[Ifeffit] Two simple question about Athena

[Matt Newville]

Dear Wang,

> Another question I found is that, the Athena 1.2.10 downloaded from
> "http://cars9.uchicago.edu/~ifeffit/src/ifeffit-1.2.10.exe"

Thanks for trying out the pre-release, not-yet-supported version
1.2.10.  If you run into trouble, using the current version (1.2.9) is
perfectly reasonable.

Let me clarify this a little bit for the rest of the mailing list:
Version 1.2.10 does not contain new "core  analysis" features.  Athena
and Artemis do have several new features that are only available on
Windows with1.2.10, but I think they could be described as
non-critical, even if very useful.

For Windows, version 1.2.10 represents a fairly complete set of
compiler tools used to build Ifeffit, Athena, and Artemis, as the
tools  we had been using were too far out of date to continue using.

Because of this, we're not surprised to hear of some issues with
1.2.10 (we know of many already, and even how to fix some of them),
and are happy to hear reports about what does and does not work.

We will release an "official" 1.2.10 in a few weeks that will
(hopefully) fix many of the issues we've seen so far.    In the
meantime, if you decide to try out the new version and run into
problems with it, don't feel bad about going back to 1.2.9.

For the time being, we don't have source code or Mac versions of
1.2.10 available, as we're still seeing what troubles we run into on
Windows.  Again, we expect the changes to be bug fixes with minor
impact outside of Windows.

> can not open file like this:
>
> 10957.9      0.00489
>
> 10966.26    0.00481
>
> 10974.63    0.00469
>
> 10983.01    0.00458
>
> ……………………
>
> The left is energy, the right is mu(E)
>
>
>
> The preprocessing software often alert that "Could not read xxx (file does
> not exit)". Such case does not happen to version 1.2.9.

The 4 example lines above read in just fine for me. Post a real
example that fails.

I normally resist the temptation to guess, but in a moment of
weakness, I will let you know of a "known issue" that may be helpful:
non-ASCII characters and non-ASCII files (say, unicode) are definitely
not going to be read in correctly, and can easily cause errors in
reading data files.

> I guess that the new version could not work well on Windows XP. Does some one
> else meet such things?

We've had several people use the new version for Windows (on 2000, XP,
and Vista).  As above, we've seen some problems, but for the most
part, things work.  I think there is one problem specific to Windows
2000 (a missing gdiplus.dll, easily fixed).   Vista has an issue with
Athena/Artemis wanting to save "horae/stash" project data under
"C:\Program Files\Ifeffit" which Vista thinks is a security problem --
the work-around of installing to a folder with full user permissions
works fine (we should probably figure out how to fix this at install
time).    I don't know of any problems specific to XP.

Thanks again,

--Matt