Wednesday, October 27, 2004
Starlink for the VO
The next talk in the afternoon VO session was given by my boss Dave Giaretta who talked about the Starlink project, and how we've gone about VO enabling the Starlink legacy classic software, along with developing complimentary "next generation" Java software.
Open SkyQuery
This afternoon Will O'Mullane did a live demo of the NVO Open SkyQuery portal. During the demo he showed how you could use it to upload and then cross match your own data against one of the "standard" catalogues (such as 2MASS or SDSS) served by an existing SkyNode. I must admit to being much impressed by the progress the NVO guys are making...
Tuesday, October 26, 2004
An afternoon of VO
This afternoon we had Keith Noddle and Nic Walton talking about AstroGrid. Disappointingly the URL which Nic advertised where we could find the AstroGrid release currently gives a 404 error, presumably something will turn up before the NeSC meeting in December.
The iPod Photo
Apple has just released the iPod Photo. Rumours about this product have been spreading for several weeks. With the new iPod also comes a new version of iTunes (version 4.7).
The new iPod Photo
The new iPod Photo comes in 40GB and 60GB versions. More information about the new iPod is available at the Apple iPod Store.
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| CREDIT: Apple |
The new iPod Photo comes in 40GB and 60GB versions. More information about the new iPod is available at the Apple iPod Store.
The VOSpec tool
Pedro Osuna from ESA/ESAC talked about VOSpec. While there was a demo of this tool yesterday in one of the focus sessions, I can't find anything on the web about it. It looks like it hasn't actually been officially released, so despite the pretty pictures, it's pretty hard to get a handle on what it can actually do.
The new ESA VOSpec tool
To be honest, it looks a lot less capable than the Starlink SPLAT tool.
The new ESA VOSpec tool
To be honest, it looks a lot less capable than the Starlink SPLAT tool.
The Aladin experience
In the first of the Vitual Observatory (VO) sessions François Ochsenbein talked about Aladin, the CDS killer application.
Aladin development started 7 to 8 years ago and has evolved into a tool which includes a number of services, fufilling the need to put astronomical data onto the astronomer's desktop. The goals of Aladin development is interactiveity, performance, ease of installation and connectivity.
Aladin in written in Java and one of the strengths of Java is the ease of interactivity, but it has notoriously slow. Aladin has always pushed the limits of Java performance as it has improved (e.g. JIT compiling). However it also provides good ease of installation, although the applet concept is now dying.
The real power of Aladin is in it's connectivity to a large range of different data sources, and it's ability to interoperate with other Java applications like VOPlot and VOSpec.
The next step is to extend Aladin to access the emerging web service infrastructure.
Aladin development started 7 to 8 years ago and has evolved into a tool which includes a number of services, fufilling the need to put astronomical data onto the astronomer's desktop. The goals of Aladin development is interactiveity, performance, ease of installation and connectivity.
Aladin in written in Java and one of the strengths of Java is the ease of interactivity, but it has notoriously slow. Aladin has always pushed the limits of Java performance as it has improved (e.g. JIT compiling). However it also provides good ease of installation, although the applet concept is now dying.
The real power of Aladin is in it's connectivity to a large range of different data sources, and it's ability to interoperate with other Java applications like VOPlot and VOSpec.
The next step is to extend Aladin to access the emerging web service infrastructure.
Morning poster session
Either there isn't enough poster space, or there are a lot more posters than normal at this ADASS because posters are only up for one day rather than the full run of the conference. My FROG poster was up yesterday, and today Malcolm and Norman got their turn.
The Tuesday poster session
Norman was talking about the new Starlink build system, while Malcolm's poster compared JAC/Starlink ORAC-DR to the ESO Eclipse environment for ISAAC reduction.
The Tuesday poster session
Norman was talking about the new Starlink build system, while Malcolm's poster compared JAC/Starlink ORAC-DR to the ESO Eclipse environment for ISAAC reduction.
Breakfast meetings
I skipped out of the conference to go and see an old friend for breakfast, all very Hollywood...
Warren and I did out PhD's together at Keele, but we've only run into each other once since then. However he's out here working for Caltech, doing site testing for for CELT, so despite hectic schedules we sort of had to arrange to meet.
Warren and I did out PhD's together at Keele, but we've only run into each other once since then. However he's out here working for Caltech, doing site testing for for CELT, so despite hectic schedules we sort of had to arrange to meet.
You've got mail...
In fact I've got quite a lot of it. While I've managed to access my inbox, for the first time since late Saturday night, my home machine is now dead. I'm having to wade through all the spam by hand that is normally automatically pre-filtered using SpamAssassin. I hadn't actually realised how much spam I was getting these days, it looks to be several hundred messages a day. In any case, this means that while I do have access to email, I'm going to be a lot slower to respond than normal.
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