Telescope Silence (Sep 17 2009)

As Josef pointed out in yesterday's thread we are indeed unable to get any new data from the telescope until early November. This is a problem because we have only a few drives full of data on our shelf, and maybe a few drives down at Arecibo (which we asked to have shipped up to Berkeley).

The silver lining is that Jeff has been putting effort into getting the data recorder crashing issues fixed - now that project can be back-burnered and he can focus on RFI issues. Meanwhile I'm cracking on the software radar blanking stuff. I actually made a significant advance this morning, discovering that at any given time the radar patterns we are locking onto can drift as little as 0.1 samples, with drastic results in our ability to find the radar. I've solved that little bit, and it's all pretty much plumbing/testing/deploying at this point. Hopefully I can get this rolling before we completely run out of data. Of course, I always feel that running out of data shouldn't be that big a deal.

By the way, one of the reasons I've been lax with these threads lately is that I'm getting tired of being the sole focus for tech support/donation queries/etc. Please don't be insulted if I address roughly 0% of your requests that are personally addressed to me. I simply don't have the time. I keep asking for additional web presence and user interaction from the others or perhaps the hiring of actual web support staff, to no avail.

- Matt

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-- BOINC/SETI@home network/web/science/development person
-- "Any idiot can have a good idea. What is hard is to do it." - Jeanne-Claude

Viva La Vida Master Matt

By the way, one of the reasons I've been lax with these threads lately is that I'm getting tired of being the sole focus for tech support/donation queries/etc. Please don't be insulted if I address roughly 0% of your requests that are personally addressed to me. I simply don't have the time. I keep asking for additional web presence and user interaction from the others or perhaps the hiring of actual web support staff, to no avail.

- Matt

Its called job stress. Lots of problems and to many dikes to plug everyday, to little manpower or resources to plug them.
Matt dont worry about us. A little down time is great for blowing the dust out of the cooling fans.
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By the way, one of the reasons I've been lax with these threads lately is that I'm getting tired of being the sole focus for tech support/donation queries/etc. Please don't be insulted if I address roughly 0% of your requests that are personally addressed to me. I simply don't have the time. I keep asking for additional web presence and user interaction from the others or perhaps the hiring of actual web support staff, to no avail.

- Matt

Matt,
Anyone reading your tech messages on a regular basis is aware that you simply don't have the time to respond to everyone's comments. We know that sometimes you "gloss over" the comments and are aware of the issues.

Its good news about the radar blanking, well done Matt! And thank you for taking the time to write these tech news messages!

Thank you Matt,
John.
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Matt:

A suggestion for your technical posts. Have a piece of boiler plate at the bottom of all of your messages that routes all technical support questions to the SETI Help Forums and to the BOINC online help. This might cut down on you getting tech support requests.
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BOINC WIKI

Maybe you can some student doing some kind of social study about online communities, who in the course of those studies acts as an interface between staff and users....

...

By the way, one of the reasons I've been lax with these threads lately is that I'm getting tired of being the sole focus for tech support/donation queries/etc. Please don't be insulted if I address roughly 0% of your requests that are personally addressed to me. I simply don't have the time. I keep asking for additional web presence and user interaction from the others or perhaps the hiring of actual web support staff, to no avail.

Recently Facebook (I am not a member) has shown some interest in BOINC projects but SETI@home is not one of them. It's a pity, since it is the project with the greatest users number.
Tullio

Looking at these numbers, is this a sign that all of the data from the telescope has almost been processed? Tapes listed are all the tapes that are currently in the splitter queue. Data as of 25 Oct 2009 8:00:16 [done] = Astropulse work

Multibeam Astropulse
09se09af 50.20 GB (10) (done)
10se09aa 50.20 GB (8) (done)
10se09ab 50.20 GB (9) (done)
10se09ac 38.15 GB (5) (done)
10se09af 50.20 GB (5) (done)
10se09ag 50.20 GB (done)
10se09ah 50.20 GB (done)
11se09aa 50.20 GB (done)
11se09ab 50.20 GB (done)
11se09ac 50.20 GB (done)
total available channels on disk: 140 0
channels in progress: 5 0
channels done: 23 0
channels ended in error: 9 0
total channels to do: 103 0

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Live in NZ y not join Smile City?

We are getting close to the end of new data until the telescope is available again. Not to worry, Matt's radar blanking software seems to have tested out. That means we can finally process the older tapes that were badly interfered with by the radar noise. This should keep our system busy until when new data can be recorded again.
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Questions? Answers are in the "Unofficial" BOINC Wiki.

Boinc V7.0.27
Win7 i5 3.33G 4GB, GTX470

We are getting close to the end of new data until the telescope is available again. Not to worry, Matt's radar blanking software seems to have tested out. That means we can finally process the older tapes that were badly interfered with by the radar noise. This should keep our system busy until when new data can be recorded again.