The archive of Macsingularity
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p>Well, it took me forever but I finally got newer version of the STSDAS and TABLES installers made. The STSDAS installer seems to have the phony “errors occured when installing this software” problem, but the TABLES one does not. In any event they are in contrib at the iraf ftp site. You can find them at the downloads page.
.I described in a post last year how to use various IRAF tasks to export nice grayscale gifs of IRAF images and then combine them using various other programs to make a nice RGB image of, in this case, the crab nebula.
However, Laura Chomiuk, over at the University of Wisconsin, pointed out to be that ds9 3.0 and later can created new RGB frames. You can load a different fits image into the R, G, and B frame and then twiddle with the brightness contrast in each frame, and use DS9′s “scale parameters” to adjust the effective z1 and z2 values. It might be worthing displaying the images in iraf and experimenting to find the best z1 and z2 values before going to ds9, because in ds9 it adds the color tint and that can be a bit distracting.
Anyway, it’s certainly another, less complex, method and worth trying. You will have to get ds9 3.0, which of course I still lack an installer for, however. I am, however, uploading new TABLEs and STSDAS installers at this very moment.
Here’s the ds9 combined image below (converted to JPEG in Graphicconverter, I had ds9 export a tiff.)
Image is Missing since the server switchover…. I’ll try to track it down.
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p>Apple Developer Connection has posted an article Configuring and Running x11 Application on MacOS X. The article contain some useful information and seems at the moderate to advanced user level. It’s worth checking out.
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p>I created a maciraf screenname for AOL Instant Messenger. The extent to which I will use this to chat with Mac astronomers and/or provide IRAF help remains to be seen. I don’t get that many emails, and sometimes a few IMs might be easier than an email. On the other hand, I don’t want to be deluged with support requests via IM.
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p>I would, however, like to hear from more Mac astronomers out there who come to this site and who use the IRAF button, my installers, etc. So, we’ll see how it goes. I can always log off!
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p>Feel free to IM maciraf or add maciraf to your buddy list, to ask a question, or just to say hello.
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p>FYI, I seem to have been blocking IMs from pretty much everyone so that’s been fixed. maciraf can receive IMs from anyone now.
.So you might have read at various places on this web site my endorsement of BBEdit Lite, an older, now unsupported free text editor from the good people at Bare Bones software.
A few years ago, they stopped development of BBEdit Lite, released Text Wrangler 1.0, and began charging for Text Wrangler – $49. In fact, at first they even pulled BBEdit Lite from their servers, but eventually it was found on their ftp site. BBedit Lite was the free version of BBEdit which is, for those of you who don’t know, merely the world’s greatest text editor. Unfortunately, it also costs something like $179.
The good news is that at the Macworld Expo Bare Bones announced the release of Text Wrangler 2.0 – which is now a free and supported product. I had read that it was released, but I didn’t realize until tonight that they were no longer charging for it.
Taking a quick look at Text Wrangler, which I just downloaded, it looks like BBEdit Lite only much better. It can install a very cool command line tool “edit” that you can use to invoke Text Wrangler from the command line. Better still, if you open say, a configuration file owned by root – when you try and save the file Text Wranger 2.0 will bring up an authentication dialog so you can type your user name and password and succesfully save the file. No more using pico, vi, or emacs to edit ssh_config or other files in the terminal – unless you really want to.
It also has support for various syntax coloring, executing shell scripts in the Terminal, using a unix script on an open text file, finding differences between two documets, and saving/opening from an FTP or SFTP server just to name a few. It’s certainly a bigstep up from ol’ BBEdit Lite. This seems the text editor every budget-conscious Mac user should have. Looks very useful for writing IDL code or IRAF scripts, and any other text editing chores, though I think HTML authors may have better choices (I used to use the free< a href=”http://www.tacosw.com”>Taco HTML Edit myself, and still do occasionally.)
I may write up more of a review when I get a chance. I suggest you head over to the Text Wranger page, download it, and try it for yourself. It does require MacOS X 10.3.5 or higher, for any Jaguar users still out there.
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p>Much to talk about after today’s Macworld Expo Keynote. The internet was abuzz with rumors, and various web sites were tracking the annoucements in real time. I’m going to cross post this here at Maciraf and at my own personal blog.
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p>I think the Mac Mini is a pretty cool idea, though if you start upgrading it the price wil escalate quickly from the $499 price point. The Apple store isn’t working yet, but if you add a keyboard, mouse, RAM, airport, and a monitor we’re right back to $1000 or so…maybe a little less. Anyway, it certainly can’t hurt to have a Mac that costs about as much as some iPods. And it’s clearly aimed at PC users who might be consdering switching – they can use their old USB perihperals and any monitor they have.
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p>They should bundle Move2Mac with it; that’s the program that will (presumably) move over various settings, etc. from a PC into a new Macintosh. There has to be a frustrated group of Windows users out there who are sick of the viruses, etc.
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p>Okay, the Apple Store is working, slowly. Adding a keyboard & mouse (+$58), airport card (+$79), superdrive, (+$100) and RAM (a true scam at +$75) – and starting the high end Mac Mini with the bigger hard drive (80GB) and faster CPU (1.42 GHZ) (base price, $599)… that brings us to $911. Add a CRT monitor and we’re at what – $1100ish? An eMac is a much better buy, I think. I think with superdrive you can get an eMac for $799? $899? Something like that. These are all non-education prices, btw.
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p>The Mac Mini advantage, then, is that if you have all these things, especially a monitor, you can save some money. My dad should get one, I think. All he’d need to do is add some memory and he’d finally be out of the OS 9 world. It looks these things are user servicable for adding memory.
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p>The iPod shuffle is an interesting product as well. I don’t really know anything about flash-based players. Do most not have screens? How much are they? How much do they hold? I have no idea. The shuffle seems about as good as a tiny mp3 player can be. But I could be wrong, I’m just speculating. Since it can’t hold all your music, like the other iPods claim to be able to, it makes sense that it has no options but to play music mostly randomly. Anyway, the price is right. They’ll sell a lot of them.
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p>I expected the iPod Mini to get a size bump, but not such luck. Everyone wants to hear about G5 Powerbooks but that’ll be a while. I look forward to the next version of OS X, Tiger. Let us hope it doesn’t break anything in IRAF. 
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p>Since I’m about to buy an iBook G4, I’m happy to see that iLife has gotten a refreshing. The new iPhoto and iMovie HD look very cool. I don’t use Garageband, really, and I don’t have a superdrive so no iDVD for me. It’s also worth nothing I can’t find my iLife ’04 CDs anywhere; though I did buy the damn thing.
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p>By the way, this is another indication that it’s not wise to buy any Apple products before Macworld, even when it’s an iBook, who didn’t get any udpates today. Why then you ask? Beacuse Apple has an “iLife up-to-date” program for people who buy Macs today or later that don’t include iLife ’05. But if you bought an iBook yesterday? You’re out of luck. No iLife ’05 for you!
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p>The new iPhoto also includes cheaper prints, so I heard – $0.19 a print which is pretty good, though you still have to pay for shipping. The current iPhoto 4 seems to be choking when I try to order prints, and then still shows the older, more expensive pricing. So, it doesn’t seem like this new pricing is in the system yet, or maybe it only works with iPhoto 5.
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p>I won’t be at this year’s AAS meeting, but if anyone goes and takes a digital camera, be sure to capture the large numbers of Mac laptops that are sure to be present. Oh and send it to me. I took a great picture last year, of like four Macs next to one another, but still haven’t scanned the darn thing. :-/
I stumbled upon this tonight, as I googled around. It’s a quick start guide for new Mac using astronomers. Unfortunately, it recommends ESO’s scisoft package (boo!) rather than my IRAF installers, but oh well. Maybe this is what I get for keeping several of my packages so out of date.
A lot of the other info is rather useful; don’t forget I have my own quickstart guide.
.Bad Behavior has blocked 45 access attempts in the last 7 days.