[Ifeffit] introducing Hephaestus ...

[Bruce Ravel]

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.html

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 at 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/