GLAST Software

Welcome to GLAST Software.  GLAST software development involves a large collaboration and can sometimes present a daunting challenge to users.  Hopefully this page will point you to documentation that will ease the process, as well as detailing a number of tools that GLAST software uses to communicate.  

Your first step will probably be to sign up for a SLAC computer account.  This will allow you access to the the GLAST code.  For details on doing this see here.

A good place to start looking at documentation is the main GLAST software page.  There you'll find links to the tools, documents and plans used by GLAST software.  For a more linear explanation of getting started with GLAST code see the Code How-To page.  There you should find a step-by-step guide to setting up, using and developing GLAST code.  The GLAST Software Road Map provides a description of the major GLAST software packages.  In addition the Support page lists whom to contact for help with different aspects of GLAST software.

Finally you will want to get set up with the various communication tools used by GLAST software.  Brief summaries of these are listed below.

Mailing Lists 

There are a number of different GLAST mailing lists.  To get on these lists you will first need get an account on the glast.stanford.edu machine which hosts the mailing lists.  To get this account contact Pat Nolan and ask him to set up an account for you. Once this is done you will receive additional information on how to join a mailing list.  You will need to examine which the set of lists to decide which to join; at a minimum you will probably want to join the "Whole Collaboration" list, where information of interest to the whole collaboration is announced, and the "Software" list, where information concerning software is announced.  The "Software" List is where weekly VRVS audio conferences are announced.  Most other subsystems also have mailing lists.  Subscribe as appropriate.

VRVS

VRVS stands for Virtual Room Videoconferencing System.  It is a web-based system for conducting conferences.  You will need to set up your computer to be able to use; to do this visit the vrvs website (http://www.vrvs.org).  The instructions there should be sufficient to set up the software and hardware you need on your computer.  The minimum hardware that you will need is a microphone and a set of speakers.  If you are setting VRVS up on Internet Explorer, Richard Dubois has a script to set up the registry keys needed by VRVS automatically.  Contact him for more info. Before attending a meeting be sure to read the VRVS Etiquette page.

If you are using VRVS from a laptop that has its IP address assigned dynamically - you will have to re-compute the computer name recognized by VRVS for each VRVS session.  To do this, go to the "My Profile" link on the VRVS web page, and click on the "Update" button located by the "Computer" section of your profile.

Standard GLAST VRVS meetings include the following (check with relevant group leaders to confirm day and times)

Wednesday (7:30 PST) - Calorimeter Software Meeting

Wednesday (8:30 PST) - Infrastructure Software Meeting

Thursday (8:30 PST) - General Software Meeting

ICQ

GLAST Software also uses the instant messaging service ICQ to facilitate rapid communication between members of the collaboration.  To set this up go to the ICQ home page, http://web.icq.com, and follow their instructions to download and install ICQ.  

During the installation process you will be queried about your security and privacy settings.  These will be things like whether or not you receive messages from users who are not on your Contact List.  By choosing the more restrictive of these options, you will be able to restrict (and hopefully eliminate) the amount of spam messages you get. Once installed you can always click on the ICQ button and choose the "Security and Privacy" option to further restrict or loosen your settings.

We are now ramping up use of the Trillian IM tool. See www.trillian.cc to get it. It features no banner ads and will also talk to AIM, Yahoo, IRC and MSN chat systems. Contacts are maintained in an xml file. There are a couple of settings we recommend:

• privacy - set the flag for "Only accept messages from my contact list", from Preferences->ICQ->Privacy.
• enable your idle timer (so people can see when you are inactive)
  GreenGlobe->Set Status->Create New Away Message. Create one called 'Sleeping'.
  GreenGlobe->Preferences->Events->->Advanced tab
  use the Add button to add a new event. Select Event Type 'idle time' and set the Action Type to 'Set Status', selecting 'Sleeping' for your away message. This will create a 'timer' event in your list.
  It appears that this timer setting does not work on NT! Seems to work fine on W2000. NT Trillian users appear active all the time they are online.

Contact Richard for the complete xml list of GLAST contacts; you can then edit it into your existing list, called buddies.xml, probaply in your Trillian installation directory under 'users\default\ '.

ICQ is unfortunately only for Windows; if however you are using a gnomish version of linux or unix, then you can use Gaim, which acts like ICQ. Visit their homepage at http://gaim.sourceforge.net/. Documentation on setting Gaim up to use your ICQ account can be found at http://gaim.sourceforge.net/faq.php. Redhat RPMs are available for easy installation.

Note that while Gaim appears to be the best unix client available, it will not create an ICQ account. However, you can sign up for an ICQ number on the web.  Much like the windows client trillian (http://www.trillian.cc), Gaim supports many IM protocols, including AIM, MSN, yahoo, jabber, and IRC.

Once you have ICQ (or Gaim, or trillian) up and running send your ICQ number to Richard Dubois who will be able to forward you a Contact List of other users within the GLAST group or simply a subset of that list with whom you wish to communicate.

A. Schlessinger Last Modified: 04/03/2002 09:55