Dags att deklarera, men ingen lust att använda Windows för detta, även om min Windows XP installation i en VirtualBox miljö på min Ubuntu 7.10 laptop funkar fint.

Loggade dock först in på Handelsbanken via ovannämnda virtuella Windows XP system för att begära ett BankID. Detta förde med sig att att mjukvara från Sun laddades ned för att få stöd för java-applets.

Fyllde sedan i uppgifterna som krävdes (namnet på BankID, fritt att välja; lösenord 12-30 tecken varav minst en siffra, det visar sig att blanktecken inte är giltiga). Sedan får man en möjlighet att testa sitt nya BankID genom att länkas till sidan test.bankid.com. Funkade fint. Det hela över efter bara några minuter.

I got my brand new Dell Inspiron 1525 today. I had ordered a standard configuration with 2 Gb of memory, 6 cell battery and the Intel wireless device rather than the Dell one. Yes, and with a lid in dark blue colour.
Here is what I did to get Ubuntu 7.10 up and running:

1. Booted from a Gutsy Gibbon Live CD and double clicked the installation program.
   Note, that I didn't know about Dell's own iso-images. There is one for the Inspiron 1525 in particular, which you may want to use. These are DVD images, whereas I used a CD image.

Data for all tests (individual spectra, both raw and calibrated) are available in directories AC1, AC2 and AOS, which contain subdirectories for each orbit. Compressed tar-files with raw and calibrated spectra per orbit are available here.

S1bTest: orbits 33183 and 33184.

HighScan1-4: performed at four different occasions, where Odin scans extra high (from 107 km to 172 km) with four different radiometer modes. If AC1 behaves as in 1. above, we might see if the effect is correlated to high altitude or long integration time. The table below indicates which orbits and which radiometer modes we've used:

I went through the following steps to get an Epson Perfection V100 scanner to work with my installation of Debian etch. This scanner is not supported by default, in fact it requires the installation of a free, but non-open (i.e. free as in beer, but not free as in speech) binary driver.

Here is what I did (most of this requires root privileges, so you may just as well do everything as root):

1. downloaded rpm-packages 'iscan' and 'iscan-plugin-gt-s600' from Avasys
2. converted the downloaded rpm-archives to deb-packages using 'alien':
   

Many years ago, I wrote a collection of small C-programs which served as a data reduction package (DRP) at the 15-m Swedish ESO Submillimeter radio Telescope (SEST) in Chile. For a long time that code has not been developed any further, but with much of the (radio-) astronomical community looking at Python as their scripting language of choice, I thought that this would be nice test case to write a Python extension to make use of my C-routines.

So my plan is to write down the design and inner workings of this extension, so that others might be able to use this as a tutorial for writing Python extension modules. I will not be using SWIG, a tool that automates the coding of Python (or other scripting languages) to C interfaces. Instead everything will be done "by hand", hopefully with an increased level of understanding of the Python C-API and with greater freedom as to what will be possible to implement via the Python module.

This is a short howto on installing MySQL5 and its Python2.3 interface under Debian stable (sarge). MySQL5 is available through the Debian backports archive, but the Python interface is not. Note that this is only about installing the client part of MySQL in order to access a MySQL5 database on a different machine via python2.3 from my local Debian sarge system.

I am maintaining a number of debianized packages for easy installation on the Debain based machines at Onsala. Here I describe, using package xs as an example how new versions of such a package are added to the depository at

deb http://nain.oso.chalmers.se/oso/debian ./
deb-src http://nain.oso.chalmers.se/oso/debian ./


The APEX telescope staff use the ESO CMM (Configuration Management Module), described in document VLT-MAN-ESO-17200-0780, to handle version control of their software.

This module is also used for the control software for the APEX HET345 receiver.

In order to produce a new version of the software the following steps are required:

The old control system used GBV 5410 amplifiers and KSY 548.30-1 motors (0.51 Nm/A) to drive the antenna via an analog output signal in the range of ±5000 DAC units from the digital control loop. The DAC signal yields a voltage ±10V at 16bit resolution (i.e. 10V/32768). The amplifier produces 6A per 5V.

The new system uses DSM 4-11.1 motors from SAD GmbH with a rated current of 4.9A and rated torque of 3.7Nm (i.e. 0.7551 Nm/A). They are driven by tendo DD4 servo amplifers from Mayr GmbH (now Pilz). The current output from the amplifiers is (rated current)*(setpoint/1640). We get

This is for the installation of HCSS on Linux (Ubuntu 6.06).

I chose to install Java (packages sun-j2sdk1.5, sun-j2re1.5 and java-common) independently of the HCSS. You may choose to install HCSS with Java included.

The Versant database is also assumed to be installed already.

1. get the installer from here
2. make downloaded file HCSS-INSTALLER.bin executable
3. run HCSS-INSTALLER.bin
4. I chose /usr/local/hcss (owned by me) as installation directory
5. choose iccdb.sron.rug.nl as database server