Archive for May, 2005
So, if you experience any weirdness in running remote programs in X11 in Tiger try using ssh -Y instead of ssh -X. Or, in your ssh_config file you want to set ForwardX11Trusted to yes, not just ForwardX11. For whatever reason, I had issues with x11 applications until I went back to trusted x11 forwarding, specifically the Spitzer data extraction program spice wouldn’t run properly from a remote linux machine until I used
% ssh -Y host.whatever.edu
(which in Tiger is now the trust variety of X11 forwarding).
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p>I forget if I’ve posted about this, but I’ll be speaking at the first Macintosh Astronomy Workshop to be held in Chicago on September 8th, in conjuction with Astrofest – a huge star party gathering af amateur astronomers put on by the Chicago Astronomical Society.
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p>I’ll be speaking about IRAF and the Macintosh. If you are an amateur astronomer who has dabbled in IRAF, or done any kind of data reduction with other software, I’d like to hear from you. I anticipate my audience will not be professional astronomers, and so I need to know my audience a little better.
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p>As an aside, the workshop is getting a little buzz here and there on the Mac web – there was a blurb about it on Macintouch today, which is why I thought to post about it.
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p>The download links for TABLES and STSDAS should have new improved installers that work with Tiger and Panther (and maybe Jaguar too but who knows.) Similarly, the IRAF installer listed there should work soon. The link below I’m hosting locally will disappear soon, or rather change to the standard contrib link, as soon as it’s done uploading.
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p>Ok. I fixed the installer for Tiger. You can download IRAF 2.12.2 here.. This has now been tested on Tiger and Panther. It should work fine.
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p>I don’t want to upload it to the IRAF ftp site until I know it works on Tiger and Panther, but I lack a Panther machine at the moment. Oh, and this was made based on my own install of IRAF sooooo….. the extern.pkg file probably now has commented-out definitions for packages you don’t/won’t have installed.
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p>Ok, so IRAF itself runs fine on Tiger but there’s a chance the .pkg installers aren’t playing nice. I’m looking into it presently.
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p>UpdateOk, we’re in trouble. Apparently my installer(s) include the invisible .DS_STORE files and this is security no-no in Tiger. The new package maker has a “remove .DS_STORE files” option… but this means re-making ALL the installers. :-/ I’ll get to work on the IRAF one right away. The others may be slow in coming. “Upgrade” to Tiger if you can or just copy /iraf from another working installation. If you archive and install it’ll be in the Previous Systems folder.
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p>Well, Apple moved X11.app yet again – this time in Tiger back to Applications/Utilities where it was in Jaguar. I think the hook I have in the IRAF Button 0.97 now should find it no matter what, provided you’ve launched it at least once. The applescript now directly tells X11.app to launch so it should be solid. I’m not as sure about the snippet that launches Xdarwin.app though. Anyway, if you’re still running Jaguar might I strongly recommend you update to Tiger.
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p>So, there was a post on Macintouch about Mac marginalization at physics conferences. The writer said everything had to be made for Powerpoint on a PC and he couldn’t use his Mac or Keynote. I figured surely astronomer’s are more enlightened – I mean Macs are everywhere at AAS. iBooks, Powerbooks. You can’t spit without hitting a Mac, so AAS must have a more mac-friendly policy, right?
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p>Wrong. This is the AAS policy:
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LCD Projectors and Computers will be provided in every oral session room, free of charge. YOU MAY NOT USE YOUR OWN. You do not need to place an order to use the LCD Projector, but the following requirements must be strictly adhered to:
PRESENTATION: PowerPoint or Adobe Acrobat are the required formats. Your PowerPoint presentation must be compatible with Office XP (2002) for the PC. The computers in the sessions rooms will be Windows XP Pro with Office XP.[my emphasis]
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p>Well, that’s just garbage. I understand they have lots of rooms and lots of speakers and want to standarize but Mac users must make up half of astronomer’s these days? Maybe 40%. Still, we’re huge as this popularity of this site indicates. Why must our presentations conform to ungodly Windows computers running Powerpoint? I use Keynote – not Powerpoint. Ugh.
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p>I think we need to make a stink. Who should we write? Who reading this is in the power structure at AAS? I know there are time constraints and delays associated with having people plugging in their own laptop but still. How about a Macintosh in each room with Office 2004 and Keynote? That would assuage 100% of users, wouldn’t it?
Tags: aas, keynote, powerpoint — .
Ok, a little late but as promised here is a poster template for Apple’s Pages. This is by far the best program for making scientific posters that I’ve seen. Support for vector graphics, floating and in-line images, easy columns. Very nice. Certainly no need to use Powerpoint (or even Keynote for that matter) anymore, please.
If you use this template, it’d be nice of you to leave a comment below saying what you did or did not like about it. It would also be nice if you gave the Mac Singularity web site a little-font credit in your acknowledgments, but that’s not mandatory.
I suppose if it truly became popular at AAS we’d have a bunch of posters looking the same and that’d be silly. So, I should come up with some alternative color schemes and fonts and all.
Tags: apple, keynote, pages, PDF, posters — .
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p>It’s possible you’ll need to re-run the fix tcsh script mentioned in the new astronomer’s guide after installing Tiger. It seemed neccesary on my G4 Desktop but not on my iBook G4.
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p>The spotlight indexing procedure went fairly quickly in my iBook. Mail takes a while to “import” the old mailboxes. I did the “upgrade” option on both machines. Be sure to customize the installation and turn off all the language translation and probably print drivers. This will save you a lot of time. Installing from the DVD took me less than 20 minutes.
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