Archive for the 'News' Category
I realize it’s been a long time since I’ve posted. Also, I haven’t updated say, the STSDAS installer to the latest version. Though, I haven’t heard much clamor for updated installers (I usually do update them when someone emails me about it.)
In any event, perhaps there just hasn’t been much news related to the intersection of astronomy and Macs, other than the proliferation of iPhone observatory type programs that have appeared on the App Store, some of which I wrote about in my last post.
Also, I suppose I don’t do much research day-to-day anymore, so various tips and tricks aren’t occurring to me to share. Still, this site isn’t going anywhere and I hope to do a better job with updates in the future.
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Tags: site updates — .
So, I’m returning to DC from the AAS today (a bit earlier than some). I found something interesting - the Boingo-run wifi hotspots at the St. Louis airport offer 15 free minutes to iPhone users, if you watch an ad. What I discovered is 2 things:
- They determine you’re on an iPhone via user-agent strings
- You can reset the 15 minutes by deleting boingo cookies
So, it’s fairly easy to get WiFi indefinitely on a Mac or your iPhone. On the iPhone just clear cookies (though that’s a pain because you can’t easily select which cookies to delete, so you may lose automatic logins to other sites too)
On a Mac you use the Safari “Develop” menu to pretend you’re Mobile Safari, watch the ad, then you’re in business. Once the 15 minutes are up, open up Safari’s Security preferences, show cookies, and select only boingo ones (easy to do with the live search text field), and then load a page at you’re back at the initial trial offer.
Who knows how long this will work or if they won’t shut the whole thing down when they read this post but it’s a neat trick and if AAS members read or subscribe to RSS from this site, you can try it out at the airport.
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Tags: airports, boingo, free, iPhone, mac, wifi, wireless — .
IRAF 2.14 has been announced and is available for download. The Mac (PPC and Intel) versions appear to work properly on both Leopard and Tiger. I’ll try and have installers made for these today. Certainly, I can test the Intel one easily but it’s harder for me to test the PowerPC version so once it’s up if someone out there could test it, that’d be appreciated.
Update The Intel installer is available here - Download IRAF 2.14 for Intel Macs .pkg installer (57MB). My prescribed update method is simple. Change to the IRAF user and do:
% cd /
% mv iraf iraf_old
Run the installer and then:
% mv /iraf_old/extern /iraf/extern/
That should preserve all your external packages. You will most likely want to copy over the extern.pkg from your old install.
% cd /iraf_old/iraf/unix/hlib
% cp extern.pkg /iraf/iraf/unix/hlib/extern.pkg
That should work. Let me know if there are any problems - it worked ok for me. I’d keep /iraf_old around for a while just to be safe. And remember any installer errors are probably permission issues but be sure to check the log first before emailing me with any problems.
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Tags: 2.14, installers, IRAF, iraf.net, Leopard, Tiger, unix — .
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.
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Tags: community, contributing, wiki — .
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.
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Tags: site updates, wiki, wordpress — .
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 /
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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.
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Tags: Leopard, unix, x11, xquartz — .
