From nch@roe.ac.uk Fri Jul 14 17:45:26 2006 Date: Fri, 14 Jul 2006 17:25:11 +0100 (BST) From: Nigel Hambly To: WFCAM Science Archive Team -- Eckhard Sutorius , Johann Bryant , Mike Read , Nigel Hambly , Nicholas Cross , Bob Mann , Ross Collins Cc: CCs for WSA weekly meeting minutes distribution -- Andrew Lawrence , Andy Adamson , John Taylor , Jim Emerson , Malcolm Stewart , Mike Irwin , Mark Holliman , Peredur Williams , Stephen Warren Subject: WFAU WSA weekly meeting minutes, 14th July 2006 Minutes of WFCAM Science Archive meeting: 14th July 2006 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Present: NCH, NJC, PMW, RSC, ETWS, MSH, JB, AL, RGM, MAR Apologies: JPE, JMS DONM: 10am, Friday 21st July 2006 Actions discharged this week: ----------------------------- ACTION: RGM to investigate further any funding opportunities from elsewhere (i.e. AG and IfA) Discharged; RGM has been doing some major lobbying on our WFAU's behalf. An AGLI decision on this is anticipated in the Autumn. Actions partly discharged but continuing: ----------------------------------------- None this week. Actions carried forward from 07/07/06 meeting: ---------------------------------------------- ACTION: JB to review Hardware/OS/DBMS design doc to note areas that need updating and itemise new sections required - CONTINUES: Note that this is on hold until after DR1. Specific points and new actions: -------------------------------- Project management: NCH noted that the UK VDFS Final Design Review is now scheduled for two days during the week of 23-27 October, under the chairmanship of Luc Simard (who chaired the WSA CDR back in April 2003). NCH asked the team to indicated their availability so this info can be communicated to JPE: all fine except the following people/times: AL not 26th; ETWS not 23rd. The location of the review is TBD. WFCAM update: Nothing new to report this week Comments and issues arising from CASU fortnightly minutes: No new minutes as of 14/7 am. Networking: Nothing new this week. WSA Operations: Routine backups proceeded as normal; DXS was finished at the beginning of the week. Hardware: Nothing new to report this week. Software: NCH reported: working on the WSA paper and the web documentation for the impending DR1 release (with MAR & ETWS). ACTION: NCH to forward DR1 website to all so that folks can check the content. ETWS reported: "Finished ingestion of DXS stacks. Tested installation on khafre on large files, unfortunately the installed debian is not supporting 64-bit. Also some python modules are not fully utilizing 64-bit systems yet, eg. pyfits,numarray." RSC reported: "I've created a new script to synchronise test databases with the WSA and the latest schema easily and quickly. Hopefully, this will save developers from having to pester the operators to recreate their test database every time it falls out of date with the latest schema. The script still requires some development work though. I've deprecated the old CU16, now that the new CU16 has been proven with a data release. This keeps the code base clean and saves us from having to maintain old code. A fully working version of the old CU16 can always be obtained by checking out the DR1_FINAL tagged version of the CVS repository. I've upgraded the CLI of programme curation sessions to allow the user to supply survey acronyms instead of programme IDs to denote the programme they wish to create. Saves use from having to remember the programme IDs. Python 3.0 will abolish the string module. So could everyone please refrain from using this module by using the intrinsic str.* methods in place of the older string.* functions. I've upgraded the existing code. Finally, I've created an alternative implementation of the DataFactory module that I believe achieves all that is required in a much more powerful and simple way. Both the old and new versions are running in parallel until it is completely proven. Plus, I've been working on some general improvements to tighten the relationship between the database schema and our .sql file schema descriptions." NJC has been working flat-out on getting the DXS and UDS data into the archive (see below). Survey Data Release: DXS was finally sorted out over last weekend, thanks to the persistent efforts of NJC and ETWS. NCH has been checking it over (DXS Survey Head has also had a look) and all seems to be OK now. UDS image data were finally delivered to WFAU yesterday (13th July). OA and SF have been optimising the S-Extractor configuration, and have promised to deliver the final spec by around lunchtime today (14th). NJC and ETWS have kindly volunteered to do the source extraction, ingestion and source merging over this weekend, meaning that we can then execute the final CUs starting at the beginning of next week and finally get DR1 out of the door. Non-survey Data Release: No time even to finish typ Astrogrid deployment: Ditt Miscellaneous: Nothing else this week.