QDP is for everyone.

My sisters in work, Marykutty James and Jincy Devasia, who are X-ray astronomers, have been using QDP tool in the HEASOFT package for generating plots in their publications (Click their names to see their publications). As I was in need of plotting a number of data files, having very similar data, reached one of them to learn QDP.

QDP comes bundled with FTOOLS package from The High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center (HEASARC). As didn't have an installation of FTOOLS or HEASOFT, thought I would need to generate the plots on the workstation in our lab. But, thank God, it can be installed even if one do not have HEASOFT installed.

QDP (the Quick and Dandy Plotter) is basically a program that reads ASCII files and then calls PLT, an interactive plotting program that is designed to be used by scientists analyzing data. You can get it from http://wwwastro.msfc.nasa.gov/qdp/. Installation instructions and quick help on PLT/QDP are also included in the webpage. Note that, this is not a GUI based plotting program and works probably in linux only.

Latest R and RKWard

Yesterday I got the latest version of R (version 2.14.0 (Great Pumpkin, 2011-10-31)). Later in the day when I opened my favourite R GUI RKWard, it said that it cannot start the R backend.

On reaching the RKWard's sourceforge page, it is seen that my version of RKWard (ver 0.5.4) cannot support R-2.14.0 and I have to add an Inofficial Ubuntu repository to my system's software sources.

As I have been using the CRAN version of R on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx), added the following two lines to the system's software sources.

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/rkward-devel/rkward-stable-cran/ubuntu lucid main

deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/rkward-devel/rkward-stable-cran/ubuntu lucid main

If you have R from default Ubuntu servers, you may need to add the following line to your system's software sources for the latest RKWard.

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/rkward-devel/rkward-stable/ubuntu lucid main

deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/rkward-devel/rkward-stable/ubuntu lucid main

Then I updated the Ubuntu package list and upgraded the rkward package. Now my RKWard is at version 0.5.7 and working perfectly.

More details of latest RKWard binaries can be found here.
If you like the sources, check this page instead.

UPDATE: To rJava/JGR users
You would need to reinstall  JavaGD, iplots, JGR, proto, Deducer packages
Inside R, do the following

install.packages("JavaGD")
install.packages("iplots")
install.packages("JGR")
install.packages("proto")
install.packages("Deducer")

In between if you encounter the following error

configure: error: Cannot compile a simple JNI program. See config.log for details.

you need to reconfigure the Java installation. In the linux terminal issue the following

sudo R CMD javareconf