Blog from July, 2007

Science Tools Working Group

Did not meet this week and will skip next week in observance of the collaboration meeting.

The current version of ScienceTools is v9r1. The differences
from v9 show a number of small fixes, mostly by Jim, in several packages, in addition to the parameter name updates.Updates to the parameter names are nearly complete. v9r1, which will have the complete set of updated parameter names, may be ready by tomorrow, with correspondingly updated documentation in the User Workbook.

Data products: No news except that some issues recently raised by Isabelle regarding details of the contents of the LAT source catalog are posted for comment.

Databases and related utilities

No news

Likelihood analysis

No news. From the release notes it looks Jim is setting up the likelihood analysis to allow for IRFs that depend on time - meaning that if for some reason different IRFs apply to different time ranges, likelihood could handle it.

GRB tools

James completed the parameter name changes last week.

Pulsar tools

From Masa: "In the pulsar tools area, James and I are still working on the top-level code of the pulsar tools. One good news is that the work on gtpsearch is done, we think, and now we are hammering on gtophase and gtephem (i.e., trying to fit the new code to those applications). One bad news is I identified another and reported it to JIRA (PULS-38)."

Observation simulation

James imported gttakosim (orbitSim package), the orbit propagator/attitude simulator written by Giuseppe Romeo. Jim added it to the Science Tools builds, and it is in v9r1, sans documentation. Giuseppe has sent me a document describing the tool and example input and output files, and is willing to help make a Workbook tutorial and reference page. It is a few steps up from gtorbsim in terms of being able to generate realistic pointing histories. Ask me where the name comes from.

From Giuseppe: "Also, a word of warning, the code checked in has a bug which I have already fixed, and gave to James to be checked in. You should wait until that has been done before running the orbit simulator with the given init file." [This has not been done yet]

User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)

No news.

Source Catalog

Met yesterday. Jean posted (but could not present owing to audio problems with EVO) an update on the catalog analysis of the obssim2 data set. Toby and Ludovic gave presentations about source localization; Toby's pointlike is now using BACK events in addition to FRONT. Tom reviewed the current results for the comparison of source detection algorithms.

Science Tools Working Group

Met this week (attendees: N Giglietto, M Brigida, A Cillis, T Stephens, C Patterson, T Burnett, J Chiang, J Peachey, S Digel, W Focke, E Winter, D Davis, T Porter)

Nico gave a presentation about approaches that he has been developing for analyzing moving sources (in particular the sun and moon) in LAT data using to the extent possible the standard Science Tools. He described the packages that he has developed and some of the remaining analysis issues. He'll have an updated presentation during the collaboration meeting.

The current version of ScienceTools is v9. Updates to the parameter names are nearly complete. v9r1, which will have the complete set of updated parameter names, may be ready by tomorrow, with correspondingly updated documentation in the User Workbook.

Data products: No news except that configuration control of the FFD and ICD for the SDP is coming before the FOR, which is PDQ.

Databases and related utilities

Tom S. will create another instance of the data server at the GSSC for the 55-day run, when he gets the files. "It's not difficult to have different data sets, I just have to clone the server and set up a new MySQL database. It's just a matter of 5 minutes to create the data base and then starting the server programs with a different configuration file. The part that takes the most time is creating the web page to point to the servers and the data." This means that both obssim2 and 55-day (or whatever we ultimately call it) will be available from the GSSC.

As probably will be mentioned in this meeting, Tony gave an update on the SLAC Data Server at the Service Challenge Steering meeting yesterday.

Likelihood analysis

Jim has implemented the parameter name changes and updated the reference pages for the likelihood tools. As of Wednesday he was working on updating the likelihood tutorials, including removing DC2-specific references.

GRB tools

James reports that he is in the middle of renaming the parameters.

Pulsar tools

Masa reported via e-mail that he and James think that they have fixed the bug mentioned last week, (JIRA PULS-37).

Observation simulation

The only news is Jim's implementation of the parameter name changes in gtobssim. I'm inquiring with Dave D. about when we might have the replacement for gtorbsim in the repository and included in the Science Tools.

User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)

James has ape ready to be delivered for the Science Tools, but is juggling other work - he hopes to deliver it soon.

Source Catalog

Did not meet this week; will meet next week.

Science Tools Working Group

Did not meet this week or last; we will meet next Wednesday

The current version of ScienceTools is v9. Updates to the parameter names are in progress (and in at least one case are already in v9). v9r1, which will have the complete set of updated parameter names, should be ready by late next week, with correspondingly updated documentation in the User Workbook.

Data products: No news.

Databases and related utilities

No news.

Likelihood analysis

From Jim: "I have implemented the parameter name changes for the Likelihood tools and updated corresponding tool reference pages in the workbook on cvs. These changes are in effect as of Likelihood v13 and pyLikelihood v1."

GRB tools

No news. David posted an interesting study of the GLAST-Swift FOV Overlap.

Pulsar tools

From Masa: "In the pulsar tools area, we are still working on the top-level code of gtpsearch. The good news is that it was almost done, we thought, but the bad news is that I found a bug (JIRA PULS-37) which makes us stick to gtpsearch a little longer."

Observation simulation

From Jim: "The parameter name changes have been implemented in observationSim v7."

User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)

From Jim: "I have updated makeFT1 to include the start and stop times of the input merit as parameters given at runtime, and I have modified the code so that an empty FT1 file is produced if no events from the merit ntuple pass the specified cuts. Both of these changes were requested by
Anders and Warren to service the L1 pipeline needs. fitsgen v3r5.

For columns to be added to the makeFT1 output, such as MC_SRC_ID, that are not part of the FT1 definition via the FT1variables file, I have added a feature that allows the user to specify the data type of the added column, e.g., "J" meaning 4-byte signed integer for MC_SRC_ID. fitsGen v3r6.

I fixed a bug in gtselect that affected the specification of time range cuts where lower limit for the time range was zero. dataSubselector v5r4p1.

Python 2.5.1 has finally been made the version used by ScienceTools in ST LATEST and HEAD."

Source Catalog

Met last week - see the agenda and minutes. Interesting discussion included applying Toby's pointLike to improve the positions of sources found by MR_filter. On Wednesday, Tom S. posted initial comparisons of several source detection algorithms that are candidates for the catalog pipeline.