MOSAIC data reduction

MOSAIC reduction is very difficult.
http://www.noao.edu/noao/noaodeep/ReductionOpt/frames.html has the official instructions.

Important things:
Have the latest version of MSCRED and MSCDB installed. Both will give cryptic errors or "cannot open file" errors (because the files don't exist) otherwise.



mscred
setinstrument kpno CCDMosaThin1
msccmatch obj09*.fits coords="!mscgetcat $I $C" search=60 rsearch=1 nfit=30 accept=yes interactive=no fit=no


Site visits, comps

Amusing - visits to my site increased steadily leading up to Jan 9, then crashed precipitously.

LaTeX: replace double quotes with tex quotes

People often make the mistake of putting " in place of `` in LaTeX documents. To repair this, the only easy solution is something like:
s/\(\s\)"/\1``/g
in VIM or sed.

I've seen alternate solutions posted but they're all too complicated. One recommendation was to switch to XeTeX, which sounds like overkill, and others all stated that a complicated perl script is required. The latter is technically true, but why isn't such a thing readily available?

Any other ideas?

Skim: a PDF reader that allows annotations

from Sam: http://skim-app.sourceforge.net/

neat

skill set

is it a marketable skill that I can bring down almost any computer system I'm given access too entirely unintentionally?

post rate

my post rate is too low I need to up it so that my front page doesn't show the same posts any more

scary

I think this is my worst nightmare:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap081203.html

LA. Not the smiley.