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SIENews

The newsletter of the SIE de Investigación y Enseñanza N. 48 - November/December 2013

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.
SIE de Investigación y Enseñanza :: N. 48 - November/December 2013 - Contact: