MacSingularity Archive

This is one cold mountain.

December 29th, 2003 by admin

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p>Well, it’s 1:30 in the morning. It’s 19 degrees outside. I’m in the control room of the 30″ scope at McDonald observatory (in West Texas) as an image integrates.

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p>This has nothing to do with IRAF, but it’s cold, and I feel it’s worth mentioning. I’m trying to do some UBVRI photometry of some T Tauri stars. But it sure is cold. WIndy too. Wind chill is like 1. ONE. To me, a native Texan, this is all very cold.

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Departmental Humor

December 18th, 2003 by admin

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p>Who says grad students can’t be creative? My friends and I made some humorous short films in the style of the “This is Sportscenter” commercials that air on ESPN. We showed them at our departmental holiday party and they were succesful. They are now online for the world to see.

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p>This is Physics and Astronomy.

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p>The “Helping Out” one is probably the funniest. This obviously has nothing to do with IRAF, but I think others may find it amusing. The commercial that I directed was edited with iMovie.

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How fast is IRAF on Apple laptops?

December 11th, 2003 by admin

I’ve been asked how the calculation speed using IRAF for data reductions on Macs compares to that on current Pentium 4s. Having never used IRAF on a Pentium 4, I thought I’d solicit comments from readers.

So, if you have any experience in comparing the speed of IRAF on relatively recent Macs to P4s, use the comments feature below to post your thoughts.

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IRAF 2.12.2 BETA

December 9th, 2003 by admin

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p>NOAO has released a beta version of IRAF 2.12.2. I will not make installers for this as it is a pre-release. It’s primarily a bug-fix release, but full details as to what has changed won’t be available until the final release which should happen on December 20, barring any major problems found.

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p>A complete re-install will be required, and I will have an installer for 2.12.2 once the final release is out. The new installer will incorporate the group permissions fix I’ve been talking about for a while.

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p>Relevant to Mac users, support for 10.1 is officially dropped in this release, though they suspect the binaries will still work. 10.3 support is officially added.

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p>I have learned that the IRAF binaries are built on MacOS 10.3 using gcc 3.3. They are going to look into G5 compiler flags and they may even make seperate binaries for the G5 if there are some significant speed gains. I personally think using gcc 3 itself should improve performance somewhat, as oppposed to 2.95.

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p>The bold can find the beta IRAF binaries here. I’d make this a hyperlink but Safari would just open it in the Finder, and who wants that?

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p>ftp://iraf.noao.edu/pub/V2.12.2-BETA

Read the NOAO Announcement of IRAF 2.12.2 BETA

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Problems with DS9 and Panther?

December 2nd, 2003 by admin

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p>I’ve received one report of ds9 not working properly once Panther has been installed. The reported symptom has been only the title bar shows, but everything else is gray.

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p>Has this happened to anyone else? I thought perhaps there might be some people who just otherwise use ximtool and just have mentioned it to me or anyone. Use the comments feature or email me if this sounds familiar to you.

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