From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Sun, 13 Apr 2008 23:16:17 +0000 From: Glenn Becker To: DIST - Plan 9 From Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed Subject: [9fans] scat, ngc2000 and other matters Topicbox-Message-UUID: 8cedad42-ead3-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 Greetings all - Today I revisited Plan 9 after a long break (changed jobs, moved, etc) and made some real progress. I'd been contemplating writing in about how slow I found the system and my seeming inability to get networked, but I decided instead to research the mailing list archives and got some of my answers ... ... but. I confess that one of the things that drew me to Plan 9 was the obvious inclusion, in the screenshot on the web page, of an astronomy program. My thought must have been something along the lines of "an OS that includes an astronomy program by default is an OS I want to know more about." Therefore one of the first things I did when I managd to get the system installed was fire up scat. I found it an interesting program (its name is another matter ...) but ran into problems attempting to follow some of the examples in the man page for the program. In short, a key database of astro-objects, the NGC catalogue, appeared to be MIA. Sample output: ngc1300 scat: NGC database not available (if I followed this with a command to look at another object with an NGC number, the program would "suicide"). Today, since I got things to run at acceptable speeds, I decided to look into this further. If I'm not mistaken, the problem is that the file /lib/sky/ncg2000.scat has nothing in it, e.g. is of zero size. Is there somewhere I can get a file that actually has data in it? Were there licensing problems? Would love to know more about this. Thanks, Glenn +-----------------------------------------------------+ Glenn Becker - burningc@sdf.lonestar.org SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org +-----------------------------------------------------+