The archive of Macsingularity
Well, I’ll be at the 4-meter for about a week starting on Dec 31st. (Another New Year’s at an observatory for me.) If any fellow Mac-using astronomers are around and would like to say hello, swing on by the 4-meter sometime.
.I got a bunch of strange errors in ds9 4.0b10 today.
Error in startup script: syntax error:
while executing
"$ds9(next) bin factor to $bin(factor)"
(procedure "CreateNameNumberFrame" line 111)
invoked from within
"CreateNameNumberFrame "$name$num" $type"
(procedure "CreateNamedFrame" line 9)
invoked from within
"CreateNamedFrame Frame base"
(procedure "CreateFrame" line 2)
invoked from within
"CreateFrame"
(file "./zvfsmntpt/src/ds9.tcl" line 1480)
The problem? A bad ds9 pref file. I bet you didn’t even know ds9 had a pref file, did you?
Delete .ds9.pref from your home directory and the problem is solved. Thanks to Bill Joye who solved this one for me – I was most baffled earlier today.
See what happens when someone leaves a comment? They get the .pkg installer they want.
CTIO for PPC is now available on the download page. Here is the direct download link for the impatient.
.During the holidays, I like to watch my DVD of It’s a Wonderful Life. This year, I’m reminded of a great 1998 Macworld column from David Pogue. In 1998, you recall, Apple was doing particularly badly (don’t I wish I had bought stock in it then). And so, the column is a Capra-esque story in which a despondent Steve Jobs wishes he had never invented the Mac.
.It seems like the venerable astrophysics job rumor page isn’t being updated that often or frequently… or maybe things are just slow this time of year. In any event, there is now a Wiki for job rumors in astrophysics that anyone can update themselves – no “Edwin Hubble” to process the requests.
There’s a general job rumor wiki for Academe but only seems popular with certain fields, and doesn’t have names. And the Chronicle for Higher Ed ran a story on these sites back in Septemeber.
.Today’s APOD was some sort of activex embedded mpg file and was causing Safari to choke on my APOD sidebar widget. It’ll be back at some point. Sorry for those that got slow site response today.
.MSCRED 4.8 is now available from the download page. I had to completely rebuild these, but thanks to IRAF.net I did not have to compile them myself. I haven’t had a chance to test them out, but they should work. Please post a comment if they work properly or not.
You can also find direct download links below.
The PPC link was broken for … well since this story was posted until Dec 8th. I guess that’s about four days – and yet no one posted a comment or emailed me. Perhaps everyone is using Intel these days…
.I’ve actually tested this one, it seems work properly – you can get it on the download page. Here is a direct download link for the impatient.
Hopefully, I’ll get STSDAS 3.6 for PPC and Intel up soon too.
.It occurred to me the legions of fans who read the RSS feeds don’t know when there’s any change to the sidebar, and thus, when I asked a poll question. The new one asks about posting about non-astronomical Mac stories. Like, if I had a comment on the latest Macintosh security FUD story or about I don’t know a hard drive benchmark test – who knows.
I mean, I’ll post what I want of course – it’s my site. 
But, I’m curious if people would like more Mac-related content, or if people just want the installers updated and that’s all.
I saw some printouts from the Astronomy Picture of the Day site around here and figured I’d add them to the sidebar of this site. Sure enough, an APOD WordPress Widget is out there. Though, I wish it’d center the photo in the column. That may be a problem on my end though.
.Bad Behavior has blocked 191 access attempts in the last 7 days.