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p>The first thing I did was log into terminal as the iraf user. I did just by typing “su iraf” in the OS X Terminal. I then renamed my old iraf installation like so:
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p>
% cd /
% mv iraf iraf_old
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p>I then logged into OS X as IRAF and ran my installer for IRAF 2.12.2, which you can find at the downloads page. The installer is still giving the annoying and confusing “errors occurred” warning at the end, but I just ignored that; the files were all there.
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p>Then back to the command line, as the iraf user, I moved my old extern directory back into /iraf and I copied my old extern.PKG file to the appropriate location.
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p>
% cd /iraf_old
% mv extern /iraf/
% cd /iraf_old/iraf/unix/hlib/
% cp extern.pkg /iraf/iraf/unix/hlib/
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p>There’s no need to run the install.sh script again because all the links should still be up and running. When I ran the cl for the first time after upgrading, it did gripe about my login.cl file being “outdated” but it still worked. I went ahead and generated a new login.cl file with mkiraf, edited it to load the packages I wanted, etc. and now all is well.
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p>So, it would seem that this site is doing rather well on certain, shall we say, adult-oriented google searches. Specifically, the writeback page for the Panther tip on changing one’s shell is getting a fair amount of hits from google searches that don’t have anything to do with bash or tcsh. This is a rather unfortunate confluence of automatic bots and web crawlers. Let me explain.
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p>The “comments” feature you see at the bottom of every story utilizes a simple POST mechanism for getting your comments on the web. Anyone can comment, and there’s no real check on what you say – except for the fact I monitor my weblogs for posts and then read the comments and perhaps reply.
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p>Every now and then some bot, I guess it’s a bot, will post a comment that is merely a bunch of pornographic words and maybe links. Like 200 of them all in one comment. So, I see this and I delete it of course. It happens once maybe every few weeks or a month.
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p>However the last time it happened, google and the other webcrawlers which index the web found the page with these “comments” before I could delete it. So suddenly my web site is turning up in google searches for “nude pics” among other, more explicit, things.
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p>I find this all kind of funny; I’m certain that those who are coming to this site looking for pictures for anything other than the Crab nebula or some screen shots of MacOS X will be rather disappointed. I also think it shows the drawbacks of aggressive web search engines…. and also these unrestricted comment features on Blosoxm powered web logs. I’m not the only G-rated Blosoxm site that turns up on adult-themed google searches. Karelia Software, maker of popular OS X program Watson, has a similar problem. 
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The latest version of IRAF now resides on contrib at the IRAF ftp site.
The links at the download page should work properly. The latest version
of IRAF fixes the control-c bug, while the new installer should set admin
group permissions.
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