User:Eric Myers

From I2U2

Affiliation: LIGO Hanford Observatory, Hanford, Washington
Location: Poughkeepsie, New York (I telecommute)
E-mail: Eric.Myers@ligo.org
Phone: +1-503-564-4169

You can leave me a message on my talk page.

You can see what I'm doing (or should be doing) from my To-Do List

Contents 1 OLPC XO 2 Spring 2008 3 Background 4 To-Do List

[edit] OLPC XO

I recently purchased an XO laptop from the One Laptop Per Child project (OLPC), through their Give One/Get One program. The educational software may be of some interest to I2U2. I've started a log of my investigations as a sub-page of my user page over on Pirates@Home: User:Wormholio/OLPC

[edit] Spring 2008

This is going to be a busy spring. In addition to working on I2U2 I'll be doing the following:

• I am teaching the second semester of introductory physics (Physics 142) at Bard College, on Mondays and Wednesdays from 10:30 to 12:30. (Office hours TBA.)

• I am teaching one section of the second semester introductory physics lab (General Physics Lab II) at Marist College on Tuesday afternoons, 2:00-4:45.

• I also do some software contracting unrelated to LIGO or I2U2, primarily related to BOINC.

[edit] Background

I am a physicist working under contract to LIGO to develop software and teaching materials for the LIGO e-Lab.

Before working on I2U2 I was part of the team that set up Einstein@Home, a BOINC project which allows people to donate the spare cycles on their PC or Mac to search for evidence of gravitational waves, all while displaying a mesmerizing screensaver. Previous to that I worked on the Web Lecture Archive Project for ATLAS, and on development of a calibration database managment interface for the preshower detectors for the DØ experiment at Fermilab.

To prepare for the design, development and deployment of Einstein@Home I set up another BOINC project for testing, called Pirates@Home, and I now use it to test software and ideas for I2U2. I have recently added a MediaWiki glossary to Pirates@Home, and I've used this as a test-bed for single sign-on between the BOINC and wiki components. The result is a BOINC authentication module for MediaWiki

[edit] To-Do List

You know you have a lot to do when your to-do list becomes a 3x3 matrix, but that turns out to be a good way to organize my tasks. There are 3 major components I'm working on for the LIGO e-Lab: the Analysis Tool, the flow of data from LIGO to where it can be used by the Analysis Tool, and the web pages which document the e-Lab and provide the logbook and glossary. There are also three major priorities: We have teachers using our tool and site, so their activities have to be supported. We want to integrate our efforts with those QuarkNet. And we want to add new features to the analysis tool, logbook, glossary, and the whole site. Thus my to-do list becomes:

Priority	Analysis Tool	Dataflow	Web Pages
Support Teachers	Single sign-on / anonymous use Plot alignment problem ROOT script error reporting Sampling selectors Plot N channels (N>1) Job control: bg, batch, at (test/prototype) Plot Graph = "GO" Simple load monitoring	1-sec trend frames 1-sec trends 'on the fly' 10-min and 60-min trend frames	LIGO e-Lab pages ("blue pages") prepared Logbook Glossary (single sign-on) Glossary - special user permissions
Integrate w/ QuarkNet	dmtroot update (build at Argonne/ send via LIGOtools) Job control for Grid PHP/JSP components play nice together General mechanism for passing arbitrary parameters DMT can read via LDR What else?	script to copy RDS trim copy of RDS publish data via LDR	Blue pages -> Argonne Logbook -> Argonne ? Glossary -> Argonne ?
New Features	Plot segments rather than one long timeseries DMT monitors as transformations Transformations: DQ plots, metadata transfer, non-trival example (movie?), metaio w/ ROOT, LIGO_LW, calibration, compound transformations Time intervals: zoom and pan, endpoints within frames, leap seconds, auto-adjusting axes labels, more robust time entry Database items: channel descriptions, run parameter logging, database server, channel database, run parameter table, segment DQ table, transformation table User interface: file export to eXcel, CSV, or R; usage statistics, session save/restore, refined channel selector, auth via SSL cert	Data Source (channel) database Data Quality/Status (segment) database NOAA buoys and METARs	Privacy! 1 person 1 login File attachment thumbnails Poster upload teachers can create new "rooms" user file lockers Roles-based permissions system