> (Stuff deleted)
> The problem goes beyond personal hostility to computers. We do not have a
> computing officer in this department, nor are we likely to get one in the
> forseeable future - so you can forget about Linux and UNIX, for they need
> regular attention by a system administrator. Our Computer Centre as a matter
> of
> policy, does not sort out departmental computers, except on a spare-time, do-
> you-a-favour-at-lunchtime-if-we-can arrangement.
>
> Macs are easy to look after and sort out when they get in a muddle. In fact
> muddle is the biggest problem. People let both their own computers and the
> public access ones get in a similar untidy state to their offices and
> workbenches. The result is even more need for a computing officer to sort out
>
> the mess. At lest with Macs those of us of the faith can help out baffled
> colleagues quickly in our spare time.
>
> We shall continue to use Macs here, for the very reason that so many
> allegedly
> professional computer people hate them - they're easy for the user to use. I
> shall continue to seek out NMR processing programs that run on the Mac
> because
> there's a good chance that the originators of such programs follow Apple's
> Human Interface Guidelines. (Some of you don't, and you should!) That makes
> for less stress and hostility, easier learning of the program by the novice
> and
> ready integration of material with other Mac programs, such as ChemDraw and
> Word.
>
> And if by any possiblity someone could come up with a Macintosh program to
> drive our DPX instead of WeirdNMR, I might be more than interested.
>
I would have fully agree with the above. We use an AM running ADAKOS/DISNMR,
a AMX running UXNMR and an AMX2 running XwinNMR. We do offline
processing on a Bruker Aspect 1000 data station, on a X-32, on SGI's
using NMRPipe, and on a Mac using SwaNMR. Little gets processed anymore
with UXNMR or XwinNMR.
Hopefully some of the problems with XwinNMR will get resolved with the
forthcoming 2.0 release. In addition to the scan counter and other
problems which we have recently discussed, here are some other problems
present in the 1.3 release which I would like to see addressed:
1. In the "as" routine it does not seem possible to display the pulse
program while one sets the parameters. This does work in DISNMR and UXNMR
the way it should, but in XwinNMR this does not seem possible...the
window with the pulse program goes away when one is about to start
entering parameters. Suspect a limitation with the X-windows interface
is the problem here.
2. In "eda" it is not possible to enter a SFO(1-4) value directly.
This worked fine in older XwinNMR releases however.
3. It does not seem to be possible to use the entire screen (or most
of it, as in UXNMR) to display the spectrum being processed. This is
not a real problem with 1D spectra but would be a nice feature with
2D spectra to avoid doing a lot of zooming which would not be necessary
if most of the screen area could be used to display the 2D matrix.
4. Being able to display the lock signal in the same window as the FID/
spectrum, as done in UXNMR, would be a nice touch. Again suspect a basic
X-windows limitation here. Also, when shimming using "gs"with both the lock
signal and FID displayed, the "flashing" of the lock signal is annoying.
Of course, the problems with using UNIX to control a real time process
(such as a NMR data acquistion where 0.1 us timing is necessary) are
well known. Thus the need to use a rather convoluted control scheme
in which the actual acquisition processor is several layers away from
the UNIX box. Varian seems to have addressed this issue using a
Motorola 68040 based box to look after the actual data acquisition.
With the popularity of offline data processing, I can see the day when
the data acquisition and data processing functions are almost
completely separated, the actual data acquisition deing done by a
non-UNIX box under the direct control of the operator with perhaps
basic data processing capability, while the bulk of the data processing
is done offline.
Cheers, Deane D McIntyre
NMR Mananger
Bio-NMR facility
University of Calgary
dmcintyr@acs.ucalgary.ca
deane@deane.bio.ucalgary.ca