Here are some of the programs I’ve written that I hope other people might find useful.

Shortcuts to the current Lick and Keck observing calendars

Current Lick Calendar Current Keck Calendar

Drag the links to a bookmark bar to use often.

IDL routines

ADDINGMACHINE.PRO: Adds a series of numbers at the command line.

CIRCLE.PRO: Creates a circle for user-defined psym=8 plotting.

COMPARE_LISTS.PRO: Determines which elements from one list are present in a second.

CONT_SHADE.PRO: Creates a shaded image of a 2-D array with a contour plot overlaid.

*CUBIC_MIN.PRO: Fits a cubic function to a curve in order to find where the minimum or maximum falls.

DAYMON.PRO: Returns a string containing current day and month. Useful for automatically naming files.

DEFINED.PRO: Returns 1 if a variable is defined, 0 if it is not.

ELREM.PRO: Removes an element or array of elements from a vector.

ICANHAS.PRO: Tests whether a structure has a tag of a given name.

*LOOP_BAR.PRO: Cleanly monitors the progress in a loop and predicts when the loop will finish.

*NBTWN.PRO: Returns number of elements in a given array that fall between two limits, or optionally the positions of those elements.

PRINTSTAR.PRO: Prints name and coordinates of a single star in proper Lick/Keck formatting.

*ROUNDOFF.PRO: Rounds a figure to a specified number of decimal points, robustly.

*ST_ADD_FIELD.PRO: Adds a field to an array structure. USEFUL. Includes /remove option.

STR.PRO: Converts a variable into a string and removes leading and trailing whitespace.

STRHAS.PRO: Returns 1 if a given string is contained in a substring, 0 if it isn’t.

STRNOWHITESPACE.PRO: Returns a string, less its whitespace.

*Particularly awesome, if I do say so myself.

Commodore 64 motherboard image from Ian Matthews.