[bananas] Summary of recent alt.sci.astro.aips activity

[Pat Murphy]

Greetings.  Many of you know that there is a USENET newsgroup devoted to
AIPS in the "alt" hierarchy.  It's been pretty much moribund for years,
apart from announcements of recent AIPS releases and patches.  However, in
the past few days there's been a flurry of activity in it, and rather than
forward each individual message, I'm creating a digest for banana readers'
perusal.  Where text from the original message is quoted in full in a
followup, I just show the followup.  I've also substituted my real e-mail
address for the "nospam" account I use for posting to usenet.

				- Pat

----- begin message #1 -----
From: Pat Murphy <pmurphy at nrao.edu>
Subject: Re: Does any AIPS user read this at all ??
Newsgroups: alt.sci.astro.aips
Date: 07 Dec 1998 08:30:58 -0500
Organization: National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Charlottesville, Virginia
Message-ID: <ygcaf10yt7x.fsf at orangutan.cv.nrao.edu>
References: <SVta2.970$45.1572543 at WReNphoon1>

rnmohan at hotmail.com (RemarQ User) writes:

> I have been using AIPS for the past year and a half.  I discovered this
> usenet group very recently but there doesnt seem to be any AIPS user
> contributing to this group...

Indeed... most of what appears here anymore is either spam, off-topic or
the like.  It would be nice to see more of a discussion for a change.

> If there is any, please respond......

I'm not exactly an AIPS user per se :-) but I do read this group.  FWIW,
it's mirrored through a filter to the BANANAS mailing list at NRAO.

So, are there any AIPs out there with things on their mind (about AIPS
that is)?  

One thing I've noticed about the latest (15OCT98) release is that it seems
to be *considerably* more popular than previous releases.  I'm not quite
sure why; possible reasons include 24-bit colo(u)r "TV" display, multiple
instances of the TV server (XAS) per host, improvements in the
applications, etc.  But until people start talking, we won't really know!

				- Pat
----- begin message #2 -----
From: rnmohan at hotmail.com ("R. Niruj Mohan")
Subject: Re: Does any AIPS user read this at all ??
Newsgroups: alt.sci.astro.aips
Date: Mon, 07 Dec 1998 08:21:38 -0800
Organization: http://www.remarq.com: The World's Usenet/Discussions Start Here
References: <ygcaf10yt7x.fsf at orangutan.cv.nrao.edu> <SVta2.970$45.1572543 at WReNphoon1>
Message-ID: <mgTa2.1661$45.2496252 at WReNphoon1>

Hi...

Glad to see that people still read this group. Btw, isnt there a
moderator for this ?

Incidentally, Pat, you had emailed me a couple of months ago in response to
a problem I had.

We use the 15Apr97 version here (at RRI).  I have two questions for now..
1. Is there any way of making AIPS print out a list of all its verbs with
possibly
a one-line explanation ? I know there is 'apropos' and 'about' but is there
a way of getting the whole list at once ?

2. BLSUM gives an output in terms of actual numbers and so one cant use
the output to run SLFIT or take the FITS file out for GIPSY. Is there a way
of making BLSUM give a SLICE output or a FITS file or is there any other
verb which will do the trick ? Right now, I take the numbers out and do any
fitting outise of AIPS using numerical recipes.

Any other AIPS-user (AIP-er ?  , AIPSman ?) reading this, please post
a message so we might have a rough idea of how many people access
this.

Niruj.
----- begin message #3 -----
From: Pat Murphy <pmurphy at nrao.edu>
Subject: Re: 2 AIPS questions.....
Newsgroups: alt.sci.astro.aips
Date: 08 Dec 1998 09:39:45 -0500
Organization: National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Charlottesville, Virginia
Message-ID: <ygck902k89a.fsf at orangutan.cv.nrao.edu>
References: <tuXa2.1803$45.2705296 at WReNphoon1>

rnmohan at hotmail.com ("R. Niruj Mohan") writes:

> Glad to hear that people still read this group. Btw, isnt there al
> moderator for this ?

Nope; the newsgroup is unmoderated.  The bananas mailing list is
moderated, however, as is the gateway between a.s.a.a. and bananas.

> We use the 15Apr97 version here (at RRI).  I have two questions for now...
> 1. Is there any way of making AIPS print out a list of all its verbs with
>    possibly a one-line explanation ? I know there is 'apropos' and
>    'about' but is there a way of getting the whole list at once ?

Good question.  To first order, one can look at POPSDAT.HLP in the $HLPFIL
area, but that doesn't provide the explanations.  Do you really mean
verbs, or would a listing that included adverbs and tasks as well be
useful? 

If you say "about verbs", you get a brief description of what comprises a
verb, along with a list of all verbs:

  >about verbs
   oranguta  AIPS (15APR99)    370     08-DEC-1998  09:32:57    Page    1
  About VERB in AIPS version 15APR99
  VERB
  Type:  General type of POPS symbol
  Use:   Verbs are the magic words which cause FORTRAN code to
	 execute some function.  They are compiled into AIPS
  ... <snip> ...
  About VERB in AIPS version 15APR99
  ****************************************************************
  List of verbs, adverbs, tasks in category VERB
   
  ABOUT      displays lists and information on tasks, verbs, adverbs
  ABS        returns absolute value of argument
  ACTNOISE   puts estimate of actual image uncertainty in header
  ADDBEAM    Inserts clean beam parameters in image header
  ... <snip> ...

The "about tasks" does the same thing, as does "about adverbs".

> 2. BLSUM gives an output in terms of actual numbers and so one cant use
>    the output to run SLFIT or take the FITS file out for GIPSY. Is there
>    a way of making BLSUM give a SLICE output or a FITS file or is there
>    any other verb which will do the trick ? Right now, I take the
>    numbers out and do any fitting outise of AIPS using numerical
>    recipes. 

BLSUM does not currently have SLICE/PLOT file generation capability.  It
should in principle be possible to extend it as you suggest; I'll pass
this on to the AIPS group.

				- Pat
----- begin message #4 -----
From: Martin Hardcastle <M.Hardcastle at bristol.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: Does any AIPS user read this at all ??
Newsgroups: alt.sci.astro.aips
Date: 07 Dec 1998 19:25:36 +0000 (GMT)
Organization: Department of Physics, University of Bristol
Message-ID: <0nj*SRWMn at news.chiark.greenend.org.uk>
References: <ygcaf10yt7x.fsf at orangutan.cv.nrao.edu> <SVta2.970$45.1572543 at WReNphoon1> <mgTa2.1661$45.2496252 at WReNphoon1>

In article <mgTa2.1661$45.2496252 at WReNphoon1>,
R. Niruj Mohan <rnmohan at hotmail.com> wrote:
>Any other AIPS-user (AIP-er ?  , AIPSman ?) reading this, please post
>a message so we might have a rough idea of how many people access
>this.

If this is going to a mailing list, that might not be a good
idea. But here's one reply.

In answer to Pat's question, I'm fairly religious about installing new
versions of AIPS, but the TrueColour support was particularly
important to me for 15OCT98; I'm going to have fun playing with
visualising multifrequency pictures of radio galaxies.

This might be a place to ask the following: I requested a CD version
of AIPS this time round, mainly because I wanted to experiment with it
on my Linux machine at home. However, both the Suns here and the Linux
box wouldn't read it properly. Have other people had this problem, or
was I just unlucky?

Martin
-- 
Martin Hardcastle             Department of Physics, University of Bristol
           J'ai le gout des homards, qui sont tranquilles, serieux, savent
           les secrets de la mer, n'aboient pas et n'avalent pas la monade
           des gens comme les chiens...
----- begin message #5 -----
From: Pat Murphy <nospam at orangutan.cv.nrao.edu>
Subject: Re: Does any AIPS user read this at all ??
Newsgroups: alt.sci.astro.aips
Date: 08 Dec 1998 09:28:01 -0500
Organization: National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Charlottesville, Virginia
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[See .sig if you want to send e-mail; do not use this address!]

Martin Hardcastle <M.Hardcastle at bristol.ac.uk> writes:

> In article <mgTa2.1661$45.2496252 at WReNphoon1>,
> R. Niruj Mohan <rnmohan at hotmail.com> wrote:

>> Any other AIPS-user (AIP-er ?  , AIPSman ?) reading this, please post a
>> message so we might have a rough idea of how many people access this.

> If this is going to a mailing list, that might not be a good
> idea. But here's one reply.

I moderate the news-to-mail gateway that pipes the traffic here to
bananas; if things get busy I can always wait a while and make a
pseudo-digest so as not to generate *too* much e-mail traffic.

> In answer to Pat's question, I'm fairly religious about installing new
> versions of AIPS, but the TrueColour support was particularly important
> to me for 15OCT98; I'm going to have fun playing with visualising
> multifrequency pictures of radio galaxies.

Glad to hear it.  I suspected this was one of 15OCT98's selling points.

> This might be a place to ask the following: I requested a CD version
> of AIPS this time round, mainly because I wanted to experiment with it
> on my Linux machine at home. However, both the Suns here and the Linux
> box wouldn't read it properly. Have other people had this problem, or
> was I just unlucky?

The only problem I had was making sure (under RH Linux 5.1) that the CD
was mounted WITHOUT the "noexec" flag.  If it's a case of the CD being
just plain bad[1], let us (aipsmail) know and we'll send a replacement.

				- Pat

[1] If you can't even mount the CD and read the filesystem, it's bad.
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