Renewal of IDL licences
Every three years or so, the renewal of the IDL licenses causes anxiety and
nightmares in the people in charge of it: will RSI increase two or threefold
their price? Shall we have to reduce drastically their number and have users
fighting one another to get hold of one of the few IDL licences? Fortunately,
we can sleep the sleep of the just for three more years, as the IAC was able
to reach a satisfactory agreement with RSI: we will keep the same total
number of licences we have now (a little less than one hundred) for just a
moderate increase in price. Thanks are due to the people in the SIC who
carried out the negotiations with the RSI sales managers.
Withdrawal/reallocation of workstations, and scratch disks
Every year, about 25 new users join the Research and the Graduate Studies
Divisions, and as many (or perhaps not quite as many) leave. And every year,
tens of new workstations are bought to replace aging ones. All this means
that older machines are withdrawn, newer ones can be reassigned to new users,
and we (SIE and SIC) can not ensure that data in their scratch disks (often
cluttered with directories and files from too many current and past users)
are backed-up or copied over to a new location.
Please Remember:
users are responsible of their own data. If you think you have data
in machines that do not belong to you or to your research group, now is the
time to check them out and move them over to your own scratch disk or save
them on a tape, DVD or other suitable media. Not doing so, you do risk that
your data are wiped out and lost forever. Of course, the SIE and the SIC are
always available to answer your questions and help you out.
Install SIE's software in your laptop yourself
So far, the whole process of installing astronomical software in a laptop has
been somewhat cumbersome: the users bring us the laptop, wait patiently till
we tell them it's done (which, depending on our general workload, may take
hours or days), come back to retrieve the laptop, etc. So, to help you get
this done speedily and to relieve ourselves of a small burden we have placed
in our web a page describing how you can install many astronomical packages
yourself:
https://research.iac.es/sieinvens/SINFIN/Linux/InstallSoftwareLaptop.html.
It is very easy, provided you read and follow the instructions.
Users' pictures in the SIE computers database
As you may already know, the SIE maintains a database of users and computers
in the Research and Graduate Studies Divisions, together with maps of their
location:
http://carlota/cdb.
Clicking on the username a small card shows up, which includes a passport-like photo.
If your photo is not yet available (as is likely the case for those who joined recently
the IAC), just send us a suitable picture and we'll add it to the database.
If, on the other hand, for whatever reason you don't like your photo to appear in our
Web, just tell us and we'll remove it.
The International Obfuscated C Code Contest
Writing well structured code, with a consistent use of indentation, clear
syntax, short statements, and lot of descriptive and informative comments, is
(or should be) the "first commmandment" of every programmer.
However, not all programmers know about the IOCCC, where skilled coders
compete to write the least understandable (but which can perfectly compile
and run) C program. From the winners of the last years, we find the following
programs specially amusing:
http://www.es.ioccc.org/2004/newbern.c,
http://www.es.ioccc.org/2001/herrmann2.c,
http://www.es.ioccc.org/1996/eldby.c,
http://www.es.ioccc.org/1994/shapiro.c.