tried some excellent ales and then had dinner at one of the longest tables I have ever eaten at. William was of course in attendance, as the youngest attendee. After that we braved the driving rain and winds to get back to the UCSD campus. I took the opportunity to catch up on some work, and recharge my batteries a little ready for the Qt training that is being offered by Till Adam of KDAB today. Looking forward to a day of learning and admiring the sun this morning! The company has been great, and I am very pleased I was able to make it along. This is my first business trip for Kitware, and I am very pleased they sent me along, and that NAMIC sponsored my attendance.

Disclaimer: The opinions and musings in this post are mine, and not those of my employer. Any mistakes/inaccuracies are also mine, that said I would love to hear what people think of this new work.

Kitware is very kindly sending me to Camp KDE. I will be giving a talk on Sunday about CMake, testing, software process and new features in the recent CMake 2.8.0 release. I will also be running a training session on CMake on Monday afternoon. See you all there!

I will also be available to talk about many other things, such as the migration to git, open source chemistry, open science and scientific visualization. Since I joined Kitware I have been exploring some crazy cool ideas in new areas of visualization too, hopefully my influence has not been too disruptive. I will be on the lookout for potential Qties to join my team of Qties at Kitware - be warned

Looking forward to my second Camp KDE! We should arrive in San Diego Friday afternoon, not looking forward to the security lines... I will of course be bringing my spawned process (now named William), who was but a bump at the last Camp KDE. His Mum will be in attendance too, having to travel on her birthday. I am in the last few weeks of my twenties, so be kind.

Bill Hoffman gave a Google Tech Talk on 7 December 2009 at Google's New York city office on CMake, CTest, CDash and CPack. Google recently made the talk available on YouTube.

I wish I could have made it down with Bill and Will to see Google's New York office. For anyone attending Camp KDE, I will be discussing some of these concepts there too, but with a focus on the software process and testing components of CMake.

Life has been so hectic since I moved to upstate New York to start my new job with Kitware. I am very pleased to say that Kitware is sending me to Camp KDE 2010 in San Diego, CA 15-22 January. I will be presenting a talk on CMake, the new features in the recently released 2.8 version, and some of the less well known features of the CMake package, including CTest, and CDash. In addition I will be running a CMake training session for anyone who would like to learn more about CMake.

I attended the first Camp KDE last year in Jamaica, and am very pleased to be attending the second Camp KDE next year in San Diego. Last year I focused on my work in packaging and open source chemistry visualization. I also met Bill Hoffman, who talked about CMake and am now working with him and many other talented people at Kitware. My wife and unborn child also attended the first Camp KDE. Now we have a six month old in the 97th percentile for length, weight and head size who will be joining my wife and I at Camp KDE 2010. I am trying to teach him to count from zero so that he has a good head start when he starts coding

I won't be talking about any of my work in open source scientific visualization at Camp KDE this time, but if any of the attendees are interested I would love to discuss it and will have a few slides for a short impromptu talk...

It is with great pleasure that I announce the release of Avogadro 1.0.0. After many years of work we have released what we consider to be a stable Avogadro release on Mole Day, which seems appropriate given the projects's name. There are still some rough edges, but I think this is a good release. With your help we can fix bugs in the release while working on new features in trunk.

What better time to look back to the beginnings of Avogadro. There was a blog post made today by Sourceforge about Avogadro detailing a little of that history. I have also made a code_swarm movie visualizing the history of the Avogadro project. There have been quite some changes in that time both at a project level and a personal level.

I would like to thank Google for sponsoring me for a GSoC project in the summer of 2007. Also Geoff Hutchison for giving me the opportunity to work with him at the University of Pittsburgh on interesting computational and visualization projects. Then there is my new employer, Kitware, who have provided me with an exciting opportunity to push scientific visualization and cross platform development to its limits.

To finish off a great day, my wife has informed me my new espresso machine has arrived! I am going to Camp KDE in January too!

On Monday 21 September we packed the majority of our belongings into the back of a Penske truck and made the 500 mile drive (in convoy - Louise, William, Dax and myself) from Pittsburgh, PA to Clifton Park, NY. Since then we have been unloading the truck, unpacking our things into our new home and doing all those things you have to do when you move house, and several things necessary when moving between states and jobs.

This is certainly the most rural house I have lived in since I was very young. We found a nice duplex on the outskirts of Clifton Park, it uses well water and I am the proud owner of the contents of two full propane tanks (no natural gas lines run out to the house). We also have a really nice wood fire in the living room, and I snagged the family room and am using it as a large home office! Thankfully they were able to hook up a cable Internet connection on Tuesday last week, and so I was not offline for too long.

Tomorrow is my first day with Kitware, I will be attending a training course being run by Kitware for the remainder of the week and so won't have my first day in the office until next Monday. I will be working in the scientific visualization group on projects such as ParaView, and have had lots of ideas for future Avogadro development over the last few weeks. I am very much looking forward to working in some new areas, but also to enhancing the previous research and development I have done in the area of visualization in chemistry. I am also looking forward to working on CMake.

Avogadro 0.9.7 was released on 18 July 2009. You can download Avogadro here. I have been less involved in the development of Avogadro in the last six weeks due to a major event in my personal life. Still this release has some great new features in it, several of which I squeezed the time in to implement.

Some of the highlights include fixing a long standing rendering bug for our Linux users (me included) where garbage would be rendered right below the tab labels. This was a fix added to Qt 4.5.0 that I discovered while looking into the issue. A nice side effect is the new inline close buttons on view tabs. I also finally got detached OpenGL views into Avogadro, as shown in the screenshot to the right. It is a little clunky right now as you need to open a new view, and then detach it. I will clean up the interface for the next release hopefully. This allows for multiple views of the same molecular scene, which can be extremely useful for certain kinds of work.

Another long standing feature I wanted to implement is in too, the inline configuration buttons for our display types. If you can see the little wrenches, you can now click on them to configure that display type. This code was inspired by the inline close buttons that are in the Qt Creator open file list. Geoff worked making the configuration docks easier to hide, we now default to devoting roughly 90% of screen space to the 3D view, which I think is great. There have been several changes to how molecules are loaded/saved too, I am still hunting down some issues but this allows us to read multiple molecule files for example.

Today is the last day that you can vote for Avogadro in the SourceForge Community Choice Awards! Please cast your vote if you think that Avogadro is a great tool for Academia. Tim (one of our other dedicated Avogadro developers) posted about the release and the awards too. I would like to thank several people in the chemistry community who expressed their support for Avogadro on their blogs - Peter Murray-Rust, Richard Apidoca and Jan Jensen, along with so many others who have helped to promote Avogadro on Twitter, FriendFeed and other online services.

We hope you enjoy the release, whatever happens with the SourceForge Community Choice Awards it was an honour to be nominated. It was great to see all the support for the Avogadro project in the wider community too. It has inspired me to go on and do more with Avogadro - thanks to all of you.