[11:01am] sigblips: Welcome to the weekly setiQuest community meeting. What would we like to talk about today?
[11:01am] Michael1234: A few site updates underway
[11:02am] sigblips: Who is going to OSCON 2011? http://www.oscon.com/oscon2011/public/schedule/detail/18710
[11:03am] sigblips: 4 days left in the SETIstars $200K challenge. What happens next?
[11:03am] Michael1234: landings on the capitol mall?
[11:03am] Jill_: Avinash and Francis Potter are going to OSCON
[11:04am] Jill_: we are ramping up the SETIStars content, including Jodie Foster, to try and get SETIStars numbers up at the end
[11:05am] Jill_: the World of SETI Sun box was hacked this past week --- messed up our planned displays for Celebrating Science
[11:05am] Michael1234: That is horrid.
[11:06am] sigblips: Hacked? I thought the SETI Institute had a firewall. Was that WoS Sun box in the fishbowl running Linux or Solaris?
[11:06am] Jill_: it appears to have been a weak password, and none of the rest of our system was breached
[11:06am] Michael1234: Most sites are under constant attack these days.  If we're gonna talk security, we should not post the discussion
[11:07am] Jill_: OK - my mistake
[11:07am] khrm: Ok what's the agenda?
[11:07am] Michael1234: Opinions vary on that policy.
[11:08am] sigblips: Probably shouldn't talk about security then.  I control one of the IRC logbots but Libertiny is out of my control. What gets posted here gets posted to the Internet.
[11:08am] Jill_: we had more than 400 visitors and 60 volunteers on Saturday
[11:09am] sigblips: That sounds like a good turnout. What percentage were kids? 50%?
[11:10am] Adityab: On a Harry-Potterish note, this sounds like not saying the word 'voldemort' to avoid bad stuff from happening...
[11:10am] Jill_: maybe more like 30% kids --- they were incredibly enthusiastic.  but we have lots of young adult and old retiree visitors too
[11:10am] Michael1234: Not really.  There is no substitute for good security, but when fixing something, why call attention to it?
[11:12am] khrm: I think it's more like LOTR situation. Don't speak in Mordorish or Saurans ( crackers) will know.
[11:12am] Michael1234: okay, back to the agenda
[11:13am] sigblips: Here are the items for discussion:
[11:13am] Adityab: I need to run back to my hostel soon - I think I should talk about my project first
[11:14am] sigblips: 1) Algorithms project. Adityab, you have the floor.
[11:14am] Adityab: I've documented every single function in the Algorithms project, save two which I'm a bit unsure about
[11:15am] Adityab: I've partially updated with wiki with instructions on using the code
[11:15am] Adityab: with more to come
[11:15am] Michael1234: Good on ya!
[11:15am] Adityab: Also added several different window types - hann, hamming, sinc, cosine, etc
[11:16am] Adityab: You can also see the progress in percentage of a pipeline now
[11:16am] Adityab: while it runs.
[11:16am] Adityab: Also, added two scripts to generate sections of waterfall plots of large data files
[11:17am] Adityab: these scripts are variants of Rob's script
[11:17am] Adityab: that's approximately the stuff I did this week
[11:17am] Adityab: Michael1234: :)
[11:18am] sigblips: What are the characteristics of the sinc window? What does it do in the frequency domain? Seems low-pass-filter'ish but I don't think it is.
[11:19am] Adityab: sigblips: Well, it's not really a sinc but a lanczos window
[11:19am] sigblips: For those who don't know: sinc(x) = sin(x)/x
[11:19am] Michael1234: :|
[11:20am] Adityab: it is low-pass-filterish as far as I know
[11:21am] Jill_: does the work this week come under the 'implement simple signal generator' task in the wiki?
[11:21am] Adityab: I couldn't use a sinc directly because it would explode in the code at zero - I'd have to stitch in the limit at zero in the code
[11:22am] Adityab: Jill_: There's a gaussian-noisy sinwewave generator implemented
[11:22am] Adityab: in which you can tune the SNR, wavelength etc
[11:23am] Jill_: zero problem for sinc must be well documented and many workarounds
[11:23am] Adityab: I need to run, the building is closing, I'll try to be back in 10 minutes or so
[11:23am] Jill_: bye thanks
[11:23am] Adityab: bye
[11:23am] Adityab left the chat room. (Remote host closed the connection)
[11:24am] khrm: Should I start?
[11:24am] sigblips: It looks like a LPF but multiplication in the time domain is equivalent to convolution in the frequency domain. So my guess is that it smooths out the high frequency noise in the spectrum.
[11:26am] gerryharp joined the chat room.
[11:27am] Jill_: hi Gerry - Aditya just had to leave for a few minutes you can see his report above
[11:27am] sigblips: http://irc.sigblips.com/setiQuest/2011/setiquest.07-26-2011.log
[11:28am] sigblips: We can return to the Algorithms project after Aditya returns and Gerry reads the log.
[11:29am] sigblips: 2) SonATA Porting project. Khrm, you have the floor.
[11:31am] gerryharp left the chat room. (Client Quit)
[11:31am] khrm: I have finished improving the build system. Though it is still not as much tested as I would want. Now if you get error during configure steps it is due to missing packages or not giving option to configure if you are using non standard locations of packages.
[11:31am] gerryharp joined the chat room.
[11:32am] khrm: 2 part  :Porting: It works on ubuntu 10.10/11.04, fedora14/15 , centos 5 debian 5 and opensuse 11.4 ( it was already working on 11.3)
[11:32am] khrm: Again I want people to test it out.
[11:33am] sigblips: So it is working on all those Linux distro/versions you mentioned? That is great.
[11:33am] khrm: And I don't have enough location left to install gentoo so I am working on tclreadline. It should take 2-3 days more.
[11:34am] Jill_: but it sounds like 'working' means that it is still a difficult build - or do i have the wrong impression
[11:34am] Jill_: in theory, can it ever be an easy build?
[11:34am] khrm: I did have posted the script which simplified the build process.
[11:35am] khrm: First runs the script.
[11:35am] khrm: Then ./autogen.sh
[11:35am] khrm: Then ./configure                      if you have packages in normal locations.
[11:35am] khrm: Then make
[11:35am] khrm: sudo make install
[11:36am] khrm: sudo chown -R `whoami` ~/sonata_install
[11:36am] khrm: But I want scripts to be tested.
[11:36am] sigblips: Just curious. Khrm, did you install each of those Linux distros/versions in a boot partition or are you running them in a virtual machine like jrseti does?
[11:36am] khrm: It works for me but it is quite possible that other uses might have some issue with them
[11:37am] khrm: Actually I install them. And have single /boot but different /
[11:38am] khrm: And there's a limit upto which you can part the hdd and the you will have to use extended partition.
[11:38am] khrm: So I have 8 partitions. 3 primary, 4 logical and 1 swap.
[11:38am] davidstrauss joined the chat room.
[11:39am] sigblips: That's good, better actually. I've always wondered how a virtual machine might subtly change SonATA's runtime characteristics.
[11:39am] Michael1234: No doubt we will find out!
[11:40am] davidstrauss: Hi all :-)
[11:41am] Michael1234: Hi David!
[11:41am] khrm: There are hardly any directories left ( except some of sse-pkg's subdirectory) that I have not changed.
[11:42am] khrm: So while documenting should I mentioned every change or tells about a change that is same and I have done in every directory.
[11:42am] khrm: ?
[11:44am] sigblips: Documenting and commenting is always a good thing.  You'll need to ask jrseti and janebird how much info they require since they will be the ones checking in the code.
[11:44am] Jill_: KHRM - if you were putting your hands on this for the first time, what would you like to see?
[11:48am] Michael1234: maybe we lost khrm
[11:48am] khrm: No.
[11:50am] khrm: I think seeing that autotools documentation is not good, I got to know many things that i couldn't find on mailing list or any other place on net. Reasons for change and details of change should be given. But I think we can categorize the changes.
[11:50am] khrm: Instead of  posting about every changes separately.
[11:51am] Jill_: i think that the whole motivation for this work is to lower the entrance barrier for newcomers.
[11:52am] khrm: Yes.
[11:52am] gerryharp: If you summarize the changes under categories, it will be much easier to navigate than if the changes are one long list.
[11:54am] khrm: Yes.
[11:54am] gerryharp: khrm, I have a question. My student, Josh tried to install SonATA a couple of times on Ubuntu and different versions of Suse
[11:54am] khrm: That's what i meant.
[11:54am] khrm: Yes?
[11:54am] gerryharp: He had a hard time, even with Jon's help. Should it be this difficult?
[11:54am] gerryharp: Or are we doing something wrong?
[11:56am] khrm: Currently, I don't it's that difficult. Build instructions is simple for my gsoc branch only.
[11:57am] khrm: I meant to say that currently it's not difficult for my gsoc branch. But one months ago it might have been.
[11:58am] gerryharp: Hmm. OK, we're doing something wrong. Can others testify to their experiences with installation?
[11:58am] khrm: That's why I need testers.
[11:59am] Michael1234: hmmm.  Well, as entirely naive, maybe I give it a shot later.
[11:59am] sigblips: I will be trying it on my AWS micro-instance.
[11:59am] khrm: Currently it's just running the script and then autotools.
[12:00pm] Michael1234: i'll gove it a shot
[12:00pm] khrm: sigblips what does aws uses? Centos 5?
[12:01pm] khrm: I will post on the forum methods to test on http://setiquest.org/forum/topic/gsoc-improve-sonata-software-infrastruc...
[12:01pm] Guest14326: Title: GSoC - Improve the SonATA Software Infrastructure | setiQuest (at setiquest.org)
[12:02pm] sigblips: Yes, AWS uses CentOS 5.
[12:02pm] khrm: Then I will post the instruction about that too. It's slightly different.
[12:03pm] sigblips: What is the status of the readMask.cpp:135 bug? http://setiquest.org/forum/topic/gsoc-improve-sonata-software-infrastruc...
[12:03pm] Guest14326: Title: GSoC - Improve the SonATA Software Infrastructure | setiQuest (at setiquest.org)
[12:05pm] khrm: That bug is because SonATA is using free instead of Tcl_free()
[12:05pm] khrm: While this is allowed in non thread tcl.
[12:05pm] sigblips: What distributions was it a problem with? How did you fix it?
[12:06pm] khrm: But in threaded tcl it rules are strict. You can't interchange between them.
[12:06pm] khrm: It was in debian, ubuntu and centos also.
[12:06pm] khrm: I changed from free() to Tcl
[12:06pm] Michael1234: I assume there's a readme or something that tells you what distros work?  I am an ubuntu partizan
[12:07pm] khrm: _sorry free() to Tcl_Free()
[12:09pm] khrm: But I have not commited this change as jrseti_ have still to verified it.
[12:09pm] khrm: Michael1234 I will post the instruction on the forum morrow.
[12:10pm] Michael1234: cool
[12:10pm] khrm: Currently I am going to sleep after the meeting.
[12:10pm] sigblips: Are there any plans to try Debian 6?
[12:12pm] khrm: Opps sorry I have try it on Debian Squeeze not lenny. I got confused with numbers. Centos 5 and debian 6 or squeeze.
[12:13pm] khrm: http://setiquest.org/wiki/index.php/Talk:SonATA_Porting#Which_Linux_Dist...
[12:13pm] Guest14326: Title: Talk:SonATA Porting - setiquest wiki (at setiquest.org)
[12:13pm] khrm: I do have mentioned out there the squeeze.
[12:14pm] Jill_: sorry - i'm on to next meeting.  bye
[12:14pm] Jill_ left the chat room. (Quit: Page closed)
[12:14pm] sigblips: Thank you for the correction.  I added a new section to that page. http://setiquest.org/wiki/index.php/SonATA_Porting#Ported_distribution_v...
[12:14pm] Guest14326: Title: SonATA Porting - setiquest wiki (at setiquest.org)
[12:15pm] khrm: That page is now reaching 5000 words.
[12:15pm] Adityab joined the chat room.
[12:15pm] Adityab: gerryharp: Hi Gerry!
[12:16pm] sigblips: Yeah, all the discussion stuff should be moved to the Talk: page and if the documentation section gets a lot bigger we can spin that off as its own page.
[12:17pm] Adityab: My university firewall has gone bonkers today and it classifies GMail as a malware site, I can't check my email :|
[12:17pm] sigblips: We could do that same sort of thing with the Algorithms project too.
[12:18pm] khrm: how do we edit this page http://setiquest.org/content/sonata-build ?
[12:18pm] Guest14326: Title: SonATA Build | setiQuest (at setiquest.org)
[12:19pm] Adityab: sigblips: Yes, we could do that
[12:20pm] Adityab: sigblips: Is the meeting still on? I can't find today's logs on the forum...
[12:20pm] sigblips: Need to talk to jrseti about that. The setiQuest site has a lot of duplicated duality. Consolidation would be nice but I doubt it will happen.
[12:20pm] gerryharp: Hi Adi
[12:21pm] sigblips: The meeting is still happening. The live IRC chat log is here http://irc.sigblips.com/setiQuest/2011/setiquest.07-26-2011.log and I'll post this to the forum when we finish.
[12:22pm] gerryharp: Adi: I was able to see your discussion of your recent work.
[12:22pm] gerryharp: Thanks, sigblips.
[12:22pm] gerryharp: A sinc window (or Lanczos) is an approximation to a boxcar smoothing in the time domain.
[12:23pm] gerryharp: Yes, it is a low-pass filter. It looks ugly in the frequency domain, though.
[12:23pm] Adityab: ok
[12:24pm] sigblips: But doesn't boxcar filtering in the time domain have a high-pass rolloff?
[12:24pm] sigblips: I mean a high-frequency-rolloff.
[12:26pm] gerryharp: Right. so a sinc window is a low pass filter
[12:27pm] sigblips: If you are doing convolution.
[12:27pm] gerryharp: Ah! Sorry. I got my domains mixed up.
[12:27pm] gerryharp: yes, a sinc window in teh time domain is a boxcar in teh frequency domain
[12:27pm] Adityab: yes
[12:28pm] gerryharp: So it is a convolution in the freq domain as sigblips says, and its frequency response is flat
[12:28pm] gerryharp: I guess that is true for all windows, which are convolutions in the freq domain. OK.
[12:28pm] sigblips: Yes.
[12:29pm] sigblips: The Fourier symmetry theorems are wonderful things. (:
[12:30pm] gerryharp: Sho nuf!
[12:30pm] gerryharp: So Adi, are you willing to try out your WF programs and generate a larger number of waterfalls for seti Explorer?
[12:30pm] Adityab: gerryharp: yes
[12:31pm] gerryharp: How are you set for computing resources?
[12:31pm] Adityab: I'd still like to polish sqwaterfalls.sh a bit, some sanity checks for the amount for input data should be added
[12:32pm] Adityab: gerryharp: Well, I have a laptop with 2 gigs of ram, and a 2.0 GHz Core i3 CPU
[12:32pm] Adityab: which is probably very modest for the tast at hand :)
[12:32pm] gerryharp: Your laptop should be OK, how big is your disk?
[12:32pm] gerryharp: Sanity checks - what do you mean? The input data files are going to be catted together and will be huge.
[12:33pm] sigblips: Adityab: That's faster than my fastest machine. (:
[12:33pm] Adityab: I have 190 GBs free on my disk
[12:33pm] gerryharp: OK, so each observation is about 20 GB. That would fit, one obs at a time
[12:34pm] gerryharp: Maybe the most painful part will be the download/ uploads?
[12:34pm] Adityab: yes the files will be huge
[12:35pm] gerryharp: I can check my accounts on AWS and see if they're still active.
[12:36pm] Adityab: I don't think I can manage downloading/uploading so much data - given the bandwidth of the data plan I'm using, it took me one full day to download the 2 GB file
[12:36pm] gerryharp: If not, I can ask jrseti to create a new one
[12:36pm] gerryharp: Anyway, lets get you set up on Amazon in the next few days.
[12:36pm] Adityab: ok
[12:37pm] gerryharp: I'd like to get an idea of how big the WF's are. In your experiments with 1s of data, how many WF's did you produces and how much disk space did they take?
[12:38pm] sigblips: There might be an AWS snag. I've been trying to get Avinash to do this for the past year.
[12:39pm] gerryharp: sigblips: Can you elaborate, please?
[12:41pm] khrm left the chat room. (Ping timeout: 255 seconds)
[12:42pm] Adityab left the chat room. (Ping timeout: 255 seconds)
[12:43pm] sigblips: I requested access to AWS computing resources multiples times but there was some some difficultly in doing so.
[12:44pm] gerryharp: Ah. Well as you know, Rob and I were working independently from the main line setiQuest group.
[12:44pm] gerryharp: I'll look into this and see what I can do.
[12:44pm] gerryharp: K, bye!
[12:44pm] sigblips: Yes but you work for the SETI Institute. Not sure if it was a liability or a priority issue.
[12:44pm] gerryharp left the chat room.
[12:52pm] sigblips: Well this concludes today's setiQuest community meeting. The transcript will be posted in the forum.