Science Tools Working Group
The current release of the Science Tools remains v9r9.
Again, the most important difference from v9r8p3 is in how gtdiffrsp manages the diffuse response columns. If you have invested time in calculating diffuse responses already, you may want to hold off on updating to v9r9, at least for running gtdiffrsp. Aside from gtdiffrsp, the new versions of tools will read the old format FT1 files, but the new gtdiffrsp cannot add columns old format FT1 files.
Data products: No news about the reprocessing of the FT2 files to remake them with the updated format. At this point they will not be produced until after the New Year.
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
No news. From the LATEST builds, it looks like plotting options for model counts spectra are being enhanced in pyLikelihood.
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
Masa reports that he is continuing to update the user-level documentation for the tools.
Observation simulation
No news
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
No news
Source Catalog
Last week source associations and populations in the 3-month source list were discussed.
Science Tools Working Group
Since December 4, the current release version of the Science Tools is v9r9. Jim reports that the new version has the changes in how diffuse response columns are named that were described last week. It also has fixes for Likelihood and gtselect to handle large (>2 Gbyte) files; see below. For the record, here are the differences from v9r8p3.
If you have invested time in calculating diffuse responses already, you may want to hold-off on updating to v9r9, at least for running gtdiffrsp. Aside from gtdiffrsp, the new versions of tools will read the old format FT1 files, but the new gtdiffrsp cannot add columns old format FT1 files.
Data products: Still no news about the reprocessing of the FT2 files to remake them with the updated format.
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
From Jim:
- modifications to enable large file-support recently added to tip STGEN-83@jira (Likelihood v14r0p2)
- added function to python interface to allow one to plot the model counts for a given source using a specified color (pyLikelihood v1r9p2, ST LATEST only)
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
Masa reports that he is continuing to update the user-level documentation for the tools. Some of the updates are in the CVS repository at SLAC, but they are not yet in the User Workbook.
Observation simulation
No news
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
From Jim:
- gtselect
- modifications to enable large file-support recently added to tip STGEN-83@jira (dataSubselector v6r3p5, fitsGen v4r2p1)
Note that there is still a bug in cfitsio that James was planning to patch (see jira comments).
From Eric W.: (on news from the FSSC)
Dave is working on test scripts and data that we will use for our brutal but thorough testing regime in preparation for our release on 15 February. John is collecting and integrating all of the various test programs from the SLAC-derived Science Tools code tree for use in a quick-check build-time test (i.e. a "hmake test" target). James has been executing a variety of bug fixes. And I've been running down problems getting pyLikelihood to build and install properly under the HEADAS system, which has forced me to take the plunge and learn a lot about how SWIG works when gluing C++ code to Python.
Source Catalog
Last week Toby presented news about resolving the pointfit-related issues that Jean noticed in the Catalog pipeline analysis of the 3-month data set. Elizabetta presented the current version of the source catalog database tables that are being designed and implemented. And we had some more discussion about source associations and identifications.
Science Tools Working Group
The current release version of the Science Tools is v9r8p3. Jim reports "ST v9r8p3 was tagged to gather up the changes in ST HEAD before including the gtdiffrsp column name changes in the next major release." See below for details regarding the pending changes to gtdiffrsp. The differences from v9r8p2 are mostly small but include some important bug fixes.
Data products: No news about the reprocessing of the FT2 files to remake them with the updated format; progress took a Thanksgiving holiday.
The pending changes to gtdiffrsp above will regularize the names of the columns added to the FT1 files. Presently the names of the columns that gtdiffrsp adds are the conjoined names of the IRFs and the diffuse source name in the XML file. In the new version that Jim has put together, the column names will be simple and uniform, but the headers of the files will include new diffuse response keywords that contain the information formerly encoded in the column names. This will make FT1 files that include diffuse responses something that can be accepted by the FSSC, which has to live by HEASARC conventions for naming columns in FITS binary tables.
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
From Jim:
- I improved the upper limit calculation following a bug-report from Jean (pyLikelihood v1r9p1, ST v9r8p3)
- There had been a suggestion to make the default "strategy" for NewMinuit be 2 (instead of 1). This change was made in optimizers v2r14 and made part of ST v9r8p2, but subsequent tests revealed this to produce unreliable results in some cases, so it was changed back to 1 in optimizers v2r14p1 and ST v9r8p3.
- The new diffuse response column conventions are implemented in Likelihood v14r0p1 and fitsGen v4r2 (both still in ST LATEST).
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
No news; Masa reports that he is updating the user-level documentation for the tools. This is going on behind the scenes so far - not yet in the User Workbook.
Observation simulation
No news
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
No news. Eric W. reports that the FSSC builds of the parts of v9r8p2 that will be supported for Guest Investigators by the FSSC are still under test. Dave Davis estimates that a week or two of testing/fixing will be required to make the builds work reliably on all of the platforms they intend to support (which include Mac OS X).
Source Catalog
The Catalog group met last week and talked about the 3-month source list and 'unassociated' sources.