The minutes of the November 2008 O|B|F Board of Directors meeting have been posted. The most important result of that meeting is that Kam Dahlquist was elected to the Board, bringing the number of Board members back to four. Please join us in extending a warm welcome to Kam! We aim to elect additional Directors this year, please contact the Nominating Committee if you are interested in serving, or if you know people who might be. [Read More]

BioPerl is preparing for version 1.6 release in the coming months. As part of this some restructuring and simplification of the packaging is occurring. Bio-Graphics has been split off into its own package back on Sourceforge to allow for a separate release schedule. It will be uploaded to CPAN as a separate package. In the future other small groups of modules will also be split off from the Core. Eventually the Core will constitute components that will be the main parsers and data objects while less-common use cases or tightly related modules (like bioperl-network) will be released to CPAN on their own. [Read More]

We are pleased to announce the release of Biopython 1.49. There have been some significant changes since Biopython 1.48 was released a few months ago, which is why we initially released a beta for wider testing. Thank you to all those who tried this and reported the minor problems uncovered. As previously announced, the big news is that Biopython now uses NumPy rather than its precursor Numeric (the original Numerical Python library). [Read More]

Scheduled for Nov 19, 12:30 - 2PM PST via Conference call. Please email board@open-bio.org to receive call-in information so we will know how many callers there will be. Agenda Old Business Approve minutes from BOSC 2008 Meeting New Business To vote on a new member to the board, Kam Dahlquist Discuss leadership changes and plan how Board membership will be expanded in the next year BOSC 2009: planning is underway by BOSC committee, will discuss any input needed by BoD Treasurer’s financial report from summer 2008, with accounts updated to be current for Any purchase or server hosting decisions I put some thoughts regarding the OSC hosting offer on my talk page: User:Dag – Dag 20:34, 19 November 2008 (UTC) Minutes Venue: held by conference call, starting 12. [Read More]

The OBF Conference call is scheduled for 12:30PM to 2PM PST on Wednesday Nov 19, 2008. Members of the Open Bioinformatics Foundation and those interested in the decisions are invited to listen in and participate. A brief agenda is available here. Please email Hilmar Lapp at hlapp _AT_ gmx.net for call in number and codes if you wish to participate or listen to the discussion. Those official members should have gotten an email via the OBF members email list. [Read More]

Agenda Old Business Approval of minutes from 2007 New Business Current Board Confirm past term expirations of those who did not run again for the Board. What to do about the Secretary seat? Some of the items on the agenda here need a legitimate vote by the Board (with prior notification and quorum satisfied). Should plan for a (presumably virtual) voting Board meeting soon afterwards. How can we better ensure quorum? [Read More]

We are pleased to announce a beta release of Biopython 1.49. There are been some significant changes since Biopython 1.48 was released two months ago, which is why we are initially releasing a beta for wider testing. As previously announced, the big news is that Biopython now uses NumPy rather than its precursor Numeric (the original Numerical Python library). As in the previous releases, Biopython 1.49 beta supports Python 2.3, 2. [Read More]

Many of you will be aware that Python 2.6 was released a month ago (October 1st, 2008). This supports a lot of new syntax and functionality, but also deprecates some old modules (e.g. the sets module). While Biopython 1.48 does mostly work with Python 2.6, we’ve been testing with Python 2.6 and have fixed a number of deprecations or breakages in our CVS repository. If using Biopython with Python 2.6 is important to you, please help out by testing the CVS code (which needs NumPy and not Numeric) and letting us know on the mailing list or bugzilla if we’ve missed anything. [Read More]