Marcus D. Hanwell's Blog

I just got an email from Sourceforge about their community awards. If you are a user, fan or developer please vote for Avogadro in the Best Project for Academia category. They even provided me with a nice graphics to put on the page, you can just click on it to register your vote.

In other news lots of exciting things happening in Avogadro, hopefully I will find some time to blog about them soon!

The KDE GSoC sprint is over, and we have all returned to our respective homes. We lost a couple of people who had early flights on Sunday, I snapped a fairly blurred group shot Saturday evening, outside of the MIT Stata Center. After an intense day of hacking we headed out for food in the middle of a torrential down pour. We had some great Indian food, ice cream and then went candle pin bowling before they closed at midnight.

Sunday morning we got back into hacking pretty early on. We debated the merits of different editors, the role of desktop and internet applications and debugged a few issues with development environments. We also got Dunkin' Donuts coffee and some very tasty burritos. Sunday was cut short by flights, but Jeff very kindly ferried the two groups to the airport for flights at around 6pm and 8pm.

As I was in the second group we took the opportunity to walk into Boston from Cambridge and take a look around. As we crossed the river I took the opportunity to take lots of photos and stitch them together into my first panorama. I think it turned out quite well, I am just starting to get familiar with the software.

I spotted a few posts from Chani and Alejandro about the event too. It was great meeting you guys and I hope you all have a great summer of code!

We all arrived yesterday in Boston, got to know each other and did some hacking. Yesterday evening we all went to an iMax theater to see the new Star Trek movie. We have spent most of the day talking code and hacking in a small room in one of MIT's buildings.

It has been a pretty productive day, and it is always great to meet up with KDE developers old and new. Everyone is heading out at various points throughout tomorrow. Thanks to Jeff and Qt Software for making this event happen.

A week ago today we released Avogadro 0.9.4. If you would like to try out the new release then you can grab packages and source here. No pretty pictures this time as I am at the KDE GSoC America sprint in Boston, MA and only have my little Eee PC with me. I will see if I can remedy that when I get back home.

This week has been really busy. I have been working hard on getting an Avogadro, OpenBabel super project set up on the Mac. Then using the CMake functions to make a fully relocatable app bundle. This is really experimental right now, but if you would like to play with it then check it out in the downloads section. It is actually the 0.9.4 release with a few patches to our translation files and some other small fixes. It can be run from any directory, and contains Qt and OpenBabel.

There were a few problems with the 0.9.4 release we discovered a few days after the release was made. The main user visible issue is with the translation files not loading, and so we will hopefully get a new release out soon. This is already fixed in head.

In January I started looking for a job as my postdoctoral position at the University of Pittsburgh was due to end in September. I took a break from this to attend Camp KDE, the first KDE meeting held west of the Atlantic. I gave two halves of two talks (so a whole talk in total) where I talked about two things I work on in the open source world - scientific visualization and packaging.

Bill Hoffman also attended the meeting and gave a talk about CMake. While watching his talk (and I think the same happened while he was watching my talks) it clicked that Kitware would be a great fit. Once I got back to Pittsburgh I sent off a copy of my CV, and they very quickly set up some phone interviews. After that they flew me out to Clifton Park for quite an interview, if you get me over a few beers I might tell you all about it...

The more I learned about Kitware the more I liked it. Their language of choice is C++, they do a lot of scientific visualization, such as ParaView, work with national labs, academics and companies on interesting scientific problems. Then there are the software process, cross platform build, test and packaging projects. They even use Qt, and will likely use it more now the license has changed. Most of their software is released under an open source license too! I really got on with Bill and his family when I met them at Camp KDE, and came away with a very good impression of Kitware after the interview.

I accepted a job offer for the position of research and development engineer at Kitware in Clifton Park, NY. Due to being British, and various visa issues I will not be starting there until October (assuming all the visa paperwork falls into place). My wife and I are very excited about this opportunity at Kitware. So wish me luck, I am leaving academia after quite a long stay. Don't tell anyone at Kitware, but most of the stuff they want me to do I would gladly do in my spare time They are still looking for more developers, especially people with C++ and Qt experience if you are on the job market too.