- this will hopefully fix a segfault, but I don't know

- for calloc() and free()

- faster, makes smaller vector format output

- was causing plot_background to generate files named things like 1H-GSTLAL...

- vectorize() doesn't play well with methods.  I think *this* will work for
  everybody

- this is for detchar only, production running should not use

- before doing .finish() to make sure the final PDFs reflect what we think the combined rates are, not what the original object thought they were

- in error path