"Emacs: editing and beyond", Wednesday 8 March,
12.30, Aula
As already anticipated in the
December
2005 Newsletter, together with the Seminar Organizing Group we have
devised a "Computing Seminar" series. We are proud to inform you
that the first Computing Seminar will take place on Wednesday 08 March at
12:30 in the Aula. The topic will be: "Emacs: editing and beyond"
(see
https://research.iac.es/sieinvens/SINFIN/sie_courses.html
for the abstract), and we expect a ~20-minute presentation plus 10-15
minutes for questions. We would like to remind you all that comments and
suggestions about these seminars are always much welcomed and valued; just
talk with us, send an email to , or, even better, post in our
Forum:
http://venus/SIE/forum/.
IAUS241 website
Have you seen the
IAU
Symposium 241 website? While it may look like many other conference and workshop
Webs, it is not. In fact it offers many advanced facilities (based on PHP and
mySQL) for both its maintainers and its users:
- Participants register, submit or modify abstracts, and the corresponding
Web pages are automatically updated.
- A list of participants (with addresses, titles of contributions, etc.)
and the abstract booklet can be generated automatically (kiss goodbye to
manually updated excel tables!)
- The content of the page can be modified by authorized users
(typically LOC members) from anywhere in the world a web browser is available.
- Detailed statistics are produced of how many visits, from what places,
what platform and Web browser, etc., the IAUS214 Web pages receive.
Peter Erwin's python script telarchive
Do you often look for astronomical data in public telescope archives? Are
you getting tired of going to the ESO, HST, ING, etc. archive web pages,
only to find that no data are available? Peter Erwin's (former IAC
postdoc)
telarchive
tool can make your life much easier, as it does simple automated searching
of several telescope archives (including SDSS-DR4 and MAST), and tells you
how many images and spectra are present in each of them. Many thanks, Peter,
for developing and making available this very useful program!.
What hardware and operating systems are used to reduce
astronomical data?
As far as we know there are no public data on how many Linux, Solaris,
MacIntosh, BSD etc. machines are used in the various astronomical institutes
all around the world. However, the poll "What is your primary IRAF
system?" in the new IRAF site,
http://iraf.net/, while having no real
statistical meaning, gives nevertheless a clear indication of the current
trend. RedHat/Fedora scores a 34%, other Linux distros 29%. Somewhat
surprising is the popularity of Mac OS, 28%, while Solaris is less than 4%.
Other systems account for the remaining 5%.
SMM images gallery
The
Servicio MultiMedia (SMM)
has recently opened an
Image gallery
which consists of images related to the IAC´s activities and projects.
The archive contains hundreds of photographs taken by the SMM´s photographer
(Miguel Briganti), sorted by topics. Miguel is in charge of maintaining and
updating the archive, periodically adding new images of astronomical objects,
observatories, telescopes and instruments, the headquarters, and other
miscellaneous images related to the IAC.