PixInsight 1.8.8-8 Released
- Thread starter Juan Conejero
- Start date
wow ok way to go man, attack a straw man instead of the issue. you're complaining that device control doesn't belong in PI and as such is a misprioritization, and i'm telling you it's not wasting juan's time and as such has nothing to do with PI "core" priorities. go read what's in the gitlab copyright notices before you go off.
Go off? Rather than offering to discuss my position on the matter, you've obnoxiously insinuated that I'm gate keeping, a term you don't seem to understand the meaning of. Give me a break.
_If_ separating the equipment control or other non-image processing components into a separate program will mean more frequent release on FreeBSD, then I would wholeheartedly support it. It's a well known software engineering lemma that adding complexity to a piece of software means more to test, more complexity to maintain. Given that FreeBSD releases are already a strain, I see that adding more features to the base program will likely worsen the problem. Ergo, separation of these components would mean that I, or other users whose main use of PixInsight is the image processing capabilities, wouldn't be affected.
_If_ separating the equipment control or other non-image processing components into a separate program will mean more frequent release on FreeBSD, then I would wholeheartedly support it. It's a well known software engineering lemma that adding complexity to a piece of software means more to test, more complexity to maintain. Given that FreeBSD releases are already a strain, I see that adding more features to the base program will likely worsen the problem. Ergo, separation of these components would mean that I, or other users whose main use of PixInsight is the image processing capabilities, wouldn't be affected.
the amount of prerelease debug/test message traffic related to the INDI stuff was absolutely minimal - maybe 2 messages out of 6 pages worth of stuff. only juan can say but i sincerely doubt that Klaus's stuff has anything to do with the lack of a FreeBSD release. i get what you are saying about software complexity but to be honest INDI is not a new feature in PI. it's been in there since at least 2015.
but that's my point. you assumed that the inclusion of stuff you don't like came at the expense of stuff you do like, and i'm saying you have misunderstood the situation. thus, unbeknownst to you, you're actually trying to gatekeep (or at least ask juan to gatekeep) what 3rd parties do with PI rather than asking juan to prioritize your stuff.
it's astonishing to me what these release threads turn into. lots of people work on PI, most of whom only for the fun of it. since you've been around a long time you'll know that lack of documentation has been a complaint for many years now. so juan solves that by hiring eduardo to work on this (and of course he also hired roberto to improve and maintain WBPP) and no one says "wow, thanks for addressing that" or "thanks for impoving WBPP so much." instead it's "oh i don't like the new features you put in, you're doing it wrong."
rob
On a separate topic about Pixinsight long term development, I was wondering if there were plans to get further involved in planetary / video processing. Obviously, there are various really good tools out there such as AS3 and Winjupos but for those that like the PI interface (such as I do), video processing would be also very cool.
Thanks
Thanks
The INDIClient module takes me nearly zero time and effort, compared to the amount of work required for a new release. Klaus is doing a fantastic work to integrate Indigo in PixInsight, and of course he has all of my support. Indigo is the future of astronomical instrumentation IMO, and having it tightly integrated in PixInsight can only be seen as extremely good news. I cannot understand why projects like the INDIClient module, which diversify us and intensify our applicability, are being seen as a threat. I would ask for more open-mindedness here.
As for FreeBSD, the problem is neither INDIClient nor the recent work done on our astrometry and ephemeris engines. The problem is lack of support from critical third-party components that are crucial for PixInsight, and very especially from Qt. I cannot afford investing the amount of time and work necessary to solve the innumerable issues of Qt ported to FreeBSD, which require a tremendous effort. We need QtWebEngine in PixInsight because it is at the core of many critical features and components. QtWebEngine is the Chromium browser, and Chromium is inviable on FreeBSD, especially in the way it has been integrated in Qt. There are much more issues with Qt on FreeBSD, especially with the latest LTS versions that we use and are now only available under commercial licenses, which means zero maintenance on FreeBSD repositories and, at least for now, no maintenance on KDE repositories either. I personally love FreeBSD because it is real UNIX and a really open-source operating system, but honestly, I cannot support it at present.
Yes, we do have plans to implement a suite of tools for planetary and lunar image processing in PixInsight. I am going to unveil a small 'secret' here. When Roberto Sartori and I were discussing about how to organize and coordinate his work as a PixInsight developer, back in 2020, we were considering several work lines. Once of them was the implementation of GPU acceleration in our code base. Another one was the design and implementation of new resources and tools for planetary image processing. GPU acceleration was the winner for obvious practical reasons.
Thank you so much for your appreciation of PixInsight's interface.
Unfortunately the new version on mac mini M1 does not work. Does it only happen to me?
Macmini 2020 - M1 16gb
Process: PixInsight [1216]
Path: /Applications/PixInsight/PixInsight.app/Contents/MacOS/PixInsight
Identifier: software.pleiades.PixInsight
Version: 1.8.8-8 (1.8.8-8)
Code Type: X86-64 (Translated)
Parent Process: ??? [1]
Responsible: PixInsight [1216]
User ID: 501
Date / Time: 2021-06-03 20: 44: 33.621 +0200
OS Version: macOS 11.2.3 (20D91)
Report Version: 12
Time Awake Since Boot: 420 seconds
System Integrity Protection: enabled
Crashed Thread: 0 CrBrowserMain Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread
Exception Type: EXC_BAD_INSTRUCTION (SIGABRT)
Exception Codes: 0x0000000000000001, 0x0000000000000000
Exception Note: EXC_CORPSE_NOTIFY
Application Specific Information:
/Applications/PixInsight/bin/libtensorflow_framework.2.dylib
abort () called
terminating with uncaught exception of type pcl :: EUnixIllegalInstructionException
I will reinstall the previous version which was fine
Macmini 2020 - M1 16gb
Process: PixInsight [1216]
Path: /Applications/PixInsight/PixInsight.app/Contents/MacOS/PixInsight
Identifier: software.pleiades.PixInsight
Version: 1.8.8-8 (1.8.8-8)
Code Type: X86-64 (Translated)
Parent Process: ??? [1]
Responsible: PixInsight [1216]
User ID: 501
Date / Time: 2021-06-03 20: 44: 33.621 +0200
OS Version: macOS 11.2.3 (20D91)
Report Version: 12
Time Awake Since Boot: 420 seconds
System Integrity Protection: enabled
Crashed Thread: 0 CrBrowserMain Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread
Exception Type: EXC_BAD_INSTRUCTION (SIGABRT)
Exception Codes: 0x0000000000000001, 0x0000000000000000
Exception Note: EXC_CORPSE_NOTIFY
Application Specific Information:
/Applications/PixInsight/bin/libtensorflow_framework.2.dylib
abort () called
terminating with uncaught exception of type pcl :: EUnixIllegalInstructionException
I will reinstall the previous version which was fine
FlapAstro (aka rakla)
Well-known member
I just noticed that the DrawSignature.js script is no longer part of the current version. Is that intentional or a problem with my installation?
/Ralf
/Ralf
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stargatecolorado
New member
Juan, I noticed that the 1.8.8-8 downloads are almost DOUBLE the size of the 1.8.8-7 downloads. Is there any specific part that caused the increase? I looked back at the previous releases and there was an expected gradual increase in size, then the huge increase in the latest release. It concerned me that something "nefarious" might have creeped into the build.
--Ernie
--Ernie
Understandable, but surely there are a lot of things that could be improved to make life easier for newcomers and with little to no impact for experienced users. A few of many examples I've hit - There may be good workarounds, but they were not intuitive to me
- I often find myself applying an effect to the wrong image. It could be a lot clearer which window is 'selected' for output.
- Undo/redo on a preview can be pretty frustrating
- WBPP doesn't remember the directories where I save my darks and bias files - It opens last used for any purpose.
- Zooming in on histogram transformation curves...
...
I respectfully disagree, I believe it is quite possible to define the goal of what you want and work towards it in a truly customer-centric way. I've seen it done to great effect in high-tech companies in audio signal analysis.
But in the end, it probably comes down to what you really want to do with PI and what ambitions you have for the software.
Attachments
Hi Ernie,
No nefarious things, just more reference data that our new astrometry and ephemeris engines require to support their increased accuracy.
No nefarious things, just more reference data that our new astrometry and ephemeris engines require to support their increased accuracy.
hi - read the last lines of the first post in this thread. the Rosetta emulator does not emulate the FMA/AVX2 instructions needed by tensorflow (which is needed by StarNet). so just delete the starnet module per the instructions above and it will work OK.
the -7 version has the same problem, you may have deleted starnet and forgotten about it?
rob
RBA
Well-known member
Hey Juan,
Since you finally decided to invest into the documentation some time and money (new hire just for the task), would you also consider investing some (more money than time, as I see it) into having translated versions of the documentation, once the English is finished? It seems to me that this task wouldn't take much of your time, mostly management (unless you feel like reviewing the Chinese translation, for example) and it would likely be a huge help to hundreds of PixInsight users. Any plans or is this also out of the scope of what you can handle or afford? Here's the suggestion in any case.
Cheers,
RBA
PS: Totally unexpected addition to PixelMath with all those popular Photoshop blending modes being predefined for the combine() generator. You ok? ;-)
Since you finally decided to invest into the documentation some time and money (new hire just for the task), would you also consider investing some (more money than time, as I see it) into having translated versions of the documentation, once the English is finished? It seems to me that this task wouldn't take much of your time, mostly management (unless you feel like reviewing the Chinese translation, for example) and it would likely be a huge help to hundreds of PixInsight users. Any plans or is this also out of the scope of what you can handle or afford? Here's the suggestion in any case.
Cheers,
RBA
PS: Totally unexpected addition to PixelMath with all those popular Photoshop blending modes being predefined for the combine() generator. You ok? ;-)
Enzo De Bernardini
PixInsight Ambassador
I like this paradigm 
I think we enjoying the crest of the wave when it comes to the development of specialized astronomical software. Thanks Juan!, and thanks to the entire PixInsight dev team for all you hard work! ?
I think we enjoying the crest of the wave when it comes to the development of specialized astronomical software. Thanks Juan!, and thanks to the entire PixInsight dev team for all you hard work! ?
Juan,
Chain Edoardo to his desk and don't let him out of your sight
Wow thank you!
you make me blush ??
I can only agree with btracy: Your description of the ImageCalibration process is an excellent tutorial on calibration in general. I'm sure some/many have been eagerly waiting for this (including me ;-).
By the way, many thanks also to the whole PI team, who are driving the development of PI!
Best regards - Thilo
Cited from my guide :
"PixInsight Reference Documentations are available for many but not all of the processes. They can be displayed either by clicking on the Browse Documentation icon (the sheet of paper icon at the bottom right of the process window) or by calling the Process Explorer and choosing the appropriate process from the select list.
In connection with Preprocessing, the following Reference Documentations exist, and should be consulted in case of ambiguity:
ImageIntegration*, ImageCalibration, Debayer*, SubframeSelector, StarAlignment*, ScreenTransferFunction, HistogramTransformation. The documentation for the starred processes is outdated and currently only available at https://pixinsight.com/doc/ ."
Bernd
The fastest way to access the documentation is pressing the Browse Documentation button.
Open the ImageCalibration Process and press the small "sheet" button at bottom right.
Look at the attached screenshot.
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