So it appears that paperwork has finally engulfed me, and I need to take care of it. There are a couple of projects going on that I cannot talk about yet, yet take an enormous amount of my available time. Hence I will take the easy way out for today, and highlight some of the cool posts of the first half of 2016.
Popular posts
By far the most popular post of the first six months is one of the first: “Setting up a Python development environment on Mac OS X“. This post so far gathered over 1000 views, very likely due to the generic nature of the topic. It is still a good reference for myself as well, but on simpler installations (for example on colleagues’ computers), I now stick with installing Anaconda Python. That already contains almost everything to run McSAS (except for PySide, which is easy to install from their packages).
The second popular post is the post on the Round Robin intermediate results. Unfortunately, the Round Robin write-up has had some delays over the last two months, but we are working hard on getting that paper ready for submission. As promised, it will be published open access, together with the sanitized, anonymized data.
“Measuring liquids in absolute units” comes in on third place, expanding briefly on the procedure we use to do measurements in our instrument.
Personal favourites:
Among my own personal favourites are (in no particular order):
The database description. We are working now for a while with the database, and so far it goes quite well. We’re thinking of expanding the applicability to a include more of our instruments, but that may need some careful thought and planning, and possibly a modification or two.
Scattering from arbitrary objects. We didn’t work on this since the write-up, but it is an interesting and potentially useful adaptation of existing software. With some slight modifications, we were able to calculate the scattering patterns of objects based on their .stl files, allowing the construction of these objects in any 3D program you like!
The SAXSess transmission factor fix. This has been an interesting collaborative project to fix something that should have been noticed much earlier. So far, the fix appears to work very reliably.
The Bonse Hart progress reports. While progress is quite a bit slower than I promised, it steadily continues, and new parts came back from the workshop last week. A final set will be handed over to them next week, and once they have been manufactured, we should have enough to start integrating it in the beamlines!
Do you have a favourite post? Please leave a comment below!
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