So, I installed Leopard about 5 hours ago or so, and here are just random initial reactions on my white Macbook (Core 2 Duo).
Updated at the bottom
- Installation took about an hour but I had no foreign language installations (thanks to Monolingual) so it didn’t update them – I think that saves a lot of time.
- Quicklook only works with iWork ’08 docs.
- New screensavers are kind of neat (Mosaic option on photo album based screensavers)
- Spotlight reindexes upon install (~1 hour for me)
- AFP disconnect problem at long last solved (only took 6 years! No more spinning arrow for 10 minutes when an Appleshare volume is mounted and you accidentally leave the network.)
- Emptying trash from dock shows warning – this never used to happen even when the option to warn was set it Finder preferences.
- The new preview is nice – group search results by page (no more 10 results all on the same page) and some more annotation features.
- Lame – No netinfo manager. This means I no longer know how to change the a) shell, b) home directory location for a user. I did an upgrade and it still knows I use tcsh so … there must be some way but not with Netinfo manager. Updated You can now do this in the account preference pane.
- X11 Toggle Full Screen not working. This is troubling, I assume it’s a bug or a bad config file but I can’t get X11 to enter full screen mode, though it’s enabled. The command simply does nothing.
- Where’s the new applescript language guide? This still says updated 1999. That’s rubbish.
- Automator seems better but … could just be I never looked at it thoroughly. I made a nice iPhoto->Zip archive workflow that works nicely.
- It appears to install iTunes 7.4.2
- I’m just now testing out Time Machine. I wish it had a “only back up home folder or this folder or that folder” option rather than a “back up everything but exclude this or that” option.
- Dashcode could be cool. Xcode is on the disc – I’m not sure how new the compilers and such are.
- I like the new print preview in print dialogs. Macworld has a nice hidden features
That’s all for now. I wonder how long until Fink releases a new point release and the headache that usually is.
I haven’t actually installed IRAF on this machine… I’ll do that over the weekend. I’d be very surprised if anything broke though. Except the X11 full screen thing I already mentioned but most of you probably use the Quartz-wm anyway.
Update Juan Cabanela reports that you can change shell and home directory location, etc. in the accounts preference pane which you can read about at Macworld.
Tags: Leopard, OS X — .
I’ll be trying out Leopard on my Macbook and seeing how nice it plays with IRAF, IDL etc this weekend.
You can buy Leopard from Amazon using my affiliate links and, to borrow a term from Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, make me rich. Amazon’s price is actually better than the higher educational price (which is only discounted to $116, lame – it used to be reduced to like $79 or thereabouts.)
Leopard Single License – $109
Leopard Family Pack – $189
Tags: apple, Leopard, OS X — .
iraf.net – Coming Soon: V2.14 and More
Looks like NOAO is back on board with supporting/updating IRAF, after all the hooplah a few years ago. The next version of IRAF will be “official” from NOAO, not from iraf.net and will be supported by NOAO, it looks like. So, this is good news!
Tags: community, future, IRAF, iraf support, iraf.net — .
Well, I’m at the AAS meeting in Honolulu.
The most interesting Mac-related news is that, for the first time, AAS presenters can use Macs (and Keynote) for presenting in oral sessions. They have Powerbooks with Parallels running OS X and Windows in every room, so people are free to use whatever OS and presentation software they want. Excellent idea. Hopefully this becomes standard practice for AAS. I grumbled about being forced to use Windows here some years ago, so it’s only fair I post again now that the situation has been improved.
On an unrelated note, I attended the NASA CAE workshop on improving the introductory astronomy class for non-majors, and it was excellent. There is a large body of research that lecture-only classes are ineffective for teaching non-science major courses, and so called “active learning” techniques are better. I’m convinced, and I think many people would benefit from the workshops so… find one near you and check it out.
Tags: aas, keynote, powerpoint — .
ecto for MacOSX 2.4.2 is a blogging application that works with WordPress blogs and many others. As you probably know, this site is run on WordPress. So, I’m just testing it out, and this is sort of a test post.
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Well, the link for GUIAPPS was broken, and then the installer in question didn’t work on Tiger. I had to compile these binaries myself on my iBook as the binaries at iraf.net seemed to have some issues. The updated installer is on the download page.
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On the download page and a direct download link is below.
Download STSDAS for MacOS X PPC .pkg installer
I also finally added a TABLES link on the download page. Although that has been available for weeks now, the link was missing.
Thanks to Killan Braun for nudging me about a STSDAS PPC installer. The files had been sitting on my laptop almost ready for weeks.
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Generally speaking, IRAF tasks are single-threaded, meaning they don’t take advantage of multiple cores or multiple processors. So, wanting to use all the power in my new Mac Pro – I discovered one can run tasks in the background in IRAF with an &, just like in UNIX.
So, for those of us with Intel processors that have 2 cores, or Mac Pros with 2 2-core chips, this is a good way to speed up tasks by running multiple processes simultaneously. For data reduction, this can speed things up, since each extraction of say a spectra is independent of the next one.
For example, I automate my extractions of echelle spectra. Usually I make doit files and just run them all sequentally. But now I can set up a “doit” file that contains lines like so
myspec file1 output1 &
myspec file2 output2 &
myspec file3 output3 &
myspec file4 output4
....
and then four more lines similarly. The first 3 are run in the background, the fourth is run normally… so the fifth line of this doit file doesn’t get run until the fourth (and presumably at about the same time the first 3) tasks finish. Feed this into the cl like so…
cl> cl < doit
And the end result? IRAF uses nearly 400% of my CPU… check out the screen cap below…
Update Ok this does work. If I want to log what’s happening in each “myspectask” I just need to do…
myspectask input1 output1 > log1 &
making sure the ampersand is after the redirect to a log file.
Update Number 2 Apparently, some times the next batch of 3 background tasks tries to fire up before the first three are done, and then for some reason I get a “no more background slots” error, even though I’m told that IRAF can have 20 background tasks. So, I stuck a sleep 3 after each non-background task to let the background tasks “catch up” and finish before the next four simultaneous tasks are started. That seems to work…
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The headline says it all. I’ve actually tested this one. It’s on the download page and a direct download link is below.
Don’t forget that TABLES 3.6 is required to use STSDAS.
Download STSDAS 3.6 for MacOS X – Intel
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Well, I thought I had this up here somewhere, but there is a (very old) IRAF Guide for Beginner’s document that’s on the old iraf.noao.edu site. I have made a pdf version of the guide, which you can view below.
Click for PDF of IRAF Beginner’s Guide
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