Core Minutes 5/18/2004  

Present:    Joanne Bogart, Anders Borgland, Toby Burnett, Sasha Chekhtman, Jim Chiang, Johann Cohen-Tanugi, Seth Digel, Richard Dubois, Warren Focke,  Navid Golpayegani, Traudl Hansl-Kozanecka, Heather Kelly,  Michael Kuss, Pat Nolan, James Peachey, Bob Schaefer, Alex Schlessinger

• Code restructuring: (Toby) Nothing pressing. We might think about separating test programs (which tend to depend on many more packages than does the library of the package they belong to) into separate packages, but not before the end of the month, when we expect to freeze things for Flight Integration. (Richard) With such a plan there is some danger of test programs losing sync with packages they are intended to test.

• Randoms: (Michael) As explained here, he tracked down the last of the anomalies, this one specific to RandGauss. All problems are understood and fixable. Next project, well underway, is to come up with a procedure to continue to verify reproducibility. Logging RandomEngine state is known not to be adequate. His preferred approach is to use some form of checksum of the event data (excluding fields like event id which can't be expected to match.)

• FRED: (Richard for Riccardo) Richard now has it running on his laptop (Tracy has been using it for a while). Riccardo has been quite responsive to requests. Now can start up Gleam from FRED's "GLAST panel". Main thing missing for more widespread use is comprehensive instructions on setting it up. Meanwhile Julie is it bringing it up on Linux. There were problems with missing libraries, plug-ins, etc., which she managed to resolve, thus smoothing the way for the rest of us. Long-term goal is to connect up all the pieces (all more or less already existing) so that non-developer astronomers can use FRED to look at particular events of interest without having to know anything from Gleam.
• Disk cleaning/archiving: (Navid) It's working. It takes a long time to archive everything because there is a lot to archive.  The jobs must have a terminal attached; some had to be redone when the terminal session died. There are ways to get around this.

• Bulletin boards: (Pat) He's installed Ikonboard for us to play with and decide whether or not it might help with some of the tasks now handled by mailing lists and Wiki pages. You can take a look for yourself, but you won't see much until you register. Unlike mailing lists, bulletin boards don't routinely send notification of new material to subscribers. Once a "topic" (analogous to email thread) has been established, you can ask to be informed of updates, but you won't know about new topics unless you poll periodically.

• JIRA: (Johann) Alex is working on allowing JIRA read access to our CVS repository.  Login ids for JIRA will not be the same as SLAC computer login ids. [Post-meeting update: Please use the same id as for SLAC login but with a different password.] (Richard) CVS access feature is not necessary to start; we can begin submitting issues without it.[Post-meeting update: Richard and Johann have agreed to an initial set of topics to track. ]

• Installers: (Pat, Richard, James) Main outstanding question is whether we should spend the money (yearly) for a product which will do everything we want to do on both platforms. James worries HEASARC will not go for anything requiring a non-negligible yearly fee. He suggests we might get away with something which only handles Windows (for which there are probably free products which would be suitable) and just use standard built-in tools and scripting for Linux; expertise needed for this approach should not be a problem. (Richard) SLAC has a spare license for a Windows installer, Wise, that we could have. Pat is defining our installer requirements now; would make a good topic for next week's meeting. 

• Flight Integration:  The weekly run-down:

  • EngineeringModel: (Heather) New tag v2r0402p4 incorporates updates to xmlGeoDbs and job options. Another new tag is coming soon in order to add calibGenTKR and calibGenCAL to the list of new packages, and then (hold your hat) a new version tag for the switch from EBF external library to LDF, from ebfReader to ldfReader, etc. (Toby) Since we generally try to minimize number of times we update external libraries, should we, when we go to LDF, also upgrade Root to 4.0 (supports Python) and maybe Gaudi? (Richard) Somewhat risky to try to do all this before the freeze for I & T at the end of the month. End of June/early July would be a better time.
  • Flight integration geometry: (Richard) Mark has reviewed CAL and will initiate the update of Eddy's document LAT-TD-03674.
  • CAL calibration algorithms: (Sasha) He's essentially on track for all required algorithms at the end of May except possibly light attenuation. See his comprehensive write-up for details on progress and status. (Joanne) ..has written drafts for xml format of light asymmetry and integral non-linearity data, but must also confirm that formats are suitable for read-in (couple days' work).
  • Calibration database interface:  Marco found some more bugs for Joanne to fix; should be straigthforward. Looks like he's managed to get the query results display working anyway.
  • System tests:  (Richard for Matt) Matt and Tony Johnson are within inches of finishing off the J2EE interface to System Tests (windows come up, minus their insides); a good thing, too, since Matt will shortly be out of commission for a while, attending to his torn tendon.  (details here; scroll at own risk)
  • Pipeline: (Richard for Dan) Web interface for configuring pipeline is about done. He expects to try out a sample task this week.
• Extra-curricular activities: Tracy, Joanne

  Action Items 

• Document effect of MC pruning options (Riccardo) (8/5/2003) It's documented in the code; Tracy will look into putting the information in a more accessible place. (9/2/2003)
• Write up, and perhaps present at a future meeting, hints on debugging. (02/18/03)   Some combination of Toby and Tracy will provide something for Windows.(7/22/03) 
• Overhaul documentation altogether by about November (Heather and ??) (9/2/2003) In progress; not yet done (01/13/04)
• Resolve calibration/timestamp issue. (11/20/02) Online folk have not yet thought about putting timestamp information into EM data, but, thanks to Richard's inquiry, may now do so. (2/25/03) We can probably live without a realistic system for EM, but we will put it on the agenda for the DC1 workshop.(5/6/03) At the DC1 Workshop Steve Ritz  promised to find an authoritative reference for timestamp format and pass it on. (7/17/03) Now that events have "real" timestamps, Joanne needs to reassess situation with Calibration (9/2/2003) Timestamp exists in EM data. Needs to be fetched by Calibration (1/13/04) Put on hold until formats settle down. (3/16/04)

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J. Bogart Last Modified: 24-Jun-2005 14:11:43 -0700