Grüße vom Paranal

Posted on April 16, 2011 by

Buenas tardes señoras y señores,

anbei ein paar Fotoeindrücke aus Chile, wo ich gerade (zum vierten Mal) beim Beobachten bin. Heute konnte ich das neue VST (VLT Survey Telescope) besichtigen, ein “kleines” 2.5-Meter-Teleskop das für Himmelsdurchmusterungen verwendet wird (um neue interessante Objekte zu finden, die später mit den großen Teleskopen angeschaut werden sollen). Danach bin ich zu Fuß vom Berggipfel zur “Residencia” runtergegangen (ca. 40 Minuten Spaziergang durch die Wüste). Das erstaunlichste an der Wüste finde ich immer noch, wie ruhig es hier ist. Man muss ab und zu einfach mal stehenbleiben und hören: Es ist still, absolut still. Mitunter hört man ein bisschen den Wind, aber ansonsten wirklich gar nichts.

Mittlerweile ist es auch wieder recht trocken geworden. Das merkt man zum Einen beim Wandern draußen (man kriegt sehr schnell einen trockenen Mund und trockene Augen) und drinnen merkt man es daran, dass man schon nach drei Schritten elektrisch geladen ist und bei jeder Berührung einen kleinen Schlag kriegt…

Das Wetter ist zur Zeit sehr gut, praktisch keine Wolken und sehr ruhige Atmosphäre. Ich hoffe, es bleibt die nächsten Tage noch so (und ich hoffe auch, dass ich von der Erkältung, die hier gerade rumgeht, verschont bleibe).

Jetzt lege ich mich mal noch ein bißchen an den Pool zum Ausruhen :-) , in einer guten Stunde geht’s zum Essen und dann steht einen lange Nacht bevor (bis ca. 4 Uhr habe ich heute Beobachtungen).

Also dann: Hasta mañana!
Leo

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Sync your life

Posted on January 13, 2011 by

If you would like to sync contacts and calendar entries wirelessly between your Mac and your iOS device(s) (such as iPhone, iPad, …), you can either subscribe to Apple’s “MobileMe” service at 79 € per year or you can manually set up sync solutions, e.g. using Google’s services. While “MobileMe” is certainly the much more convenient solution, it is also expensive. Continue reading →

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Testing your memory using memtest

Posted on August 4, 2010 by

Not yours, actually, but your Mac’s memory. I recently got two 4 GB modules (yes, that’s 8 GB of memory… wow!) and wanted to see if they are OK. Faulty memory modules may cause system crashes and all kinds of weird behaviour. The program that can be used for this purpose is memtest which seems to be freely available with a GPL license but the official download website asks to pay a small amount for downloading it. However, there are alternative download sites and even alternative frontends to the memtest command line tool.

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IDL and page orientation

Posted on July 9, 2010 by

In case you ever want to rotate a postscript file that’s in seascape orientation into ordinary landscape orientation, e.g. because IDL produces postscript files that are seascape, you can use this command for ghostscript:

gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sOutputFile=pstest.pdf -sDEVICE=pdfwrite “-dAutoRotatePages=/None” -c “<< /Orientation 1 >> setpagedevice” 0 rotate 0 0 translate -f pstest.ps
gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sOutputFile=pstest.pdf -sDEVICE=pdfwrite "-dAutoRotatePages=/None" -c "<< /Orientation 1 >> setpagedevice" 0 rotate 0 0 translate -f pstest.ps
where of course pstest.pdf and pstest.ps are the names of the files.
A more convenient way is to rotate within IDL, though, e.g. by using David Fanning’s fixps.pro.
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iOS 4 with free iPhone: Tethering still possible

Posted on June 23, 2010 by

I didn’t find on the internet whether Apple’s new iOS 4 would still allow Tethering for free iPhones, e.g. iPhones bought in Italy (like mine) and used with any SIM card. So I had to try out myself to find out: It does.

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Opas Kartoffelsalat

Posted on June 20, 2010 by

Auf mehrfache Nachfrage hin poste ich hier das Rezept nach dem ich Kartoffelsalat mache. Ich habe es von meinem Opa, Kurt Brüggeller.

Zutaten

  • 4 mittelgroße speckige Kartoffeln (pro Person)
  • rote Zwiebeln
  • Essiggurken, süß-sauer
  • Senf
  • Kren (Meerrettich), am besten pur also kein” Gourmet-Sahne-Meerrettich” o.ä.
  • Salz, Pfeffer, je nach Geschmack etwas Petersilie
  • Raps- oder Sonnenblumenöl
  • Apfelessig
  • Evtl. mit Garnitur: hartgekochtes Ei, Schnittlauch, (Cocktail-)Tomaten

Zubereitung

Kartoffeln kochen, auskühlen lassen, schälen, fein blättrig schneiden. Zwiebeln und Essiggurken fein schneiden, alles gut mischen. Abschmecken, mindestens drei Stunden in den Kühlschrank. Dort ziehen die Kartoffeln viel Wasser, daher darf der Salat vorher ruhig recht feucht sein, damit er am Schluss nicht zu trocken wird.

Guten Appetit!

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Most annoying feature of the month: autocomplete=off

Posted on May 10, 2010 by

Thank you, dear browser developers, for trying hard to protect us innocent web surfers from the evils of the web. While features such as phishing protection might really be helpful, another very widely used, but seldomly recognised, feature isn’t. I am talking about the “autocomplete=off” feature here that prevents website to save login credentials in a system-wide password-manager (such as Keychain under Mac OS X). Meant to protect banking websites and other high-security sites, some webmasters apparently feel a need to use it for trivial-use websites such as Google or Deutsche Bahn. This is both annoying and dangerous. Annoying it is of course because it requries you to look up the password everytime you want to log in to that website. Dangerous it is, because people then might store passwords again in un-protected lists and / or copy-paste their login data to the form thereby making the data more easily accessible by intruders.

Solution? As in many cases: Use Firefox. While there seem to be some work-arounds to fix this annoying feature for older versions of Safari, newer versions of WebKit (the HTML engine underlying Safari) don’t seem to be patchable this way. However, with Firefox together with the add-on Greasemonkey, you can use scripts to enhance your surfing experience. The script re-enable_password_manager by andunix did the job for me. Now the Deutsche Bahn website opens again with login data pre-filled — as it should. :-)

One final note about Greasmonkey: Don’t let yourself be confused by the options that it offers you when adding a new script. In case it did nevertheless, this Stackoverflow webpage might help clarify things.

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Convert multiple ps files into pdf using ps2pdf

Posted on April 20, 2010 by

Unfortunately ps2pdf doesn’t allow that. But with a script as simple as that it will convert all ps files in your working directory into pdf and delete the original files:

#!/bin/bash
##
## Written by Leonard Burtscher (burtscher@mpia.de)
## 20 Apr 2010
##
##
## PURPOSE
##
##
## To transform all ps files of a directory into pdf using ps2pdf
## Then delete all ps files
##
filelist=`(find . -name \*.ps)`
for i in $filelist; do
ps2pdf $i
rm $i
echo ‘Converted $i into pdf, deleted original file.’
done
#!/bin/bash

filelist=`(find . -name \*.ps)`

for i in $filelist; do

        ps2pdf $i

        rm $i

        echo 'Converted $i into pdf, deleted original file.'

done
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On the plural of AGN

Posted on March 24, 2010 by

In the current view of galaxy formation and cosmology most galaxies undergo phases of high nuclear activity, where they accrete lots of matter (compared to their Eddington accretion rate) and shine brightly. Such an object is then called an Active Galaxy and the thing in the center that actually shines and where lots of other stuff is happening is called an Active Galactic Nucleus or AGN.

Now how would one call two such objects? Certainly they are Active Galactic Nuclei, since the latin word nucleus (Second declension, “o-Deklination”) has a plural ending of -i in the nominative.

However, this does not mean that the plural of AGN necessarily must be AGN, AGNi or some other funny, but counter-intuitive, abbreviation.

AGNs is also a the only grammatically valid plural form of AGN. This is because the term AGN is so widely used that it itself has actually become lexicalized, i.e. it has become a word by itself. In other words: You say it. And since standard English words get an ‘s’ in the plural, the plural of AGN is therefore AGNs.

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Working in multiple locations

Posted on February 16, 2010 by

I guess it becomes more and more usual to work not only in one place but have your office wherever you are. Since years I find it extremely practical to have all my data on one mobile computer (a MacBook Pro, currently) and work with this laptop in various locations. But different locations require different computer settings: The network setup may change, the printer system as well, the filesystem you’re connected to can be different as well as many other things. Since I found it annoying to always have to change all these things by hand, I put in place a set of scripts with which all setttings can be changed from one location to another with one simple shell command. When I get to my institute, I call a script called switchmpia.sh which looks like this:

#!/bin/bash
rm ~/.bash_profile
ln -s ~/.bash_profile_mpia ~/.bash_profile
sudo mv /etc/cups/client.conf.off /etc/cups/client.conf
#
switch_network_mpia.osascript
echo “**************     Network environment set to home ******************”
#
echo “**************         Environment set to MPIA        ***************”
echo “Printer settings only become effective after restart of applications.”

#!/bin/bash

rm ~/.bash_profile

ln -s ~/.bash_profile_mpia ~/.bash_profile

sudo mv /etc/cups/client.conf.off /etc/cups/client.conf

switch_network_mpia.osascript

It changes the default .bash_profile to one that has some institute-specific settings (see below), changes the CUPS settings (so that I can use my USB printer at home and the CUPS network printers in my institute) and calls an Apple Script that changes my Mac’s network settings (see below).
My .bash_profile_mpia looks like this:
export MIDIDATA=/Volumes/astrodata/MIDIDATA
# …
echo “Environment: MPIA”
source ~/.bash_profile_generic
It sets a number of environment variables that I use in my scripts to values appropriate for the disks that I have available in my office, then it calls my generic .bash_profile.
The above mentioned Apple Script switch_network_mpia.osascript looks like this:
#!/usr/bin/osascript
tell application “System Events” to tell (process 1 whose frontmost is true) to click menu item “MPIA” of menu 1 of menu item “Umgebung” of menu 1 of menu bar item 1 of menu bar 1
It changes my Mac’s network location (which uses a German localization) to the settings for my institute (setting mainly the correct proxy servers). A good website to learn how Apple Script can help you with scripting system preferences was macosxautomation.com. The Apple Script was the most tricky bit for me and I was happy to receive very helpful comments from Pierre L. in Apple’s discussion forum for this (see the link for more information about this). Thanks again, Pierre L.!
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