Minutes from SSS Mtg 2009-Jan-27

Attendees: B.Butler, D.Harland, L.Sjouwerman, B.Truitt, S.Witz

Remark

Prior to the meeting it was suggested that only the programmers, along with Bryan and Lorant, need attend this week's meeting.

Upcoming Meetings

The EVLA Advisory Committee Meeting will take place on March 19 & 20. Bryan may be able to fully represent our group for this meeting. There will be an SSS Readiness Review Meeting in mid to late April (currently scheduled for the 21^st & 22^nd). This review will take place. Its focus will be on the OSRO, and possibly the RSRO, program. The SSS group will be involved in this meeting.

OPT User Help

Lorant is focused on this now. The programming staff needs to create keys for the RCT (the help text is tied to these keys). Dave needs to either ask James to start this, or have James stay on the WIDAR project and reassign the creation of the keys to Brian. Lorant would like someone else to do some quality control on the help. One suggestion was to enlist Jurgen, who could use the help as a way to learn the OPT and then provide Lorant with feedback.

Single Sign On

It is going slowly, but there has been progress. Authentication works in its most basic form, but we really need to receive the full set of information on the user from the database. OpenSky is aware of our request. We hope to have what we need from them by the end of the week.

Lorant mentioned that it would be helpful to add user information into the script files, as comments, produced by model2script. Desired data: user name, ID, and email address.

Observation Scheduling

The SSS code is almost ready for testing. We would like to start testing soon after Barry comes back to the office. Some remaining items:

1. The PROGRAM column of the SB database table might want a trimester code, or it may want an array configuration code. We need to ask Barry about this.


2. We need to settle on a real directory in which to deposit scripts for fixed-date observations.
   • Bryan mentioned an existing convention of .../[year]/[month] for directory names.


3. We need to settle on a naming convention for the file names of scripts.


4. We need to know whom to email when a script has been submitted.
   • observe -at- nrao.edu, schedsoc -at- nrao.edu


5. We need a place to put model2script.
   • home/mchost/evla/bin


6. We discussed the Unsubmit process a little bit, both for the immediate term (Ka band call) and longer term. In the immediate term we will probably rely on observatory staff and manual intervention. Before deciding how to handle the longer term we should talk with Barry to understand what is done now -- especially if some, but not all, of the planned iterations of a scheduling block have already been run.

Dave will ask Barry to attend next week's meeting in order to help us with observation scheduling.