Late Breaking News
-
2007-2008 News
- 8.10.07. Please check the changes to how Outlook 2007 has to be configured
to install your digital certificate.
2006-2007 News
- 10.10.06. When a Word document is signed with a digital signature, it
appears as Signed (unverified). The appelation unverified means that
the certificate used to sign the document has not (yet) been inspected by you
for its identity. It does not mean it cannot be verified.
- New to this year is the use of a Wiki for project creation.
-
2005-2006 News
- Whilst the Corina 1D to 3D conversion service continues to be down, here is
another useful way of generating 3D coordinates.
- Draw the molecule using ChemDraw.
- Select the whole molecule, and invoke Edit/Copy as SMILES
- Open a simple text editor such as Wordpad (from Program Files/Accessories)
and past the SMILES string into a new empty file
- Save this file, being careful to give it a file extension ending in .smi
- Open Programs/Additional programs/Weblab Viewer Pro and open a new
file, taking care to specify a File of type Smiles (*.smi). You might also
find a desktop icon to this program.
- Your molecule should open as a 3D file. Check that eg stereochemistry
has been correctly assigned.
- The recommended HTML editor this year is a program called
Nvu; http://www.nvu.com/. This is free for
all computing platforms.
- Lab on Monday 10th October, 2005 clashes with the lecture
to be given by the 2005 Chemistry Nobel Prize winner Dick
Schrock at 16.15. Attending the latter is no doubt going to
be more memorable than the CIT lab. The CIT lab will
therefore end early to allow anyone who wishes to attend the
lecture.
-
2004-2005 News
- An RSS Feed for this page is now available. Click on the
XML logo here to subscribe:
. If you come across a site which you feel
deserves wider dissemination through these pages or the RSS
feed, please suggest it to Henry Rzepa.
-
2003-2004 News
- The Ligand Site is an interesting new database
entry with around 1 million entries.
-
Tutorial on exporting data from Crossfire. There are no
predefined exports for reactions, and you will have to define
your own. Ifyou don't want the hassle of setting up an export
option from the reactions context, you can always convert
your reaction hits to either the substances or citations
context by selecting the correct hitset (e.g. Q01) from the
'tree' view at the left hand side of display hits window and
clicking on the right hand mouse button - select 'Convert'
and then the context you want to convert to. It will re-run
the search and then you will see all the usual options from
the Export button.
- Full instructions on connecting to the WiFi network in
Pippard and the Chemistry library are to be found here.
-
2002-2003 News
- 14.10.02. Issues with the NCI database (i.e. no longer
compatible with Netscape 4.8) and Protein Explorer (i.e.
various links have recently changed) now sorted.
- 7.10.02. Try this Endnote tutorial if you want
to try importing data from WOS to Endnote.
- 4.10.02. The Pippard Lecture Theatre now has a wireless
(WiFi) base station. If you have a wireless card in your
laptop, you can go online and follow the examples.
- 4.10.02. ChemStock is a chemical inventory
database project by Mark Williamson in this department.
- 4.10.02. If you want to access the full features of the
CIT resources from where you live, you need to investigate
setting up a so-called
VPN or "Virtual private network". This in effect
temporarily extends all College subnet license rights to your
domestic machine. The procedure for setting up a VPN depends
on whether you are using a Modem or an ADSL connection.
- 4.10.02. We recommend a USB FlashDrive device for
transporting/backing up your work files
-
2001-2002 News
- 15.11.01 A delightful (one page!) project illustrating
the Nobel Prize winners work this year is available at http://www.cmbi.kun.nl/~borkent/projects/sharpless.html.
The use of "Chime buttons" is quite advanced, and we are not
expecting quite such fancy stuff for your own projects.
- 30.10.01 A useful tool for checking that your HTML
collection uses consistent file names, and is cross-platform
compliant, is HTML ReName. Download a
30 day trial here, and check your project against
it.
- 15.10.01. A tutorial on the use of EndNote is available
here.
-
8.10.01. Student Software prices: Cambridgesoft have
special student prices. A copy of ChemDraw can be obtained
from $44 upwards via their online shop. The College
"SoftwareShop" stocks a student pack which will provide
Office XP Pro or Office 2000 Pro or Office 2001, price
£111.62. They also stock other useful software for
creating graphics, Web pages, etc. Mathematica is available
from Blackwells for around £89. Hardware sales
(memory, hard disks, ethernet cards, etc) are in the
Workshop on Mech Eng level 4, at the extreme south end of
the corridor.
2000-2001 News
- 25.07.01. Try ChemCalc.
- 9.01.01. A free database of organic spectral information is
available in Japan.
- 31.10.00. A new interface to the Quest X-ray database
called ConQuest, is available for Mac
here and Windows here
- 24.10.00. The Available Chemical
Directory is available for browsing.
-
1999-2000 News
- 22.02.00 An XHTML validator and corrector is available
using the BBEdit program on Macintosh computers. To check
your HTML, and to update it to the XHTML standard, open your
HTML in BBedit Lite, go to the Tools menu, and at the bottom
of the list, invoke Tidy HTML. This should correct errors,
and ensure your HTML corresponds to the latest
standards!
- 22.02.00. A copy of GoLive, a "high end" Web editor, has
been installed on the Blue and White Macintosh in the
computer room.
- 15.02.00. A Complete
set of HTML guides and references is available here. This
includes a guide to stylesheets (only for
the very brave!).
- 10.02.00 A bare-bones guide
to preparing HTML documents is now available.
-
Instructions on dial up access to Imperial College. If
you want to use eg BIDS etc, you CANNOT connect using a
commercial ISP; you must go through the College modems.
- 15.11.99. An alternative interface to the
ISIS/Draw databases is now available.
- 18.10.99. If you have not received a follow-up email to
your ATHENS account, please contact the Chemistry librarian
to set up a new account.
- 18.10.99. The pre-defined search queries cannot be loaded
on the Windows version of Crossfire due to system
limitations. You must use a Mac for this to work
-
18.10.99. Don't forget to pre-register your ATHENS account
before you try to use Crossfire. If you don't you will get
obscure database errors.
1998-9 News
- 18/2/99. For complex, large or colourful print jobs, you
can send files to the College Docunet printing
service. You can then visit the Docunet office (Walkway,
Sherfield building) to specify how you want the document
printed, and pay them the charges.
- 11/2/99. A 1 Week extension of the deadline has been made
to avoid conflict with the Mathematica lab deadline the week
earlier.
- 18/12/98. Updated reference materials for HTML 3.2 and the new V
4.0.
- 23/10/98. Beilstein access has been very very slow. New
user registrations are taking > 30 minutes to come
through, and search response has been slow. We understand a
second server will be running 26/10/98 so matters should
improve significantly. BIDS access is also slow via the Web
interface. The Telnet
interface is probably less used and much faster.
- 22/10/98. If you wish to change your BIDS (ATHENS)
password from the unmemorable string given to you,
go here. We advise you to consider changing it to your
College email account, to avoid confusion.
-
20/10/98. The password problems of people not being able to
lg into the PC cluster should have been solved. Remaining
problems appear to be associated with using 9-character or
longer passwrods. If you have one of these, you will have
to change it to 6-8 characters.
1997-8 News
- 10/03/98. The CIT project can be "normalised" against
other coursework components as follows. Organic (lab + 6
problem sets) 80, inorganic, 80, physical 80, CIT, 40,
Nathlab, 20.
- 15/02/98. If you think your skills after doing the
project deserve wider exposure, see the New Scientist Student
Web project. Perhaps you can put some chemistry onto
their web site!
- 2/02/98. In Claris Home page, it is very important to
collect or place all the files you are going to link your
primary document to If this is not done, then transferring the
file collection to another computer (or to floppy) may
produce broken hyperlinks. This is because the explicit path
to the linked document is written out to the HTML source.
That path might be computer specific, ie it will reference
the name of the hard disk, which varies from machine to
machine. This can be prevented from happening if all the
files you want to reference reside in a single folder, ie
that in which the calling document is also in.
- 2/02/98. Anyone preparing a set of HTML/GIF files for
their project, please remember to avoid the use of spaces in
naming these files and or directories. Whilst the Mac is
happy with spaces in file names, other systems (e.g. Unix
etc) might not be. In general its best to avoid their
use.
- 2/02/98. Some Windows 95 users are finding that when they
insert a floppy disk into the Macs here, the filenames would
be changed (and hence web pages would not run correctly).
This is because by default, Macs truncate all Windows 95
"long" file names to the DOS 8.3 format. Software to prevent
this truncation has now been installed on the computers, and
this should no longer happen.
- 28/01/98. Course projects should be handed in by 17.00 on
Friday 27 February, 1998. Please either place a floppy disk
in the box provided outside room 169, or email the project to
it-course@ic.ac.uk. The project should be completed in
Microsoft Word, Claris Works or HTML format.
- 23/10/97. The Link to ISIS Draw now opens to the in-lined
Browser mode (using the Chime plug-in) rather than to ISIS
Draw. To conduct a search against this query, press the mouse
button in the molecule area, and select the edit/copy item.
Then in ISIS Base, select paste. The reaction, complete with
a retro-synthetic analysis of the reaction appears. Selecting
RSS from the Search menu now correctly produces search
results.
-
See here for examples of last year's
projects.
1996-7 News
- 4/03/97.I am delighted to report not only that a high
proportion of students handed a project in, but that the
standard was very very high.
- 22/01/97. The 1997. This can be done a) by
handing Dr Rzepa a floppy disk, b) by sending the report in
Claris Works format using e-mail to it-course@ic.ac.uk or c)
If all else fails as a paper report.
- 9/01/97. Some people have asked how to search for
INORGANIC crystal structures. The Interface is
different from that for the organic database. Anyone wanting
to try, login here (using
the account cshr and password from Henry Rzepa) and type
ICSD at the prompt. The command to search for e.g. a
molecular formula is MOLF. An alternative Web-based
interface is also available.
- 4/01/97. A number of people have asked for
HTML Guides. A good introduction is
here, but be sure to wear your sunglasses!
- 19/12/96. Please note that Project 11 (Pindolol) has
reached the maximum number of takers and is now
.
- 13/12/96. Please
enter the ChemWeb discussion forum here. You will need
your individual ChemWeb accounts, which have to be obtained
from the regular entry point for the forum.
- 9/12/96. A local
mirror of the Daylight pages is available.
- 4/12/96. Beilstein
now offer abstracts via a Web Interface.
- 3/12/96. CAS
have a new Web based interface. Response is very
slow.
- 3/12/96. A new Web
Interface to BIDS has been just released.
- 3/12/96. Problems with running Beilstein on the 6100
machines have now been fixed.
- 26/11/96. We have been informed that the CAS passwords
issued are only valid from what is called the "x" port. Upon
invoking Telnet, the first thing you should type is x (rather
than z implied on the instructions).
- 24/11/96: The printed instructions for the Quest Program indicate how to define a
sub-structure search query from scratch. We have now modified
this so that a pre-defined search query for penicillin has
been prepared. Please read the modified instructions to see
how to invoke this.
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1996-2004.