Attendees

Tom Goddard, Zach, Greg, Eric, Elaine, Tom Ferrin

July 31, 2025

Agenda

• Zach, work in progress

Discussion Notes

• New PharmChem chair
  • Brian Shoichet is new pharm chem department chair.

• Network attached storage updates
  • Our plato cluster NAS disk can't update because the cannot access the internet. Last update in February.
  • Also we can't check logs because 2-factor authentication needed and NAS can't access internet.
  • Greg has ticket to UCSF IT to allow NAS to access internet. So far they have not responded (in some weeks).
  • Greg will escalate request.

• Iron Mountain tape backups
  • Eric trying to get 20-25 tapes back from Iron Mountain.
  • UCSF cancelled contract with Iron Mountain to store tapes off-site.
  • We will make a new plan to keep backup tapes off-site.

• Plato web server reliability
  • Has been good but with occassional spontaneous reboot with unknown cause.
  • Password protecting top-level ChimeraX Trac (but not individual tickets) has stopped high load average due to AI bots scraping.

• ChimeraX dependency versions
  • License holder was concerned about old versions of ChimeraX dependencies like Python listed on our embedded software web page.
  • Greg updated the embedded software web page and made it automatically update python version and other versions.
  • Current ffmpeg versions are 3 and 6 on different platforms but Greg wants to update to 7.1 on all platforms.

• Zach Chimerax builds
  • We release 1.10.1. May need a 1.10.2 to get an additional fix in.
  • In daily builds pyopengl-accelerate needed patch to work with newer Cython 3.1.

• Zach animation tool demo
  • Showed prototype animation tool, multiple tracks.
  • Discussion about advantages of simple ChimeraX scene time-line.
  • Worth looking at how Chimera animation gui worked.
  • Tom Goddard suggests in addition to user interface it would be nice to improve the quality of movies, e.g. reducing nauseating flying motions.

• Animation examples
  • Tom Ferrin asked Tom Goddard to show animation examples and discuss ways the animations can be improved at group meeting in 2 weeks.

Action Items