Some notes on Computing for new (and not so new) PhD students

Your computer account should be set up ready for you on arrival - your supervisor should have details.   (If s/he doesn't, it's because they didn't complete and submit a simple form;  beat them about the head until they do.)  For historical reasons, the computer system available for day-to-day use by astronomers at UCL is habitually called "Starlink", although formally that's now an anachronism. The computers almost all run the unix-like operating system "linux".   This differs from (= "is better than") Microsoft Windows in many ways, but you'll soon get up to speed.

Once logged in, typing 'resources' (without the quotes, and in lower case) will give some guidance on things like printers, disk space, etc., but for beginnners a good rule of thumb is to ask your office-mates for things like "where is the nearest printer?", "how do i turn this on?", etc. It will be your turn to answer such questions next year!

Hardware faults should be reported (immediately) to the system manager, John Deacon (jrd @ star.ucl.ac.uk).

1. Things you really should know:

   Every astronomer should know about, and routinely use, the following "must-have" on-line resources:

   ADS - find and read just about any paper ever published

   Simbad - find out basic data on, and published studies of, just about any object in the sky

   'astro-ph' (and UK mirror) - preprint server for submitted papers.

   The group's Wiki

   Our own web pages, of course

   
   

   Astronomy Picture of the Day – okay, not really must-have, but a nice resource, mirrored locally.

2. Email

   The recommended Starlink mail utility is called 'pine'. Just type that in (note that linux/unix is case sensitive, so it has to be "pine", not "Pine" or "PINE") – most commands are pretty self-evident, and there's built-in help.
   

3. What's X's email address?

   Without resorting to printed directories, there are two quick routes. For a local (UCL) astronomer, you can "finger" them (no, that's not what i mean!). For example, to find John Deacon's email address, just type "finger deacon" (without the quotes). You can also get internal phone numbers in a similar manner – e.g., "phone deacon" (or "phone "jrd"). Of course, you can also check out the listing of Group A members.
   

4. How do I...?

   If you're new to linux/unix, there are lots of "how-to" resources on the web. You can always google, of course, or a useful starting point is Linux.org.uk.

Redirecting UCL email:

In addition to your Starlink account, you will automatically be assigned a computer account and email address on the central UCL system. The chances are you will rarely, if ever, log in to that account, but "Official" (and therefore potentially important) emails from UCL are liable to go there. You should therefore take steps to ensure that email is forwarded from your UCL account to your Starlink account; you do this simply by putting a file called ".forward" (without the quotes, but with the leading ".") in your UCL home directory, containing nothing but your Starlink email address (terminated with a carriage return). Don't forget to test it out by sending yourself an email to your UCL account.