You’ve heard the hype about PubChem, but you’re still not convinced. In your mind, the fans have yet to show anything that PubChem does to make your job (which is to get stuff done in the lab) any easier. You’ve got SciFinder, which does everything you need to do. Why bother with this free Internet thing? New technologies need to prove themselves. Those that don’t simply disappear, or morph into something whose value is more apparent.

A series of D-F articles have discussed InChIMatic, a Web application that lets you structure-search the Web using popular search engines such as Google. Recent articles have also described Firefly, a lightweight 2D structure editor designed especially for the Web. Today, the first alpha release of Firefly is available for use with InChIMatic.

Tobias Kind writes to say that a PubChem Power User Gateway (PUG) interface is now available for Java. The software, which currently consists of two Java source files, can be downloaded here.

Both PubChem and the Protein Data Bank (PDB) maintain vast collections of molecular data. Individual users are free to view and search these collections via standard Web browsers. But what are the options if you’re developing software to interact with these databases? Various application programming interfaces (APIs) are available for accessing PubChem and PDB records.

Earlier this week, James Gosling fielded a variety of questions from the San Diego Java Users’ Group. Subjects ranged from the deeply technical to the ridiculously political, and the entire event was simply great. Here, in no particular order, were some of the highlights: Question: “What’s your least favorite word?” Answer: “Action Item.” My kind of guy. Virtually all banking transactions on the planet are processed by Java code.

Depth-First began with a single post on August 12th, 2006. One year and 193 posts later, I thought it would be interesting to reflect back on how my expectations about blogging diverged from reality. Many of my observations come from statistics compiled by Google Analytics. An investment in time to install and use analytics software more than pays for itself within a few weeks.

Chemists are accustomed to embedding live molecular objects in their documents with Microsoft Word/ChemDraw. These objects can then be reprocessed and embedded into other documents, such as PowerPoint presentations, saving enormous amounts of time. What if the same feature were available with Web documents? A recent D-F article proposed a method to encode molecular structure data within commonly-used Web image formats such as PNG.

Yale University has ended it’s financial support of BioMed Central’s Open Access Membership program effective July 27, 2007. Under the program, Yale libraries paid an annual fee to cover the costs of submissions by Yale authors to BioMed Central (BMC) open access journals. Yale authors can continue to submit manuscripts to BMC, but must pay for all charges themselves.

During the last few years, there have been a few occasions when I’ve been at a computer but without immediate access to a periodic table. My standby is Web Elements, a site that seems to have been around forever. I recently happened onto Jorge Goncalves’ Triple Point, which summarizes the best 55 online periodic tables. Although some of the links are broken, there’s plenty to choose from if Web Elements doesn’t do the job.

You know something’s gone mainstream when chemistry’s flagship magazine, Chemical & Engineering News , recommends it. The current issue contains an article offering five tips for a better job search. And right there at number three is “Connect through blogging.” What specifically should job-seekers be doing with their blogs?