[Ifeffit] Using this mailing list effectively

Sun Jan 6 20:08:53 CST 2013

Dear Zhaomo,

Although it was very classy of you to point out to Bruce your gender in such a delicate way, a more appropriate response would've been to start calling him Ms. Ravel.

Anatoly

________________________________
From: ifeffit-bounces at millenia.cars.aps.anl.gov [ifeffit-bounces at millenia.cars.aps.anl.gov] on behalf of Zhaomo Tian [zhaomo1989 at postech.ac.kr]
Sent: Sunday, January 06, 2013 8:54 PM
To: ifeffit at millenia.cars.aps.anl.gov
Subject: [Ifeffit] Using this mailing list effectively

Dear Bruce,
The reply you gave me was much more useful than knowledge and I benefit a lot.
And I also understand it is because you do concern me so that you pointed out my mistakes, and only through this I can improve rather than going wrong way continuously.
Thanks a lot and I will improve my skills for question asking and try to make favorable questions.

Ps. I am always curious why people think me as Mr.by just seeing my name, actually I am Ms., but just call me Zhaomo is ok.

------------ Original Message ------------
>From : ifeffit-request at millenia.cars.aps.anl.gov
To : ifeffit at millenia.cars.aps.anl.gov
Mail Subject : Ifeffit Digest, Vol 119, Issue 10
Sent : Sun, 06 Jan 2013 12:00:02 -0600

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Today's Topics:

1. Re: Problem downloading windows installer for Demeter
(Ravel, Bruce)
2. Using this mailing list effectively (Ravel, Bruce)
3. Deglitching in Athena 0.9.14 (Lyle Gordon)

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Sun, 6 Jan 2013 15:44:00 +0000
From: "Ravel, Bruce"
To: Javier Alonso , XAFS Analysis using Ifeffit

Subject: Re: [Ifeffit] Problem downloading windows installer for
Demeter
Message-ID:
<47CED3CD722C2A439C0D1D1056B213251AEACAD3 at EX10-MB1.BNL.GOV>
Content-Type: text/plain; Zharset="iso-8859-1"

Javier,

Thanks for reporting this problem. This is related to a recent change in how GitHub handles large binary files. I thought I had fashioned a solution. Turns out that I was mistaken.

I have come up with a different solution for distributing the Installer and Updater files and I've updated the links at http://bruceravel.github.com/demeter/

Please go back and try again. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Also, please use the Ifeffit mailing list (http://millenia.cars.aps.anl.gov/mailman/listinfo/ifeffit) for this sort of thing rather than emailing me directly.

Cheers,
B

________________________________________
From: Javier Alonso [jalonsomasa at gmail.com]
Sent: Sunday, January 06, 2013 7:59 AM
To: Ravel, Bruce
Subject: Problem downloading windows installer for Demeter

Dear Dr. Ravel,

Firts, I'd like to personally thank you for Demeter: it really helps me a lot with my XAS data analysis. And now the problem:

I'm trying to download the windows installer for Demeter from the webpage:

http://bruceravel.github.com/demeter/

but I keep receiving the same error message again and again:

Error: blob is too big

I think this is something related to Github and the limit of file sizes, but I haven't been able to find an alternative downloading site or similar.

Thanks in advance,

Javier Alonso

--
Javier Alonso Masa
Departamento de Electricidad y Electr?nica
Facultad de Ciencia y Tecnolog?a.
Universidad del Pa?s Vasco
48940 Leioa(Spain)

http://www.gmmmt.net/

Phone: +34 94 601 5400 / +34 695325749

------------------------------

Message: 2
Date: Sun, 6 Jan 2013 16:47:13 +0000
From: "Ravel, Bruce"
To: XAFS Analysis using Ifeffit
Subject: [Ifeffit] Using this mailing list effectively
Message-ID:
<47CED3CD722C2A439C0D1D1056B213251AEACB06 at EX10-MB1.BNL.GOV>
Content-Type: text/plain; Zharset="us-ascii"

> I think you are really right, I am in too great a hurry that I lost my patience to set a time to learn basics quietly. Thanks for reminding.
> And for my second question, could you give me some suggestion too?

Mr. Tian,

Asking questions is an art. Anyone can barf out sentences that end with a question mark, but asking questions that will prompt a useful and constructive discussion is a subtle and skillful business. Both Chris and I tried to tell you that in our earlier responses, but apparently there is a need to be more explicit.

You are doing some things wrongly. I say this not to be mean and not to diminish you, but because I spend a lot of my professional time teaching people how to do XAS. It is important to me that people practice our craft well. This mailing list is a powerful tool to that end. When it is used well, the people who solicit help from this list profit significantly. When it used poorly, the people who volunteer their time answering questions become frustrated and the person asking the questions goes away with nothing.

So ... here are three comments:

(1) I am frustrated that you are not using the most recent version of my software. You are using a version of Artemis that is about 4 years old. I have no intention of continuing support for the older versions of my software.

(2) Your second question refers to 4 sets of data, which you posted to the mailing list not in an Athena project file, but in an Artemis project file. That's odd. It would be much easier to examine the data in the form of an Athena project file. Many of the issues in your recent line of questioning referred to S02. As Scott pointed out, the evaluation of S02 is related to the determination of the normalization and background. If you want people to help you with your actual question, it would be prudent to provide the data in a form that allows examination of all steps of the data processing. My point here is that you simply must think about how you pose your question -- that includes thinking hard about how to present your data to the person whose help you are soliciting.

(3) Your first email on the topic of these Cu films was somewhat misleading in that your initial complaint seemed to be about a strange measure of coordination number on a Cu foil. In that email, you gave a hint as to the actual form of the data, but scant information about how the data were measured and none about how the data were processed and analyzed. After prompts from Scott and other, you have provided a bit more information about your actual measurement, but not enough to actually know what's going on. As long as your line of questioning remains vague as to the details of the problem, the best you can expect are vague answers of the sort that you have already received.

Since I am suggesting that you be more thoughtful and explicit in how you communicate here on the list, it is important that I do the same. Here is an example of what I consider to be a well-asked question. My example comes from a posting that I myself made to the WxPerl mailing list last year. WxPerl is the programming tool I use to make the GUIs Athena, Artemis, and Hephaestus. At the time, I was having a problem getting menus to post properly when making right-mouse clicks in various places in Athena. While the question is rather technical and I don't expect a non-programmer to follow all the details, it is still instructive:

http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.wxperl.users/2011/03/msg7929.html

Note first that in five brief lines of text I summarized my problem. I then gave a complete example of how someone else could reproduce my problem on their own computer. I then explained both what I expected to happen and what actually happened.

The point here is that I took the time to condense my question into a form that the people at the other end could understand and address with a minimum of effort. Sure enough, I got useful responses from 2 knowledgeable (and, no doubt, very busy) people.

Mr. Tian, to the extent that it seems like I am singling you out for special criticism, I sincerely apologize. But you have been posting to this mailing list rather often of late and you are doing so in a way that is probably not getting you the sort of results you would like to see. I understand that this is an English language mailing list and that it is difficult to be as expressive in another tongue as you can be in your own. (I really do understand that -- I have suffered through learning two other languages in my life. It really is hard.) But you have to try if you want to get useful results.

B

------------------------------

Message: 3
Date: Sun, 6 Jan 2013 11:08:41 -0600
From: Lyle Gordon
To: ifeffit
Subject: [Ifeffit] Deglitching in Athena 0.9.14
Message-ID:

Content-Type: text/plain; Zharset=ISO-8859-1

Dear Bruce and Ifeffit users,

I just installed the latest version of Demeter, 0.9.14, on my Windows
7 computer. I tried to deglitch a dataset in x(E). Upon clicking
"choose a point" the window pops up telling me to double click in the
gnuplot window. I can select a point but there doesn't appear to be
any feedback in the UI about which point was selected until after
clicking ok. Then after ok I get a large "E". It is difficult to tell
sometimes exactly which point was selected as the E is quite large.

I guess this is turning into more a "bug" report/feature request, but
I felt the previous interface in Athena 0.8.054 gave much more
feedback during the deglitching process of removing points.

I was wondering if there was a setting that could change back to the
old style or if this was a decision based on the limitation of
gnuplot/perl. I hope this submission is alright for the mailing list.
In the future I could post these "issues" on github.

Thanks very much,
Lyle

------------------------------

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