Eclipse is one of those great tools that is both easy to learn and extremely powerful. Eclipse’s power comes, in part, from the number of features it offers, which seems to grow with every new release. This creates a problem though; the more features that are added to Eclipse, the more difficult it is to find them. This article focuses on one feature that every Eclipse user should know about: Quick Fix.

It’s been said that “every system evolves until it uses email.” While this isn’t always true, and email is quite unpopular with some people, others prefer it over alternative information delivery methods. Those who prefer email updates can now subscribe to the Depth-First feed via email. Whenever a new article is posted, you’ll receive an email containing the full text as HTML.

Imagine you need to create a cheminformatics system that’s useful to chemists in their daily work. What tools would you absolutely need, regardless of the specific system you’re building? The answer to this question is hardly academic. If you’re looking for ways to disproportionately improve the state of cheminformatics, improving the performance of one or more of its fundamental tools would seem to be a logical path.

A recent Depth-First article titled “SMILES and Aromaticity: Broken?” has been selected to appear in the science blogging anthology “The Open Laboratory 2007.” This article, along with the 51 other winning entries, will be published as a book that can be purchased from Amazon.com. The book, the second in a series, is aimed at promoting the 2008 North Carolina Science Blogging Conference to be held on January 19, 2008.

As discussed by Peter Suber, Peter Murray-Rust and others, President Bush signed H.R. 2764 into law yesterday. Among the many items in this bill is one that proponents argue could change the nature of the Open Access debate. Does this new law represent a fundamentally changed game, or just the next inning of the old one?

Let’s face it - real change is painful for most people. Think back, for example, to your last big change at work, and chances are pretty good that the experience was not entirely enjoyable - especially if the change was imposed on you. As designers of tools, it’s easy to forget just how unpleasant change is for your users.

Breakthroughs in technologies for managing and exchanging information always precede explosions in information exchange. From a safe distance, this principle seems completely obvious. Yet, like most obvious things, it’s all too easy to forget in the heat of battle. Recently, Peter Murray-Rust discussed the appalling state of data capture, dissemination, preservation and curation. His comments were prompted by an article written by Nico Adams.

James Swetnam has an interesting article on security and the online chemical catalog. Apparently, the previous structure query results of a certain major retailer can be viewed by anyone, not just the person who originated them. Chemical structure queries, like any other database query, can be very valuable information in the hands of a knowledgeable and determined competitor.