[Ifeffit] athena 2002.08.14

[Bruce Ravel]

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 at 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/