1. Home
  2. Forums
  3. About the AAVSO
  4. VStar

VStar 2.15.3 release: French localisation, polynomial fit equation bug fix

David Benn
Affiliation
Astronomical Society of South Australia (ASSAU)
Fri, 07/12/2013 - 03:38

Hi all

VStar 2.15.3 is available via the WebStart download button on http://www.aavso.org/vstar-overview. The desktop distribution is available from SourceForge (https://sourceforge.net/projects/vstar).

This small release adds the first French localisation (thanks to  Dominique Naillon) and fixes a bug in which polynomial fit equations in the Analysis -> Models dialog (e.g. for use in R) were sometimes incorrect. In addition, a build script that will become useful for plugin devlopers was also added, thanks to Adam Weber.

Note that the polynomial fit plugin (see http://www.aavso.org/vstar-plugin-library) has become part of the core of VStar replacing the old implementation.

See the change log for details and attribution.

Thanks to Sara for sanity checking and deploying to the AAVSO host. Sara noticed some odd behaviour on her Mac running Java 1.7 (blank window at start up and problems with some file menu items) but I have not been able to reproduce this on my Java 1.6 Mac or on my son's Windows 7 machine running Java 1.7. Please report any problems to me or via this forum topic. Thanks.

Development has been slow because my son recently injured his knee and this has pre-occupied us lately.

I will be turning my attention back to the the user manual for awhile (http://www.aavso.org/vstar-user-manual-project) before more development. If you would like to write (even a small) section, please feel free to offer.

David 

David Benn
Affiliation
Astronomical Society of South Australia (ASSAU)
Thu, 09/05/2013 - 13:24
vstar.jnlp vs other launching techniques

Do you start VStar by opening (double-clicking) the vstar.jnlp file initially downloaded from the AAVSO VStar page? 

If you ever find that VStar stops working upon a new release of VStar, e.g. giving an error such as this:

just go back to http://www.aavso.org/vstar-overview and download it again. The downloaded JNLP file can then be used upon subsequent launches.

The JNLP file contains information about how VStar should be loaded, including dependency information. If a newer version of VStar has dependencies not required by the previous versions, an error will result.

Other ways to avoid this problem are to:

  1. Always start VStar from the "Download Now" button here: http://www.aavso.org/vstar-overview (since this always downloads the current JNLP file) or
  2. Download it from SourceForge (https://sourceforge.net/projects/vstar) and run it via a non-JNLP launcher application in the downloaded zip file.

Thanks to Rob Jenkins for mentioning a problem he had with vstar.jnlp when moving to VStar 2.15.3.

If you have any questions about methods of launching VStar, please don't hesitate to ask. See also this link re: VStar launching options.

David