Hi, I put a new tarball and Windows build for Athena on my website this afternoon. There are only a few changes since last week, but they are interesting enough to merit a new release. 1. I fixed a problem in the display of the group list. When deleting groups, slightly more vertical space was removed than had been allocated when the group was listed. This lead to a misalignment that was particularly apparent when deleting many groups. 2. I now do the thing where the cursor changes to a stop watch (an hourglass on Windows) whenever Athena is doing anything time consuming. That keeps you from clicking buttons as a bad time and also gives you a visual cue when lengthy procedures finish. 3. I put in more careful checks of memory usage. I had a bug report that was traced back to a large quantity of data overflowing Ifeffit's static memory space. I now check memory usage more frequently and issue a warning message when the amount of memory is running short. The scheme is not foolproof. It is still possible to overflow the memory before triggering a warning, but Athena should catch many situations in which this might happen. 4. It is now possible to create a "background group". That is a data group which is listed in the groups list and which contains as its data the background function computed from another data group. This is useful for at least three things, including directly comparing different background functions, comparing a background function to a background computed by FEFF and read from the 5th column of xmu.dat, and investigating low-R phenomena such as multi-electron effects or the so-called atomic xafs. 5. Project files now identify the version of perl, the version of ifeffit, and the operating system of the computer along with the version of Athena used to create the file. This is information I need when I am sent a project file as part of a bug report. There is no problem with backwards compatibility -- project files without this information will be read without problem. And project files continue to be transferable between platforms. The tarball and the Windows exe are in the standard places. Special thanks to Raul Barrea for a very useful bug report which lead to most of this week's new features. Regards, B -- Bruce Ravel ----------------------------------- ravel@phys.washington.edu Code 6134, Building 3, Room 222 Naval Research Laboratory phone: (1) 202 767 5947 Washington DC 20375, USA fax: (1) 202 767 1697 NRL Synchrotron Radiation Consortium (NRL-SRC) Beamlines X11a, X11b, X23b, X24c, U4b National Synchrotron Light Source Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, NY 11973 My homepage: http://feff.phys.washington.edu/~ravel EXAFS software: http://feff.phys.washington.edu/~ravel/software/exafs/