IRAF and More - For Mac Using Astronomers and Astrophysicists
The wonderful High performance computing for Mac site has pre-compiled binaries for Grace and the motif library on which it depends. This is perhaps easier than the compile-fest that is required to get it working via Fink on an Intel-based Mac. Of course, for reasons that remain unclear to me, people appear to prefer IDL, SM, and “something else entirely” to grace.
Tags: fink, grace, plotting, unix — .So, I admit I only recently installed SM(supermongo), and only have used it slightly. Between IDL, grace(installable via Fink or there are binaries for MacOS X at the HPC site), and Plot, I just don’t see why any Mac user would make plots in SM. It requires gnuplot-esque scripts/programs, and just seems in general a pain and esoteric.
Perhaps it is powerful, perhaps for automated plot creation from certain kinds of data, it’s great, but I don’t understand its popularity. Has anyone used all the above tools and yet prefers SM? If so, please post a comment. I’m curious if I’m missing something.
For casual plotting, say from analysis that I do in IDL, I just do quick plots in IDL itself, and I’ve written a fair number of simple IDL routines that call plot or ploterr or other people’s plotting programs. This works for day to day plotting, and is easy to integrate into my other IDL programs. For almost all plots for publication, I have always used the aforementioned grace, which I installed with Fink.
If if I wasn’t already familiar with grace, I’d probably try this unfortunately under-named program, Plot. It seems pretty good, but since it’s very similar to Grace except with all the options in different places, so I’ve just stayed with the familiar Grace. But, I vastly prefer a graphical interface like this for tweaking than altering parameters via some script. I have also used gnuplot. It was a nightmare. I recreated in grace in one hour what it took days to get gnuplot to do, and do poorly. I abandoned gnuplot as a first year grad student.
Anyway, I know sm must have its fans, so if that’s you, let me know why you like it below. But, please note if you’ve used any other plotting program.
Update I’m baffled by the “something else entirely” winning unless it’s non-astronomers voting for Excel. Whatever you are voting for, could you post a comment and tell me? Also, I recently got a new Macbook, and installing Grace via Fink was a royal pain requiring a selfupdate via rsync and then a very long compile-fest because they don’t have a binary available. It’s hard to recommend with all that pain, but I maintain it’s much better than SM.
Update II Ploticus sounds vaguely familiar (see in the comments), but not so much python/matplotlib. These sound like IDL/SMish sort of plotting though. Personally, I still prefer a GUI - hence my like for xmgr Grace.
Update III I certainly get the desire to have a plot automagically made while one is doing data reduction, analysis, etc. This is one reason I like IDL. However, I prefer to be able to finely tune the appearance in a GUI for a plot designed for publication. I suppose it’s a learning curve thing. Granted, once you write one sm script to plot a spectra … you’re set for all other spectra. However, I’m not convinced for my own work that the time/effort spent learning how to write such a script is worth it, since I’m obviously rather comfortable with Grace. (It’s worth noting for a certain repetitive plots I have used IDL.)
.The problem - your department’s network won’t let you ssh or connect directly to your work Mac, you can only ssh to one special computer, and then from there you can ssh to your Mac. But, you’d like to be able to use Apple file sharing or sftp directly to your work Mac.
Well, SSH Tunneling (Port Forwarding)[sic] is great, clear, explanation of how to use SSH tunneling to directly connect to an ssh-enabled machine that doesn’t allow ssh connections from people offsite/off-campus, etc. It shows how, even when you can only access the work machine through the “gateway” machine (a situation I face here at UF), that you can setup an ssh tunnel through the gateway machine to access your work machine directly.
The best part about this? I can now use sftp (specifically fugu and its ability to edit external text files in TextWrangler) on my work quad core mac from home. I always knew this sort of thing was possible but … now at last I’ve figured out how to do it!
Update Oh, it gets so much better. Because in addition of using port 22 to forward ssh to your work machine, you can also forward port 548 (appleshare).
So, a variation on the tip from the site would be like so (where work is the Mac on your desk that has ssh and appleshare running (actually for this tip, your Mac only need be running file sharing, not ssh) and gateway is the one machine you’re allowed to ssh into from off-campus.
ssh -l myuserid -L 7778:work:548 gateway cat -
Then minimize this terminal window, and then use the Finder to “Connect to Server” in the Go menu. Enter “localhost:7778″ as the server address and boom, you should see the standard apple file sharing login window for your work machine. Enter your user name, password, and choose what you want to mount. Nice. (I use 7778 here, but you could use 7777. Obviously, if you use 7777 for forwarding port 22, you need to use a different port to forward 548).
Tags: apple, appleshare, networking, port forwarding, ssh — .New versions of MacFUSE and sshfs are available at the Google Macfuse page. You may remember that with MacFUSE and sshfs you can mount any ssh server in the Finder. It’s pretty nifty. FUSE in general makes it easy to add support for additional file systems.
There’s also a new tool, MacFusion that provides a new GUI for MacFUSE, but I haven’t tested it out yet myself.
.Well, Apple just can’t keep Kerberos working. Upon the most recent Apple security update, again with the ssh segmentation violations. It’s getting highly annoying.
The trick is to use Pacifist to replace the Kerberos.framework file (or something) with that from the 10.4.9 update. Described, more or less, in this thread here.
.So, this was annoying, but upon a recent upgrade to 10.4.9 that blasted kerberos related error returned - this time I noticed effecting my ability to mount my iBook over AFP, and it also gave me the same ssh segmentation error I wrote about earlier this month.
The same fix worked, only this time I used pacifist on the 10.4.9 combo update. Which, makes this so frustrating because clearly the correct files are there in the update yet somehow they don’t get written out write by the installer. At least I knew how to fix it.
.If you have any issues getting IDL to properly record/recognize the cursor position or mouse clicks, you may want to try this command in the terminal
defaults write com.apple.x11 wm_click_through -bool true
Frank Varosi here at UF gave me this tip, which he found at this french site. What this command does is it changes a window manager preference in Apple’s X11. This probably only effects the so-called “Quartz VM” which is the default window manager. If you switched to the enlightenment or some other window manager, my guess is this click-through preference has no effect, but I can’t say for sure.
Personally, I’ve yet to write IDL programs that look for the cursor location, but I figure this may be helpful to others.
Update As a commenter noted, you will have to restart X11 for this to do anything, since it’s changing a preference in Apple’s quartz-vm window manager.
Update II As commenter Josh Shiode noted, the Macosforge X11 (and possibly any X11 with Leopard) requires a slightly different command:
defaults write org.x.x11 wmclickthrough -bool true