You might’ve noticed a bit of a lag in the updates on this site. For the last weeks, I have been running around teaching (and presenting) at “SAXS Excites” with Glen in Graz and at the University of Birmingham. At these events, I’ve had the chance to demonstrate the LiveFT, SasModelsExplorer and McSAS3GUI software packages. These are useful for teaching and SAXS analysis, but currently require installation via python and are, therefore, not as accessible to the community as they need to be.
I’ve been planning to make a blog post as soon as I could build a binary as a Github action for the three most popular operating systems (Linux, OSX, and Windows). That was a few weeks ago, and I’ve been struggling ever since to get the binaries built. During the Birmingham course, the prototype Windows binary seemed to work on a few systems. The Linux version has not had a successful install yet (to my knowledge), and the Mac OS X version is stuck with me trying to figure out how to get the code signing and notarisation to work so it will not be blocked by the OS.
It is not often (enough) that I talk about failures on this blog, but here’s one that I keep struggling with. This topic is just too far out of my wheelhouse for me to be any good at it, and the LLMs aren’t able to make up for the lack of expertise either. Besides not being available to the public, these things are also blocking their publications.
I don’t know what to do, so if any of you have some experience in this area, help would be very much appreciated!