October 17th: Cure for mcplot problems?
Today, a possible cure for problems with mcplot on recent versions of
the support software (perl/PDL/pgplot...) was probably found. The
changes made are explained in this email to neutron-mc@risoe.dk. Modified
versions of mcplotlib.pl are available for mcstas-1.5 and mcstas-1.6.1-ill.
October 10th: McStas developers participate in SCANS meeting.
On October 4th, Peter Willendrup and Emmanuel Farhi gave a talk on
McStas at a meeting in the SCANS
network. The slides are available in
html and pdf format.
September 30th: McStas Survey Results Page
Results of the users survey have now been summarized in a web page.
September 23rd: McStas Survey 2002 ended
The McStas users survey has ended. Results will be published here and
on the mailing list within a few days.
September 2nd, 2002: McStas Survey 2002
To make sure that the McStas project is re-launched with success, we
have decided to do a little survey among the McStas users, to ensure
that the opinions within the community are reflected in the oncoming
versions of the software.
For example, many users have indicated that the current setup of the
McStas tools (e.g. mcrun, mcplot, etc.) is becoming very complicated
to install on some platforms. This will be dealt with in the next
release, on basis of the result of this survey.
Also, we would very much like to know what versions of McStas that the
user base is using and on which platforms the software runs.
The survey should only take a few minutes to complete, and is
available at
http://fys-lin-1.risoe.dk/mcstas-survey.
You can sign your qustionaire or leave it anonymous,
as preferred.
We hope that you will find the few minutes needed to complete the survey,
and thus help us in making McStas a better software.
Note: The submission deadline of the survey will be
Friday September 21st 2002.
Best Regards
Peter Willendrup
Kim Lefmann
Emmanuel Farhi
September 2nd, 2002: Status page
A development status page has been set up,
indicating work in progress relating to the release of McStas version 1.6.
Release date? - Well, once all the yellow indicators on the status page
are green, McStas 1.6 is ready. :)
August 26th, 2002: Meeting activites at ILL
The McStas responsible Peter
Willendrup is currently visiting Emmanuel Farhi at the ILL.
The meeting
is taking place to estabilsh future collaboration, to converge the
different available versions of McStas and to determine contents and
approximate release date for the next release.
Information on the results of the meeting will be published on this
web page, as well as to the mailing list.
July 31th, 2002: Mailing list restored
The neutron-mc mailing list has been restored. Go to Mailinglist for further information. It is likely that the first announcements will appear on august 1st.
July 19th, 2002: Refurbished website now running
The website for McStas has been given a needed overhaul, and has been put online. The mailing list is not working yet, but is expected to work within at most two weeks. Broken links and other irregularities can be expected. Comments and bugreports are welcome, send them to mcstas@risoe.dk.
The old website is still available, through http://neutron.risoe.dk/mcstas.old.
July 1st, 2002: New McStas system responsible
The new McStas system responsible is Peter Willendrup. Big efforts are beeing made to restore the McStas server machine, and to get updated versions of website and mailinglist running.
April 15, 2002: McStas server
Due to hardware problem, the McStas server has been down for a while. The
web-pages are moved to a central Risø web-server. Some facilities
using perl-scripts may not work initially. We will also find a solution
for the email list, which currently is not working.
January 17, 2002: McStas administration
Per-Olof Åstrand is leaving as McStas administrator. Until June 1,
Per-Olof will be at Risø one day per week to assist with the administration
of McStas.
January 17, 2002: McStas 1.5 information
Sources: In McStas 1.4, illumination was not treated correctly in
the standard source components. Updated versions were included in 1.5,
but they contained unfortunately a stupid error. Corrected versions (compared
to the 1.5 release) of Source_flat, Source_flat_lambda, and
Source_flux_lambda
are available on the web. There are still problems with Source_Maxwell
and
Source_adapt.
The first McStas-1.5.tar.gz that was put on the web was unfortunately
useless. Accidentally, this overlapped with router problems at Risø
and the Risø web was unaccessible for the users. Thanks to Garrett
Granroth, who apparantly was the first user who downloaded it, it could
be replaced October 15 without any noticeable inconvenience for the user
community.
Internal changes in version 1.5 of the McStas kernel have caused problems
in some components. In particular, mccompcurname has been
used in some components. It was for example the problem with the unofficial
component Flux_adapter in the problem reported by Ulrich
Wildgruber. In addition, the official components Source_gen,
Gravity_guide,
Monitor_nD,
PreMonitor_nD, and Source_Optimizer
also
contain mccompcurname.
Previous news items: 2001, 2000, 1999,1998.