Author: Michael G

A (scientific) software developer position that has just opened up in CEFCA for the development of Gnuastro for the data reduction pipeline of European Space Agency (ESA’s) newly approved ARRAKIHS mission (to be launched in 2030), as well as other data from our Astronomical Observatory of Javalambre (OAJ):

https://www.cefca.es/cefca_en/reference_0119

(For 2 years, deadline: January 15th 2024)

ARRAKIHS is expected to last until ~2035 and we will be applying for future grants to keep the core pipeline team until the end of the project.

The job will be based in Teruel/Spain, which is a beautiful city (recognized as a UNESCO World heritage for its “Mudejar” architecture). Teruel just 1.5 hours from Valencia by car and with a population of 35000 people, everything is nicely within reach and you will not waste hours every day in traffic or long commutes as in large cities! Our observatory (OAJ) is also just 1.5 hours away by car (we have one of the darkest skies with fewest cloudy nights in continental Europe)!

As the ARRAKIHS pipeline engineer, the successful applicant will also be visiting other ARRAKIHS consortium members: IFCA/Santander, ESAC/Madrid; UCM/Madrid, IAA/Granada, EPFL/Switzerland, Univ. Lund/Sweden, Univ. Innsbruck/Austria.

The job will involve major developments in Gnuastro for the missing features or things that can be improved for Low Surface Brightness optimized reduction pipelines and high-level science from it (Gnuastro’s MakeCatalog for example).

Once tested in the ARRAKIHS/OAJ pipelines, all those features will be brought into the core of Gnuastro for everyone to use in any pipeline! This is thus a major development in Gnuastro’s history!

Anyone with a B.Sc degree or higher can apply! So please share this email with anyone you think may be interested. People with a M.Sc or PhD are also welcome to apply; it is “scientific”/Research software engineer position after all; and we expect to publish many papers on the algorithms/tools that we develop.

If you can’t wait to get your hands dirty, and want to improve your profile for the application, there is a nice checklist in our Google Summer of Code guidelines to help you get started and fix a bug or two until the deadline to include in the application (you have almost two months from now):

https://savannah.gnu.org/support/?110827#comment0

Please don’t hesitate to ask any questions from the contact person in the main announcement above; we’d be happy to help clarify any doubts.

Earlier this month, Microsoft released new preview updates with changes to make its operating systems compliant with European Union regulations. Those changes include the ability to uninstall Edge, decouple the OS from Bing, turn on third-party news feeds in Widgets, and more. Sadly, only EU citizens can enjoy those changes without messing with their PCs’ software intestines. Other people must tweak Windows Registry to spoof their location, which can lead to unnecessary complications. Luckily, there is a much simpler method that does not require editing the registry or faking your location. As it turned out (via Deskmodder), Windows manages new region policies using a JSON file inside the system32 folder. Modifying that file allows force-enabling specific features in unsupported regions. What follows is a 19 step process involving taking ownership of protected system files, dowloading additional tools, editing the registry, a few reboots, and more. A very simple process. So anyway if you want to remove Firefox from Fedora or Ubuntu or whatever, just run sudo dnf remove firefox or sudo apt remove firefox respectively, because as we all know, Linux is very hard to use and just not ready for desktop use. Good for servers, though. The tech world is a clown show.