IAC publications archive now public
The new
IAC publications archive is
now open to everyone (from within the IAC network). It contains all the IAC
papers, that is all those papers with at least one author affiliated, at the
time the paper was published, to the IAC. Expansion is underway to include
also all papers (regardless of affiliation) published by researchers now at
the IAC. The archive, which draws most of its data from the ADS, is updated
regularly by the Research Area Secretaries, with the help of our librarian,
and allows the extraction of a number of bibliographic data and metrics to
assess the publication output of individual researchers as well as of the IAC
as a whole. There are still various things that need revision (for instance,
fixing papers with no or incorrect affiliation, removing duplicates, etc.),
but we are working on them. Please visit it and feel free to explore the various
options it offers (just keep in mind that some data and statistics are not
final yet). Your comments will be very welcome!
SIE's talk:
"SIEmpre
a tu lado: 13 años soportándote"
Last Tuesday (December 10th) we gave a talk titled "
SIEmpre
a tu lado: 13 años soportándote" ("
Always on your side:
13 years supporting you") where we presented ourselves and described
the various services we provide to IAC's users: astronomical software installation,
maintenance and support (Linux and Mac OS X); Supercomputing, in particular
the LaPalma cluster and Condor; Web development, including personal, project
and meeting websites. We also gave a brief but juicy preview of the new IAC
Publications archive.
If you missed the talk, do not despair. The slides, made using the Google presentation
app, are available at
this
link. Also, we would be happy to repeat this talk next year for new PhD students
and postdocs unfamiliar with the IAC computing services. In the meantime, please
visit our
main website and
the
SIEpedia, where you can
find plenty of interesting and useful information.
plusFORT
We have installed, in those desktop PCs with Fedora 19,
plusFORT,
a "
multi-purpose suite of tools for analyzing and improving Fortran
programs. It combines restructuring and reformatting with global static analysis,
dynamic analysis and many other features in a single powerful package. plusFORT
is a one-stop solution for programmers, project managers, and quality assurance
engineers working with Fortran source code". To execute any of the
plusFORT programs, just type, for instance, $PFDIR/spag (PFDIR is a globally
defined environment variable). To see what other commands are available and
how they work, just browse the $PFDIR directory, and visit the links in the
above website.
Visitors statistics for the SIE websites
In the last year or so we have been collecting data about visitors activity
on our two sites, SINFIN and
SIEpedia,
using the Piwik webtracker (which is installed
locally and relies on no third-party applications, whose free versions have
generally some limitations). Here go some interesting statistics for the
period November 2012 - October 2013.
- Visits: We have received in total (both sites) 41300
visits, about 110 daily. The webpage that received the largest number of
hits (5200) was the one in SIEpedia about how to
install
IRAF in Mac OS X, followed by the page on the
Linux
Locale (3800 hits). The webpage most visited on the "SINFIN" website
was the one about Astronomical
Software for Mac OS X (4800 hits).
- OS: Windows 7 is the most popular Operating System (13400
visits), followed by Mac OS X (11000) and Linux (9400). We also had one
visitor with Windows 95 and one using the Play Station 3.
- Browser: The most popular browser is Chrome (15000 visits),
followed by Firefox (14700) and Safari (7000).
- Screen resolution: Most common screen resolution is
1366x768, followed by 1280x800 and then 1920x1080; we also had 131 visits
from a 5120x2880 monitor and one from 6048x1200; smallest resolution: 122x133.
- Visitor Location (Country): About 30% of the visits
come from the United States, followed by Spain (23%) and Mexico (6%).
New scripts to install astronomical software in laptops
We are happy to report that a major overhaul of the scripts to install astronomical
software in laptops has been done, and is nearly completion. The two major
basic improvements are: a) the installation process has been simplified; b)
one no longer needs to be connected to the internal IAC network to download
and run the scripts. This work has been carried out by a ULL student doing
a one month long stage under the "práctica en empresa" program; it
has been a remarkable achievement, since this student was a Windows user and
at the time he started he had no familiarity whatsoever with Linux. We expect
that the new scripts will be officially released next month.