Work in Progress: Dec 5, 2024
Stuff you probably know that I do:
- answer questions on the mailing lists
- test and document features, otherwise update the
User Guide; some recents:
- update the ChimeraX Change Log
- add website news items (e.g. version 1.8 released)
- add website feature highlights and example images
- spent a day or two on thoughts for a cavity-finding feature highlight
but didn't get far
- tool was still being tweaked, i.e., poor Eric was having to deal with
the kvfinder authors' demands at the same time as my picky complaints
- although similarly reasonable, results in ChimeraX different than those from
their web server
due to their different (and seemingly odd) VDW radii
- other website pages such as ChimeraX-related software
Stuff you might be less aware of:
- update citation counts and lists
- find latest citations of our papers using
Web of Science (1-2x/week I go through those added
since I last looked)
- find each on PubMed, or if it's not on PubMed,
Google to find direct link, add to HTML files organized by year;
these are listed in our intranet index
- time-consuming but has a purpose beyond counting;
is useful to give a larger feel for the uses/misuses of our software
and recent relevant research
- ~weekly: choose a few to put in the featured citations lists
[Chimera home]
[ChimeraX home]
- ~weekly: update the citations histogram in the
ChimeraX stats page;
for comparison, Chimera citation counts have peaked but are still much higher:
- commercial licensing:
- original assignment was simply to generate and send out license keys
when admin tells me the license agreement and payment are in hand
- the license key goes with an email message based on form letters
for Chimera and ChimeraX that we have in Google docs, with minor edits
- but now: I update my shadow spreadsheet (google sheet) for just about
every email that comes in (type of license, number of users, dates of sending
quote, getting partially executed agreement, sending that to OTMA, getting
fully executed agreement back, issuing license, license exp. date ...
because for various reasons I always need to go back to ancient emails to look
up status, and these dates help me find a specific message in my
licensing mailbox of a zillion messages)
- verify the pieces of info they have provided in the intake form,
stuff like "NA" for a person's name, or the state instead of the city, etc.
... yeah the admin should do it, but they do not
- try to answer other questions that I'm not qualified to answer,
since the others could ignore them forever. Some are confusing gray areas
(do I need a license for this or that) but many are just dumb things that
are explained already in our commercial licensing info page
- try not to freak out about long-unanswered queries that are really
in the admin's wheelhouse
- there are usually a few messages a day, occasionally a dozen or more,
and may take an hour or two to deal with, even if I don't answer...
although admittedly half of that may be stewing and trying to remember
what I was working on before the interruption
- hahaha (bitter laugh) I said this in another WIP two years ago:
"now that Kimberly's new process is in place (smartsheet form
linked to commercial licensing page), I plan to stop updating the shadow
spreadsheet"
The recent demoralizing disaster and associated problems have also been taking
up a lot of time and psychic energy.
- enough said about the disaster itself
- nick-nack paddywhack trying to use UCSF VPN, which I mainly need for
for citation tracking (Web of Science)
- it is extremely picky (doesn't like clicking between tabs, opening
a new tab, just starting Chrome, etc.) and often turns off my ability to
get/send email (Mail app shows exclamation point symbol)
- X2go is unbearably laggy and doubles/triples the amount of time it takes
- winter hand misery time again
- speaking of winter stuff...
Meng /
UCSF Resource for Biocomputing, Visualization, and Informatics
