Tuesday 10 May 2022

Show neighbours in nglview

Nglview is a really nice Python library which encodes a widget to show a NGL viewport, a JS 3D protein viewer used until recently by the PDB. One annoying feature is that one cannot select neighbours as easily as say PyMOL's "select byres HEM around 3".  But it is possible and here is how.

Saturday 7 May 2022

JS in Colab

A Jupyter or Colab notebook has two sides, one is the Python kernel, which may be running on a remote machine, and the front-end running in one's browser. The JavaScript in the browser and the Python kernel as a result may be on separate machine, yet it is possible to make them dialogue. However, this differs between Jupyter and Colab, the latter being more restrictive. I have found this difference problematic and even though I may not be fully versed in Colab functionality I want share some pointers, discussed below. Majorly:

  • Colab diverges greatly from Jupyter in terms of JS operations.
  • JS code injected into Colab is sandboxed within each cell.
  • There is no requireJS in Colab cells or window.
  • Imported modules have to be external to Colab/Drive.