From the summit of Mauna Kea, Hawaii

Hi there,
it’s 20:21 here in Hawaii. I am currently in the control room of UKIRT on Mauna Kea at 4200m above sea level waiting for the humidity to drop. This is actually my second night here and so far it has not been great ! The weather is actually not that bad but there are some low clouds occasionally coming up and causing the humidity to spike.

I was quite worried about this observing run because I’ve never been working at such a high altitude. I am quite pleased that so far it has been going pretty well: no headaches nor any sickness. I’ve even been doing quite a bit of coding for the VISTA quality-control database which is not really bad considering that some people have rushed down the mountain because they show either minor or major symptoms of AMS.

Tonight we had a great sunset. I managed to take a few pictures as well but I forgot the USB cable down at the hotel so I will not be able to add the pictures to this post. In the meanwhile, if you want to get a feeling of how’s life up here, with a funny twist, have a look at the Hotel Mauna Kea video produced by a visiting astronomer:

 

Extreme shepherding

Way too tired to post anything serious… tough week, and it’s not over yet ! So, here’s a question that I could not help asking myself:

Have I been living in the UK for too long, or isn’t this video simply brilliant !?!
Enjoy, and thanks to Alexandra for pointing this one out a while ago.

 

What am I up to

Very busy period on both my main work projects: the Gaia mission and the Vista public surveys.

For the Gaia project we have been experimenting a bit with Hbase and Hadoop to deal with the bulk of the observations. Unfortunately we don’t really have the right hardware to carry out some decent stress-tests, but we should still be able to get a rough picture to decide what to do next. We have quite a big hardware purchase coming up and we need to get it right because the budget is tight and the time before launch (Feb/Mar 2012) is closing in. Hopefully by the end of next week we should be able to complete a few test run and compare the results with similar test where all the data was handle by an Oracle 10g database.

For the Vista project I really need to finalize the relational model for the quality control database schema. The main structure is there, but unfortunately some important details of the processing software are not well defined yet so I am struggling a little bit. The implementation uses Hibernate for the ORM and a custom-made framework to configure what information need to be extracted from the astronomical images (FITS files). The design is quite sound although, if I had an infinite amount of time and patience, there are a few loose ends that I would like to improve.

As a side-project (given that I haven’t got enough on my plate) I’ve been playing with some very popular Web 2.0 apps in an unconventional way. I don’t particularly find them that useful or interesting for their original purpose, but I think I can get something useful out of them. And, if you are curious, no, it has nothing to do with useless flashy crap and bodged Apple-wanna-be cover-flow heavy-weight rubbish. Oops, I’m about to get into rant-mode… but it is really too late for this now. I simply get pissed off when I hear people waffle about Web 2.0 apps and then, when you really look at it, all they have done is to display a bunch of images in a fancy and rather user-unfriendly way. Ok, enough ranting for today, I’ve finished my wee dram and it is about time to get some sleep !

 

International Year of Astronomy 2009

2009 is the International Year of Astronomy. The Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit (CASU), were I work, is deeply involved in several corner-stone projects, both ground- and space-based:

• Gaia
• UKIDSS
• Vista

just to name a few. CASU is providing high-quality data processing services to the UK and international astronomical community. I cannot anticipate too much, but, since today, I’ve started working on the integration of CASU daily activities with Web 2.0 technologies and you will soon be hearing from me again. Sorry for the secrecy, but you can never really trust anyone when you have a decent idea !

 

Best G. W. Bush moments

I guess these will help out historians putting the George W. Bush administrations in perspective…

 

MySQL on Leopard and BitNami stack

This is more a note to myself to remember what I’ve done rather than a real post.

Today I decided to remove an old version of MySQL I had installed on my MacBook Pro to install the nice BitNami MAMP stack. I’ve decided to move to the BitNami MAMP stack because it will be then really straightforward to install several nice Open Source applications I would like to play with.

To get rid of the previous version of MySQL I’ve done the following:

1. sudo rm -rf /usr/local/mysql*
2. sudo rm -rf /Library/StartupItems/MySQLCOM
3. sudo rm -rf /Library/PreferencePanes/MySQL.prefPane
4. Remove the line “MYSQLCOM=-YES-” from /etc/hostconfig
5. sudo rm -rf /Library/Receipts/mysql*
6. sudo rm -rf /Library/Receipts/MySQL*

 

A praise for the Academic Reader

One of the daily rituals of every astronomer is to skim through the arxiv for the latest pre-prints. Usually you get this habit when you are in grad school but then, as time goes by, it gets harder and harder to find some time to do it. It is not really a matter of procratinating it is just that you have more urgent things on your list requiring some attention. Actually, the daily ritual becomes the “oh-crap”-cry when you open you emal inbox and find out that half of your nice (and preciously rare) british sunny morning will go in fixing some boring thing that you can’t really ignore.

 

Will you derive ?

Apparently some people would…

This reminded me of my dark ages spent over calculus books (except for the dancing bit). Enjoy.

 

 

The life-changing experience…

At 10:59 am (BST) of September 12th my first son, Martino Zeno, was born at the Rosie Hospital in Cambridge. Although it feels like ages ago, only a month has actually gone by. Holding my own son in my arms a few minutes after he was born, still hurriedly wrapped in a few surgery cloths and stained with her mother’s blood triggered the strongest flow of emotions I’ve ever felt in my life.
Probably it was the relief after a labour started three days before, the rush to the surgery room after 24 hours spent at the hospital trying to have a normal and natural birth but when I finally had Martino in my arms and saw the look in Francesca’s eyes all the tiredness, worries and stress went away and I suddenly felt a rush of joy, happiness and, again, relief. Probably Martino felt the same way because he soon gave his very special welcome to the world by crapping all over me. Damn midwives, they didn’t put the nappy on! I am just kidding, no hard feelings at all, I was still wearing the scrubs they provided me to assist Francesca in the surgery room so no worries there.

 

Quynh Hoa in bloom !

Finally after almost two years, we got our first Quynh Hoa flowers! Probably you’ve never heard about it before but that would not be too surprising: it is a Vietnamese plant. The most exciting thing about this plant are the flowers: they only start blooming at night and by the next morning they are gone. One of the popular names of the plant is indeed “Queen of the night”. Another interesting “feature” of the flower is that its stalks grows off one of the leaves of plant.
We received a little branch from Pierre and Hoang Mai, his wife, just before they left Cambridge to move back to Paris in winter 2005. We planted it in a nice pot and did not see much going on for the rest of the winter: it was just staying there without showing much signs of life. Then spring came and it suddenly started growing at an amazing rate: about 1cm in 24 hours! It was really impressive and we actually have to move it to a larger pot because we were afraid the other one was not large enough to cope with the growth rate.