Archive Page 2
Macworld | Editors’ Notes | OS X turns VII – Yes I bought OS X 10.0, and no I couldn’t do much of anything with it – it was too slow. When 10.1 came out a few weeks later though, you could definitely sense the way the Mac was going and clearly it’s been a great ride for Apple and OS X fans over the years. Now we see OS X working it’s way onto iPhones and iPods – no one would have guessed that 7 years ago.
Anyway, so Happy Birthday MacOS X, from all of us here at Mac Singularity.
Tags: apple, OS X — .
So, I dropped the ball – the January 14 2008 critical update to IRAF? I never bothered to incorporated the updated binaries to my .pkg installer. I have done so now, and the installer for IRAF 2.14 on the download page contains the updated binaries.
This is also the first time I’ve used Packagemaker in xcode 3.0, so … I now am requiring authorization to install and I think I have it set up so that the iraf user will be given ownership, but I’m not 100% sure that’s going to work. Let me know if there are any problems.
Oh, and as an aside – did you see the iPhone version of IRAF?. Quite amusing.
Tags: installers, intel, IRAF, pkg — .
Papers now looks to be the killer app for finding and organizing PDFs of journal papers in astronomy. I’ll need to check out the bibtex export ability and such of it, but it was already quite handy and with ADS and arXiv now bulit-in; it’s even better.
Via a comment from the authors on the old Paper post.
As an aside, Macbooks and Macbook Pros dominated the AAS convention in Austin, perhaps even more so than usual. One of these years I should just do an entrance poll into the exhibit hall at AAS and ask people what platform they use. What do you all think, 60-70% Macs now? Surely something like that among laptop usage, but I would imagine there is still plenty of Linux on desktop machines.
Tags: ADS, arxiv, bibtex, journal articles, papers, pdfs — .
So, those of you who are running Leopard’s X11 may be interested to check out the download page at MacOS Forge which contains all the new changes made to Xquartz/X11, etc. since the release that made it into Leopard. They even have nice .pkg installers for people who want to install the latest versions before they become available in OS X Software Update.
Grab the 2.1.0.1 release and see the changes that have been made over the version in Leopard.
Tags: installers, Leopard, x11, xquartz — .
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.
Tags: 2.14, installers, IRAF, iraf.net, Leopard, Tiger, unix — .
Via Daring Fireball, Tidbits has an interesting article on the new Airport Menu in Leopard. While I noticed the new “lock” icon that shows if a network is encrypted or not, the holding-down-option-key trick I did not know about. I like that it shows the transmission rate so you can tell if the connected station is 802.11g/b/n, etc.
Tags: airport, Leopard, networking, wireless — .
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 — .
