MIRIAD-Ruby

Introduction

The MIRIAD-Ruby package…

1. Makes MIRIAD datasets accessible from Ruby by wrapping the MIRIAD UVIO routines.
2. Makes Ruby usable with MIRIAD datasets by adding convenience, utility, and astronomy related methods to Ruby classes.

Installation

MIRIAD-Ruby can be installed in three easy steps.

1. Install Ruby. See the Ruby Download Page for instructions.
2. Install RubyGems (for Ruby < 1.9.0) See the RubyGems web site for instructions.
3. Install MIRIAD-Ruby by running…

   gem install miriad

   or

   sudo gem install miriad

Documentation

You are reading part of it!

On the web

The latest documentation is published on the MIRIAD-Ruby Home Page

At your local site

The MIRIAD-Ruby gem contains full documentation, which will be installed along with the gem (unless you specified —no-rdoc or —no-ri, but why would you do that?).

To view the local HTML documentation generated from the RDoc comments:

1. Run gem server.
2. Point your browser at http://localhost:8808/
3. Find the miriad entry.
4. Click on the [rdoc] link.

To view the local ri documentation (kind if like man or info for Ruby), just run ri class_or_method. For example, to find out about all the ways to call read(), type ri Miriad::Uvio#read.

Further Reading

Additional information about MIRIAD-Ruby can be found at:

• The MIRIAD-Ruby Rubyforge Project Page

Additional information about MIRIAD can be found at:

• The Australia Compact Array web page
• The MIRIAD Software Page at the University of Maryland

Acknowledgements

The MIRAD-Ruby package is distributed with a snapshot of MIRIAD‘s lower level I/O routines writtin in ANSI C. Most of the MIRIAD functionality provided by MIRIAD-Ruby is actually performed by this C code, which MIRIAD-Ruby wraps and exposes to Ruby.

Much of the documentation for the Miriad::Uvio routines was transcribed into Rdoc format from The Miriad Programmer's Guide .

Authors too numerous to list (and too likely to prefer anonymity) have contributed to both the C code and the documentation. If you are one of them and would like to be mentioned here, please file a bug report on the MIRIAD-Ruby Rubyforge project page.