[Ifeffit] problems in the current version of Artemis for Windows
Bruce Ravel
bravel at anl.gov
Wed Aug 1 09:36:36 CDT 2007
Hi,
I rolled out a new version of Artemis in time for last week's XAFS
Summer School at the APS. Unsurprisingly, a few bugs cropped up
during the course of the week. Three of them are serious enough that I
wanted to offer some advice on how to work around them until I manage
to fix them. All three of these problems affect Windows users and
appear not to affect Mac or linux users.
1. The most serious bug is a scenario where Artemis simply hangs when
you start it. The symptom is that the console window appears,
followed by the splash screen. Then Artemis' main windows fails to
appear. The bug involves how I attempt to clean up when Artemis
finds evidence of a large number of abandoned projects.
In normal operation, Artemis uses disk space in a special folder to
organize the data, feff, and other files associated with a
project. When you exit Artemis normally, that folder is zipped up
into a project file and removed from disk. When Artemis exits
abnormally, the folder can be left in place. When Artemis notices
four such apparently abandoned folders, it posts a dialog box
offering to clean up the mess before continuing.
In the current version, there is bug in the place where Artemis
checks for abandoned projects, resulting in the behavior described
above. For now, the work-around is to close the Artemis console
window then, using your file manager, look at this folder:
C:\Program Files\Ifeffit\horae\stash\
In that folder you should find several folders with names like
artemis.project.0
artemis.project.1
and so on. Toss each of those folders into the recycling bin and
try starting Artemis. It should work now.
2. A problem with similar symptoms might happen on Vista. If you do
not have sufficient privilege to write files to
C:\Program Files\Ifeffit\
then Artemis' splashscreen will appear then disappear without
Artemis' main window appearing. For the Vista user, the solution
to this problem is either to run Artemis with higher privilege
(which may be frowned upon by the people who administer your
computer) or to reinstall Ifeffit into a location where you have
write privilege.
3. Many people have noticed that, after using the "Write special
output" item in the Theory menu (which can be used to save an
atoms.inp file, a feff.inp file, or other kinds of files), you are
unable to save the file by clicking the "Save" button. The work
around is to select the entire contents of the palette using the
mouse or Control-a and then to cut-and-paste the contents into
Notepad or Wordpad.
I am hard at work on these and many other problems (see
http://cars9.uchicago.edu/iffwiki/HoraeToDoList) and am hoping to make
an update of the windows package and a new release of the tarball next
week. Until then, hopefully this message will help you work around
the most serious problems in the current version of Artemis.
Regards,
B
--
Bruce Ravel ---------------------------------------------- bravel at anl.gov
Molecular Environmental Science Group, Building 203, Room E-165
MRCAT, Sector 10, Advanced Photon Source, Building 433, Room B007
Argonne National Laboratory phone and voice mail: (1) 630 252 5033
Argonne IL 60439, USA fax: (1) 630 252 9793
My homepage: http://cars9.uchicago.edu/~ravel
EXAFS software: http://cars9.uchicago.edu/~ravel/software/
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