A New Record

[Thomas Droege <tdroege2@earthlink.net>]

Wednesday nights' data sets a new record.  1,826,705 measurement pairs.  I
can't see very well.  (I can't see a mag 2 star if I look straight at it.)
So it is hard for me to tell how clear the sky is.  But the telescopes
know.  There are big differences in  the number of stars seen as determined
by the sky conditions.  This even though the weather reports show little
difference.  This is one reason I am eagerly awaiting data from ARNE and
ROB.  I am curious as to how much fainter they will be able to see.

I am looking forward to breaking the record many more times as the nights
get longer and the sky gets clearer going into fall.

I am very proud of myself.  I have written code to dump the night's runs
onto CDs.  In the past, I have had to click on each file to load it into
xcdroast.  By the time I would click on 1200 or so files, my eyes were
pretty bleary and I was sick of the whole process.  This would take me
three or four hours.  On top of this one has to sort out the good from the
bad files, so it is not mindless clicking.  

The program only stores files that match the .clt file.  This required my
learning something about regular expressions.  The animal books are
completely general and speak in a language foreign to me.  I finally went
out and bought "Perl for Dummies" and found it to be just my speed.  In a
few minutes I was writing regular expressions, and even understood the
basic ideas.  The Camel and the llama did not give me the same result.  OK,
they tend to be perfectly rigorous.  Also completely un understandable.  

I am also using cdrecord instead of xcdroast.  Thanks to all who gave me
clues as to how to do this.  Of course nothing worked the first time and I
had to figure out what the errors were.  That is why I am feeling proud.  I
am beginning to get the hang of this script software.  I still am using
some awful practices, like writing in line code to burn up to 12 disks. 
Just repeating code instead of writing a loop.  But I will do better over
time.  Some of the code is done right.

Tom Droege