Compatibility fixes for outdated matplotlib/numpy libraries

I'd like to keep pygwinc functional in ancient environments (like control room workstations), as long as it's not too painful. These tweaks are sufficient to run pygwinc with mpl 1.5/np 1.11.

@christopher.wipf this seems to include a lot of changes which are not related to numpy compatibility. Is this meant to be applied on top of a different merge request? I'll look...

Yeah all that stuff was just the aLIGO parameters update. This is all good.

merged