wow dude. I suck at that. I swear there were some other things I had to write down but I can't remember them now. precipitable water vapor precipitates and that can be good
Russell Owen, DS9
As I might have expected, Russell Owen from the University of Washington - the man responsible for the Telescope User Interface, TUI, on the Apache Point Observatory telescope - has written up a help page for XPA access points on ds9. He knows his stuff... I think I need to aspire to that.
sage casjobs
annoying feature of sage casjobs: no spaces are allowed, no matter what, even if quoted. so when importing must remove all spaces. gurrh.
SAVE / RESTORE in Python
Save/Restore is probably the single best feature of IDL that, sadly, is very poorly replicated in Python. For 1 or 2 dimensional variables, you can use Pylab's save/load, but I never use such piddling tiny arrays. For higher dimensional objects, either using FITS files (a pain because of header definitions) or pickling ought to work. e.g.: import numpyimport picklex=ones([10,10,10,10],dtype='float64')pickle.dump(x,open('x.pysav','w'))X = pickle.load(open('x.pysav','r'))
scary
I think this is my worst nightmare: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap081203.html LA. Not the smiley.
Screen cont'd
Guide to screen Particularly useful features: Scrollback: ctrl-a [[scroll keys] Switch to a numbered screen (doesn't work for me so far): ctrl-a [number]
Screen, nohup, ssh, scp
I learned a lot about the above in the past day, but I didn't keep track of the links. First, screen is very useful: it allows you to run any task, detach the screen, and let it run in the background. You can resume it later. Example: screenipython run_fitter.py<ctrl-a> dscreen -r Second, it's a huge pain to type a password every time I use scp and ssh. The solution is to make a key on your computer and put it in the authorized_keys file. ssh-keygen -t rsascp ~/.ssh/id_rsa ginsbura@milkyway.colorado.edu:.ssh ginsbura@milkyway.colorado.educat id_rsa >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keysssh -v ginsbura@milkyway.colorado.edu Use ssh -v to figure out why it fails if it still asks you for a password. In one case, this happened because the computer I was using expected the id to be in ~/.ssh/identity instead of ~/.ssh/id_rsa. There may also be permissions issues (i.e. you want restrictive permissions on your ssh keys). With the latter, you can still use nohup, which is helpful if you want to pipe your output to a log file.
SETI
I read a paper on ArXiv today about SETI, and talked to Jeremy Darling about water masers. This got me thinking: the best way to signal your presence to the universe as an intelligent civilization is to take advantage of natural amplification. So, say, you go find a big cloud of water molecules in the right state to start masing, and blast them with some of the right frequency radio emission: you get a strongly enhanced isotropic emitter. Maybe SETI should look for those, then search for nearby coherent sources.... EDIT: Isotropic? No.
skill set
is it a marketable skill that I can bring down almost any computer system I'm given access too entirely unintentionally?
Skim: a PDF reader that allows annotations
from Sam: http://skim-app.sourceforge.net/ neat