2007 October 2
Oh no, I’m blog-slacking! Gotta get my head back in the game.
Second half of my time at the ATA was productive — still haven’t looked at any of the data taken for my proposal, but continued work on PAM optimization and figured out a bunch more stuff that I’d like to do if I have the time. For the PAM stuff, I was able to do in Java what I did with my sketchy Python back at Berkeley, namely, extract Miriad gain information, which is totally the hardest part of the exercise, so that’s good. Except that now I’m blocking on the fact that it looks like my changes to PAM settings are overridden with the defaults by the time observations start, which is a bit of a problem when you want to find what the best settings are. But from what I’ve seen so far, I have a hunch that some stray bit of software is resetting the defaults, and with luck the offender can be tracked down and commented out pretty painlessly.
Today was catching up on administrivia (reimbursement!) and the Star Formation homework (due: last Thursday). A few roadblocks in the latter that feel a lot more like errors in the set than mistakes that I’m making. I’ll ask some of the people who’ve already handed the damn thing in — falls short of the Platonic ideal of problem set practice, I guess, but I’ve been past that for a while now.