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Milo Fungus writes "I've been working on a project for my biochemistry research lab that may be of interest to a few Slashdotters. We study the enzymes in an important biochemical pathway that produces (among other things) terpenes, carotenes, and sterols. I have been making a web-based tutorial to summarize our research, with animations of the proposed reaction mechanisms of the enzymes. I'm finding that SVG is a very good tool for the job because it is easy to learn (because of my experience with HTML) and the file sizes are amazingly small, even for complex animations. The files are typically ~5 KB for a g-zipped animation about 1:00 minute long, compared to 2 MB or more for a lossy-compressed video file of the same length, which is locked into a certain resolution. I have been wanting to do this project ever since I saw Hongyun Wang and George Oster's animations of ATP synthase. I would appreciate any feedback about the tutorial's usablilty, etc."

Milo Fungus writes "OpenOffice.org is three years old today. The birthday page links to interviews and information about OpenOffice.org's push to schools, which is led by Ian Lynch of the Marketing Project. As a happy and satisfied user, I say 'Happy Birthday' with vigor and gusto." Gift idea: give a copy of OpenOffice.org to your boss tomorrow.

Milo Fungus writes "The University of Utah announced yesterday to all students, faculty, and staff that "the University will disable network access for any machine for which a DMCA complaint has been received" from the MPAA, RIAA, or member of the software industry. The full text of the memorandum can be found here. (Please be easy on the server and set up a mirror if you can.)"

Milo Fungus writes "The University of Utah announced yesterday to all students, faculty, and staff that "the University will disable network access for any machine for which a DMCA complaint has been received" from the MPAA, RIAA, or member of the software industry. The full text of the memorandum can be found here. (Please be easy on the server and set up a mirror if you can.)"

adric writes: "It seems that MP3.com has removed decss.mp3 (but its still available), allegedly for having "offensive lyrics". You can read a bit more here. The best part is the gallery of DeCSS showing the world of clever places this little bit of code has migrated to. T-Shirts, songs, poetry, non-existent languages, PNG comments, embedded in jpgs, gifs, and more. Even if the MPAA's lawyers can make source code illegal, they'll never remove DeCSS from the Net. Can everyone please just drop this now and let us have Linux drivers (and for that matter, let us fast forward through commercials on DVDs!)

adric writes: "It seems that MP3.com has removed decss.mp3 (but its still available), allegedly for having "offensive lyrics". You can read a bit more here. The best part is the gallery of DeCSS showing the world of clever places this little bit of code has migrated to. T-Shirts, songs, poetry, non-existent languages, PNG comments, embedded in jpgs, gifs, and more. Even if the MPAA's lawyers can make source code illegal, they'll never remove DeCSS from the Net. Can everyone please just drop this now and let us have Linux drivers (and for that matter, let us fast forward through commercials on DVDs!)

Anonymous Coward writes: "http://www.joeysmith.com/~jwecker/ descramble.mp3 This guy put the function void css_descramble(byte *sec,byte *key) from css-descramble.c as lyrics in a song. Is this illegal?" Amusing. And not as painful to listen to as I thought it would be. Well, almost.