Archive for November, 2007
Jessica Lu suggested that a wiki might be useful for Mac using astronomers to share their tips, etc. I have set one up here at Mac Singularity. Check out the Mac Astronomer Wiki here.
Anyway, register and you can edit and help out. We laid it out in terms of a setup guide for new astronomers (the one I wrote years ago is out of date) and pages for specific applications or tasks. We need more pages on, for example text editors, dare I say it – graphing programs, etc. So, register and contribute! I think for certain types of information, this could be a good way to get people with various expertise contributing.
Update Ok, I somehow managed to disable editing for registered users. No wonder nothing had changed over the last week or so. It’s fixed now.
Tags: community, contributing, wiki — .
Juan Cabanela writes of his Leopard upgrade. Of particular note, there’s a beta of ds9 that seems to play nicer with the way the DISPLAY variable in X11 in Leopard.
Also, for people interested in patching X11 to the latest updates ahead of Apple’s official deployment via software update there is a “quick install” script at the XDarwin wiki that should help that process along.
Tags: apple, ds9, Leopard, x11 — .
So, I spent a lot of time googling on this. I had a pdf of my thesis I wanted to get printed into book form – and the site I was using to publish needed all the used fonts embedded in the PDF file. It claimed that one was not, in fact, embedded. I use TexShop and pdftex and I have to use pdftex at this point because all my figures were PDFS.
So, I searched for “pdftex embed fonts” or “texshop latex embed fonts” and countless variations. I found a lot of interesting links.
But none worked – the options in udmap.cfg or whatever were already set to embed fonts, but the one Times-Roman just wouldn’t embed. I was looking for some other option to flip and not finding anything when one of these links inspired me to try this:
Open the PDF in OS X Preview. Save as PDF. Boom. Done. The font became embedded. I don’t know if this would work for any PDF but it worked for me. I was then able to upload it with success. (I’m using lulu.com, incidentally. UMI-ordered thesis reprints are a scam. Overpriced and poor quality.)
Update Eh, so that didn’t really work. Lulu didn’t reject the PDF outright but was yet unable to print it as they said in an email later. So, I’m back to the drawing board somewhat. It seems to create embedded fonts but “embedded subsets” which may be a problem. I tried saving to postscript and letting Lulu do the PDF conversion, but the new PDF still has subsets rather than entire fonts. I’ll see if it works.
Tags: fonts, latex, PDF, pdftex — .
Well, I upgraded last night to the latest WordPress. I had to update a few plugins but by and large things went smoothly. WordPress 2.3 has support for tags in addition to categories, so this post is really just a test to see how tags work and if I can integrate them into my current wordpress theme (which, admittedly, is somewhat old.)
I’m also, at the suggestion of a reader, working on putting together a Mac Astronomer’s Wiki. The main purpose I think will be to maintain a decent “quickstart guide” for setting up a new Mac. The one I wrote years ago has suffered from a lack of updates, and I think this is the sort of thing that perhaps could benefit from the collaborative efforts of the Mac astronomy community, rather than just me.
Hopefully, it’ll be ready for prime time in a week or so.
Tags: site updates, wiki, wordpress — .
I’m not running IDL of any stripe on my Macbook, but it would seem there is a patch for IDL 6.4 that will fix compatibility issues you may encounter with Leopard. From what I can tell from this thread the problem sounds related to the X11 changes in Leopard.
Tags: IDL, Leopard — .
A common problem with the IRAF installers is that / is sometimes not writeable by the admin group, and thus the “iraf user” can’t write files to the root of the hard drive. To see what goes wrong with the installer, please check the installer log. You can see a screenshot here.
If it’s something about permissions, making / writeable by the admin will probably fix it (assuming IRAF is an admin user, as I suggest)
sudo chmod g+w /
Tags: installers, IRAF, permissions — .
No full screen yet, but some progress is being made with Apple’s X11, though not officially coming from Apple.com yet.
I’m pleased to announce that I’ve posted source and binaries on Xdarwin.org for Xquartz 1.2a7. Since 1.2a6, the following issues have been resolved:
- JIS (Japanese) keyboards are now correctly detected by X11.
- Xvfb and Xnest now compile cleanly; I have not tested them, but binaries are available at http://people.freedesktop.org/~bbyer/x11app/
- The “offset-pointer”/”ghost window” bug with Spaces has been
resolved correctly (this is my second attempt). This means you can
now use the F8 function to zoom out and drag a window from one Space
to another with your mouse. Unfortunately, due to a known issue in
Spaces itself, you can not drag X11 windows to the edge of the screen
to move them to the next screen.
- A focus problem was fixed — previously, clicking on an X11 window
that was behind an Aqua window would not always bring the X11 window
to the foreground (but clicking on any other X11 window usually
would.) I’m sure I’ll be proven wrong, but at the moment I have fixed
all of the focus problems that I know about.
….
Ben Byer
CoreOS / BSD Technology Group, XDarwin maintainer.
For more details, see the full posting at the X11 users list from Ben.
Tags: Leopard, unix, x11, xquartz — .
The excellent Papers has been updated to 1.5 and includes additional search engines as well as the ability to use search engine plug-ins. New search engines include Google Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science. No ADS yet but Google Scholar does an okay job finding ADS and ApJ papers.
It also boasts improved Leopard compatibility and is still 29 Euros (I think there are some student discounts.)
(via MacResearch)
Tags: ADS, bibtex, journals, Leopard, papers, PDF — .
You can subscribe and look at the archives to Apple’s X11 User’s mailing list here. Ben Byer has been doing some heroic all hours work to try and fix some problems in X11 in Leopard, mostly from switching code bases and other issues. It’s pretty impressive to see Apple’s staff interacting directly with users like this – I can’t think of any other aspect of OS X where people who work on it are talking directly to people who use it.
Also this forum at macosxhints contains a summary of a lot of recent developments that have been peculating on the mailing list.
Tags: apple, Leopard, unix, x11 — .
Update at the bottom
According to commenter Erin, the Spot and Leopard tools from Spitzer don’t work on OS X 10.5 due to a Java issue. I haven’t tested this myself but I’ll try to verify this evening when I’m back on a Mac running Leopard (and Leopard, boy that’s confusing.)
There have been conflicting reports about Java on Leopard. Many have complained about a lack of Java 6, some have said that Java 5 is broken too, and others have said Java 5 works just fine. The Spitzer Science Site itself is saying:
Spot and Leopard have not yet been tested under Mac OSX 10.5 (Leopard). We strongly recommend that users not upgrade their OS prior to the Cycle-5 proposal deadline.
That seems like very sound advice.
Update I just tested Spitzer Leopard, seems to work fine in … Leopard. Spot seems to work too, but I did not in anyway test in rigorously. I wouldn’t upgrade before the proposal deadline, just to be safe.
Tags: java, Leopard, spitzer, spot — .
