Hi folks, On occassion, the topic comes up of contributions to the ifeffit universe from other people besides Matt, Sam, and myself. Indeed, there have been some excellent examples centered around this mailing list. For example, a few months ago, we had a really useful discussion, including code examples, about rebinning data. As a somewhat smaller example, two fine souls responded to my request for some example data from NSLS X10C. Last week, Scott asked this: Oh, and I've been thinking. [Matt and Bruce] spend enormous amounts of time on this software, and it's a big contribution to the field. As I explained above, I'm not willing to help on the coding end, but I'd like to support the project in some way. I know Bruce has mentioned the need for more/better Athena and Artemis documentation...I was hesitant to suggest I help with that until I got more familiar with the software, but I think I'm now getting to that point. So Bruce--what is the most pressing need in that area? I'll see if I can start devoting some time to it... I thought I would answer Scott's question in public. Who knows, maybe I'll start something ;-) I will divide this up into a few categories. If you dig into any of these, we should probably communicate so that you produce something in a format that will be useful to us developers. Pure documentation ================== 1. Edit and expand upon the documentation that exists for Athena. The Athena doc is actually in pretty good shape. Most parts of the code are at least mentioned in the doc. If you are not familiar with the POD markup that is used in Athena's docs, don't worry. If you do some significant editing, I'll be happy to touch up the mark-up. 2. The Artemis document needs serious work. Pick a topic that interests you (or one of the unwritten topics in the current document) and start writing. You don't have to write in Latex. If you write in Word or some other format, all I'd ask is that you not format what you write too heavily and that you provide me with external copies of all images in appropriate formats. 3. Write a FAQ (frequently asked/answered/anticipated questions). Documentation by example ======================== One of the neat (IMHO, anyway) ways that I have documented Athena is the collection of demo projects, which are just normal Athena projects with extensive commentary in the Journal area. 1. Make more Athena projects. Improve upon the ones that are already there. 2. Make some nice Artemis projects. Even better, make a sequence of Artemis projects which demonstrate the steps one might take in building a sophisticated fitting model. Programming and related chores ============================== If you are inclined to deal with code, but don't necessarily want to dive into Athena or Artemis, here are some smaller projects. 1. Write an object-oriented module in Perl for accessing Spec data files. I could then use this in Athena. 2. Volunteer to maintain and build the Windows distribution and updates. 3. Collect examples of data from every dedicated XAFS beamline in the world. (Really, I mean it, every one.) Figure out which ones can be read by Ifeffit and which cannot. Figure out how to preprocess the ones that aren't read properly by Ifeffit and explain to us how to recognize them and how to preprocess them. 4. Think up a battery of tests. Subject Athena and Artemis to those tests soon after (or even prior to) every release. Let me know about any problems. Web-based projects ================== 1. Set up a web site for a FAQ which allows searching the FAQ for keywords. 2. Set up a web page which indexes the Ifeffit mailing list archives and allows searching by keywords. 3. Set up and administer a Wiki so everyone can participate in the process of documenting Ifeffit, SixPack, Athena, and Artemis. 4. Set up and administer a community discussion board. My inclination would be to use Slash (http://slashcode.com), which has a comination of features that I think could provide a valuable service to the XAFS community. 5. Collect and organize new material for the databases that Matt maintains which contain atoms input files and standards spectra. Well, that ought to be enough suggestions to get anyone started. 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 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/