[Ifeffit] Demeter-devel MacPorts Athena issues & work-around

Bruce Ravel bravel at bnl.gov
Fri Jul 4 07:41:50 CDT 2014


On 07/03/2014 06:54 PM, Margaret Hinkle wrote:
> Issue 1. With the new demeter-devel Macports download, Athena freezes
> upon opening. Opening up Athena via Terminal brought up perl5.16 -- I
> could see the GUI, the Tip of the Day, and the Athena startup box, but
> the system just froze. I had to force quit every time, getting the
> following notice in my Terminal: 'Terminated: 15'. I had a feeling it
> was an issue with the Tip of the Day popping up, so I edited the
> Athena.pm file (in the UI folder), and edited line 197 from
> ‘$app->show_tip ifDemeter->co->default('athena', 'tips');’ TO
>   ‘$app->show_tip ifDemeter->co->default('athena', 'tip');’
> (honestly, I don't know enough about this code to be able to give it a
> real option that would turn off the Tip of the Day as the default, so I
> just hoped this would make the program give me general error in the GUI
> but that Athena could still load). Luckily, my not-fix fix worked. I get
> an error every time I open it, but after clicking 'OK', Athena behaves
> just like normal. I hope you can use this information to provide a real
> fix to the problem!

It *is* surprising that removing random characters from the source code 
didn't fix the problem!

There is another way that you might have asked this question, something 
like, "I am having this problem with Athena and I am suspicious that the 
tips-of-the-day dialog is to blame.  Is there a way to disable it before 
starting Athena?"

Look for the '[athena]' section of demeter.ini, which should be in 
'$HOME/.horae'.  Set the "tips" parameter to "false".  That will 
suppress the tips dialog.


> Issue 2. I can only load data files into Athena if there are no headers
> of any sort -- commenting out each header line with a # or % does not
> work. When I try to load in a .dat file with a commented-out header, I
> get the following error message in Terminal:
> 'At line 436 of file iff_show.f
> Fortran runtime error: End of record'
> followed by Athena quitting itself.
> This is an issue with both the regular Macports demeter download and the
> demeter-devel download. These data files loaded in just fine to the old
> iXAFS version of Athena, and on a PC. Is there a plugin I should be
> using in the Demeter versions? If I delete the header, or load it in
> from a .prj file, everything works just fine. So it is not huge issue,
> as I do have a work around.

It is not reasonable to expect anyone on the list to understand your 
problem if you do not provide an example.  Without being able to 
reproduce a problem on my own computer, I can only speculate.

Perhaps it has something to do with very long lines in the data file... 
perhaps something having to do with non-ASCII characters...

B

-- 
  Bruce Ravel  ------------------------------------ bravel at bnl.gov

  National Institute of Standards and Technology
  Synchrotron Science Group at NSLS --- Beamlines U7A, X24A, X23A2
  Building 535A
  Upton NY, 11973

  Homepage:    http://xafs.org/BruceRavel
  Software:    https://github.com/bruceravel



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