Where possible remove limitations

So, have been using Aimless for a little while now, which does not need recompiling for lots of batches. Using this with Reindex replaced with Pointless means you can now process data sets with many many images. By way of a test case: 70 180 degree sweeps @ 1 degree / frame from a small molecule crystal processed fine. This is most likely to be useful with Pilatus data. Would suggest -3da (and a local install of recent Pointless / Aimless versions) to do this kind of thing. Will be released shortly unless you want to get it from svn.

OS X Lion (ii)

OK, now the machine is working and crikey it works very well. First time I have had a laptop which is quicker at parallel processing than my 8-core Xeon workstation. Nice.

Unfortunately spotted some bugs in the xia2 implementation on there. Seems that they have changed the output on the program I used to guess the number of cpu's so they were not all being used. Now they will be.

Making OS X Lion work

Luckily just got my hands on a new and funky macbook pro with OS X Lion to help with user support. Here's how to turn it from a pretty paperweight into a computer (i.e. install compilers)

(1) install your updates to latest OS X
(2) get apple ID for app store
(3) install XCode from app store
(4) register as apple developer
(5) XCode -> preferences -> download (add command-line tools) -> install

Manual

One of the most common (and it has to be said, most reasonable) complaints I have heard about xia2 is the absence of the manual. I am now working on this, to be included in the next release of the program.

The first version will no doubt be rather rough, so I will welcome any feedback on it when it becomes available.

Testing in preparation for release

Finally gearing up for a release, got to run some extensive testing first.

Mosflm / Pilatus

The beta for mosflm 7.0.8 appears to work much better with Pilatus data than the released 7.0.7 version - if you're using data from a 2M or 6M, I would strongly recommend the upgrade.

CCP4 Study Weekend 2012

I'll be at the CCP4 study weekend in the new year to talk about xia2 - in the main session as well as the lunchtime bytes. If you've any ideas of things you'd like to know about in the lunchtime bytes please make a note below or drop me a line at the usual address...

See you there!