Archive for November, 2003
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p>I’ll be giving a poster at the 203rd AAS meeting coming up January 4-8 in Atlanta titled Forbidden Line Emission in the T-Tauri Spectroscopic Binaries DQ Tau and UZ Tau-E Monitored over an Orbital Period. My scheduled time is all day Monday, I’ll be my poster in the morning mostly. My poster id is 5.03. Feel free to stop by and say hello. The poster was made in MacOS X using Keynote.
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p>One other note, I’m still looking for someone to split a room with at the convention hotel, as I’m a grad student without a large travel budget. Anyone who might be interested can email me and let me know.
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p>Well, it seems that the staff group has not disappeared persay in Panther, but
rather no one is
in the group except root. So, there shoud be some way to go into Netinfo and put iraf
back in the staff group, though I don’t know a 100% safe way to that just yet. Once I
figure it out, I’ll update this entry.
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p>Update. I think I figured this all out. In fresh installs of Panther, the gid (group id) of new users that are created is 80, which corresponds to the admin group. In Jaguar and upgraded copies of Panther the gid is 20, which is staff. (The upgrade process doesn’t tamper with the Netinfo database that contains all this user/group stuff),
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p>So, all my installers probably create files that are in the group staff, group id 20, and that’s causing problems since in fresh installs of panther, because the IRAF user is not staff, because its gid is now 80 (in the group admin.)
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p>A workaround for those effected might be to simply change the gid of iraf back to 20, which can be done easily in the Netinfo manager. A much better solution would be for me to change my installers to create files that set the group to gid=80, namely admin, which contains all “administrators” in all versions of OS X.
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p>It appears that the “staff” group has disappeared in fresh installs of Panther, which is causing issues because the my .pkg installers set up group permissions of staff. Also, the installers are mysteriously changing the group of / to staff, which is
very troubling. So you install IRAF, it turns / into the staff group, and then you try to install TABLES and it complains “Permission to install in the default place denied,” because iraf is not IN the staff group, and then shouldn’t be able to write in
/, even if /iraf is already created and owned by iraf. What a headache.
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p>The fix seems to be to put the / group back as admin, not staff. This can be done with the “repair permissions” feature in Disk Utility, but that’s overkill. From the command line just do:
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% sudo chgrp admin /
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p>If you upgraded or archived and installed from Jaguar, then I believe
both the Iraf User and your own account will still be in the staff group
and this will probably not cause you any problems. This may be related to the error that is occuring at the
end of the installation process, which you can ignore. I think there are some bugs in the MacOS X Installer Ulitity that need to be worked out.
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p>MacOS X Installers for STSDAS and TABLES 3.1 are now available on the download page. Those users who are upgrading from 3.0 should be advised that the installer will likely overwrite any and anything it wants in /iraf/extern/stsdas so if you modified any of the files there, the changes will not survive.
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p>Personally, I just ran the TABLES installer without touching my old TABLES installation. That worked fine. I also deleted STSDAS first and then reinstalled with the new installer. That also worked. However, the weird installer error is back – it appeared when I installed STSDAS, but not when I installed TABLES. Either way, the installer error is harmless – just ignore it and proceed.
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p>If you already had STSDAS and/or TABLES installed, then you should not need to again edit the extern.pkg file in /iraf/iraf/unix/hlib/
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The RSS subscription feature works with an RSS Newsreader, like
NetNewsWire or Slashdock. These programs let you view and read various news headlines and articles from a wide variety of internet sites.
To subscribe to the Mac IRAF RSS news feature cut and paste the URL below into the RSS newsreader that you prefer.
http://macsingularity.org/feed/
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Well, an uniformed officemate unplugged the G3 mac that’s powering the news/tips section of the web page so the web site was partially down for less than an hour this afternoon. The nice thing about the frames-based setup is that the top naviagation frame should always load from Owlnet, and as such you can always access the old static pages from the top bar.
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p>Well, the weird error that was around in my installers in 10.1 went away in Jaguar. It seems to be back in MacOS X 10.3 Panther, however. We’ll see if this persists when I get around to making the new STSDAS installer with the Package Maker tool that came with Panther.
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p>Keep in mind that you can ignore the error, everything seems to work fine message or no message.
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p>You can read more about my observations on Panther here.
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p>Don’t worry, you are still at the Macintosh Iraf Web Page. You can see that there have been some major changes to the layout. You can access downloads, and all the other
informative pages at the top via the navigation bar, which should persist even if something happens to the old G3 mac powering this blog style section.
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p>I wanted to make the new blog the default web page, since this is where all the news is at now.
In order to do this I had to implement a single framed page so that the navbar at the top would always be present
at the various blosxom created pages. I hope everyone continues to find this website informative. I will use the new
blosoxm powered system to easily add news and new tips and shortcuts to the site.
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p>Please email me with your comments or use the writeback feature to publicly praise or decry the new site.
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MacOS X 10.3 “Panther” uses the bash (bourne-again shell) by default, as opposed tcsh
which has been used in all previous versions of MacOS X. Any enviromental labels you changed by
editing your .cshrc file won’t have any effect in bash.
The default shell in MacOS X is stored in the NetInfo database, and if you chose the “Upgrade” option,
I don’t believe the database is altered. However, “Archive and Install” or a fresh install will create
a new netinfo database and your shell will be switched.
So, you can learn the bash shell and how to use .bashrc files, or you can switch back to tcsh. I have done the latter.
I’m told the bash shell is very cool, but I don’t see the need to learn how to deal with it and I think iraf
sortof expects a c-shell anyway.
So, how to switch back? You can use the NetInfo Manager (in /Applications/Utilities/) to edit your shell. Navigate in the Netinfo domain to
/Users/you and then change the “shell” property to /bin/tcsh. You’re back in business.
Alternatively you can do this in the command line, obviously replacing “you” with your user name…
% niutil -createprop . /users/you shell /bin/tcsh
You may need to do the above command with sudo if you get permission complaints
It might be wise to change the iraf user’s shell as well, done
in the same way as above except for the Iraf User. Though I’m not sure if this is neccesary.
This tip is pretty much the same as this one at MacOSX Hints.
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Okay, so you decided to stick with the bash shell. Here’s how to change your path. Edit the .bashrc file in your home directory (or create one) and then add a line like this:
PATH=/usr/local/bin:~/bin:$PATH
My friend and bash fan Colby gave me this tidbit. Something all bash users probably know. (bash is a very linux thing, by the way.)
Tags: bash, command line, path, unix — .
