Hi folks, In his workshop he has handmaidens he has forged out of gold who can move and who help him in his work. ... With Athena, he [is] important in the life of the city. The two [are] the patrons of handicrafts, the arts which along with agriculture are the support of civilization. "Mythology", Edith Hamilton The big new feature in the latest release is a new program called Hephaestus -- in keeping with the Greek mythology theme. Hephaestus combines the functions of the old Atoms Periodic Table with a bunch of other small utilities based on the priodic table and on tabels of x-ray absorption coefficients. Hephaestus supercedes both the Atoms Periodic Table and the TkFormula programs, both of which are being retired. You should find that Hephaestus is a very handy tool both at home and at the beamline. Along with displaying edge and line energies, and computing absorption lengths of elements and compounds, Hephaestus offers tools for computing the absorption of ion chambers, displaying the anomalous scattering factors of the elements, and displaying chemical data about the elements. Here is a web page with descriptions and a few screenshots: http://leonardo.phys.washington.edu/~ravel/software/exafs/abouthephaestus.ht... The Windows updater does not install shortcuts to the desktop or to the Start menu, so Windows users might want to do so by hand. The updater will put the hephaestus.exe and .bat files in the normal Ifeffit place and you will find the hephaestus.ico icon file there as well. It should be a simple matter to modify the desktop and Start menu shortcuts for the Atoms Periodic Table to launch hephaestus instead. If you do not know how this is done, post a question to the mailing list and hopefully someone will explain. For the unix users, there is an icon file for use on the desktop in the Ifeffit/lib/hephaestus directory when you unpack the source code tarball. The file vulcan.gif is the intended icon file. I hope that you will find Hephaestus useful and I look forward to hearing people's suggestions for improving it. B -- Bruce Ravel ----------------------------------- ravel@phys.washington.edu Code 6134, Building 3, Room 405 Naval Research Laboratory phone: (1) 202 767 2268 Washington DC 20375, USA fax: (1) 202 767 4642 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/