From: "Joshua Colwell" <josh.colwell@lasp.colorado.edu>
To: "Mark Showalter" <showalter@ringside.arc.nasa.gov>
Cc: "Joshua Colwell" <josh.colwell@lasp.colorado.edu>
Subject: PDS disk review
Date: Tue, 10 Jul 2001 10:51:21 -0600

Hi Mark,
Here are some comments after playing around with the PDS PPS rings
disk for a while.  I will try to do more.  The following comments are
mostly very minor, with the only major complaint probably falling
outside your domain.

In the Catalog directory: the windows operating systems thinks files
with a .cat file suffix are security catalog files and tries to open
them with the wrong application.  A note should be put in the readme
for this directory indicating that the contents of these files are in
ASCII format and can be viewed with a text viewer. Missing from
ref.cat is Horn et al. 1990, GRL 17, 1745-1748. In person.dat: change
Esposito's and Simmons's e-mails to
firstname.lastname@lasp.colorado.edu.


In the images directory, the datainfo.txt file does not point to the
software which can be used to read and view .img files.  Is there some
easier way to see an image than wading through the 100+ page OAL
user's guide? If so, please tell us somewhere.

In the software/oal/idl directory, the readme.txt file redirects us to
the OAL user's guide, but doesn't give the location and name of that
file.

In software/oal/examples/readme.txt it sas v1.lbl, sgc_0031.lbl and
sgc_0031.dat must in the directory to run the examples, but I can't
find those files.  Why not just include them in the examples
directory?  I don't see a "pub/oal" directory which is mentioned
there.

Sorcdata directory: no comments.

Rawdata directory: no comments.

Easydata directory: I looked here for easy views of calibration data. 
I guess that is in the calib directory, but the datainfo.txt or a
readme in the easydata directory should tell us that.

Then, in the calib directory, it doesn't contain all the calibration
files. I was looking for the PS4R01.dat observation of Vega, but it
seems that only observations of Sig Sgr and Bet Per are included in
the directory.  I think all of it should be there.

Also in the calib directory in calinfo.txt: in Phil's memo, give the
full reference for "Uranus" chapter by French et al.

At the top level in Aareadme.txt, *.pro should be in the list of
source code files.

Finally, aside from looking at the easydata I've had a frustratingly
difficult time getting to look at any other data.  This is largely
because the software is not friendly to Windows (or apparently linux)
operating system. The IDL software I looked at is out of date and
difficult to use.  The embedded comments are cryptic and the OAL
user's guide is too long.  The IDL code wants a shared library
oal_idl.so, but this isn't provided - it must be made. But I didn't
see any directions for making it, and in any event it would be easier
(for the user) just to provide a built version of oal_idl.so for the
major platforms.

From an archiving standpoint, it seems to be complete and everything
connected with the data is apparently very well documented.  I don't
have any comments on that part, and that is the fundamental part of
the disk.  But somehow it seems to me that it shouldn't be so
difficult for me to get a look at one of the images (I have no idea
how to deal with a VICAR2 image format, and the PDS headers don't
provide much help, and I can't run the software on my machine).  Now
I'm actually going to dig into writing my own programs to extract some
of this information, but I doubt that activity will result in any
additional reviewer-type comments on the disk.

Josh
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Joshua E. Colwell
Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics
University of Colorado
392 UCB
Boulder CO 80309-0392
josh.colwell@lasp.colorado.edu
Tel: 303-492-6805
Fax: 303-492-6946
http://lasp.colorado.edu/~colwell/
--------------------------------------------------------------------------



From: "Joshua Colwell" <josh.colwell@lasp.colorado.edu>
To: "Mark Showalter" <showalter@ringside.arc.nasa.gov>
Cc: "Joshua Colwell" <josh.colwell@lasp.colorado.edu>
Subject: additional PDS disk comments
Date: Tue, 10 Jul 2001 13:59:28 -0600

Mark, the following paragraph, found in the datainfo.txt file in the
editdata directory, should, I think, appear prominently in the
uppermost aareadme.txt file to direct people to the editdata
directory: These are the recommended data files to use for essentially
all PPS data analysis.  The Rings Node has gone to considerable effort
to test and identify the reliable and useful segments of the data
found in the RAWDATA directory.  Further information about how the
data files were edited may be found below and in the PDS label files;
see, in particular, the DESCRIPTION fields.


I've been trying to get some of the software to work.  For PPS data it
seems like your routines are the ones to use.  So I copied them to a
Sun workstation.  The first problem I encountered was that ftp-ing in
binary mode appended an invisible CTRL-M to the end of every line
which makes all the compilers barf.  So I retransferred in ascii
format. The documentation file assumes a relatively high level of
computer programming knowledge on the part of the user.  Is an
idiot-proof step-by-step tutorial beyond the scope of a PDS disk like
this?  If not, it would be helpful here, and then at the highest level
aareadme.txt file a pointer to it so that a first time user is walked
through the steps of getting the data from some editdata file into a
format they can look at (Excel, IDL, or just an ASCII printout).  Next
I had to chmod +x on all files.  I'm now at the point where it isn't
compiling because it isn't finding oal.h which is required by some of
the files in the PROFILE directory, but which is not included in that
directory as well.  I would recommend having all files which are used
by a particular set of routines located together.

Josh