How did the NSA hack our emails? by Numberphile

I like to see the numberphile videos as often as they appear. I find them very interesting, but I didn't share before in this blog. This time is different.

They have talk about a field that likes me very much: elliptic curves (and a pseudorandom number generator made with them, the Dual_EC_DRBG), and the greatest point is that they have summarized in 11 minutes in a wonderful elegance:

[link to the video]

But they have not only provide an explanation for not initiated, they have pointed the key of the weakness that could have been introduced.

Update: To often I forget to write the title of a post...

Update 20140116: For further reading, I stumbled a post with a proof of concept about how this affects all the users of this algorithm. It is still a suspicion that 'P' and 'Q' has been chosen from a known 'd' and no one has calculate it, but it is that: suspicious. If you are impatient (suppose not because you are at the end of this post) or you don't wanna see into the maths, go direct to the conclusions of the post.

GnuPG launches crowdfunding campaign

Long time no see! But I've found a reason to write. Yesterday, Werner Koch has send an announcement into the GnuPG maillists: 

• A crowd-funding campaign as a way to give a new push to the project.

If you read Werner's email and/or saw the video, you may think in contribute to the project.

About Spanish time region change

Recently have started in Spain a debate about change the time zone to recover the one used when the republic. I think, it's curious that I didn't heard since now about this change. I know that Greenwich meridian cuts the territory and even that we are not in the same zone than England (UK). But it was forgotten to mention to me by anyone that before it was.

According to what I have heard this days, was during the second world war, when the nazi German invade France, they have changed the time zone of France (who where also at Greenwich) to set the same than the invader and the Spanish dictator waved his ally changing the Spanish also.

So far so good? Up to this point there is nothing else in the matter of set back the time zone or not. Every year we change from winter time to summer time and vice-versa, with caring about time zone business.

But the justification I have heard to support this change I think is point less. You can read in the press, that this will help to improve productivity, or that the siesta have the will be gone, or that this will improve working habits...

This is not the solution on the working habits at all! How can think that if some one that is working from 8am to 7pm, will change its work time schedule if politicians change the time zone? The only effect on the change of the time zone, will be that the sun will shift the rise and the set, but will not point the real problem of the Spanish productivity. The exampled journey will be tagged between 7am to 6pm, that is useless for working habits!

There is a brain fire recorded thing in Spain: it is not much important how much you work, the important thing is how much hours are you at work (how much seems that you work). And this is the issue about the working habits and the productivity. Many bosses likes to see you heating the chair and they don't like to see you being the first that leave the office in the evening (even if you have been the first to arrive).

Until this issue is not fix, the working habits will still be bad... In this country, what the boss expect from you, is to see you doing unpaid extra-hours even if you don't have anything to do. And never thing in register those hours, I've work with a time clock machine than automatically signs you off after the 8 hours even if you are still in the office. If you do that, the boss will be happy with you, if you work hard but you don't stay more (except when something really unexpected happen) you will be classified as "not very committed to the project".

Once I had a boss that told me: "we don't want workers that only does eight hours". Put the time zone you want, if the origin of this sentence is not fixed, the balancing between work and family time will be lopsided hopeless...

In other European countries, there are companies points you an assistant when you trigger overtime alarms, to help you to organize your time or detect if you are overloaded.

cloud.sagemath.org

After to follow the coursera's "High Performance Scientific Computing" I've learn about the Amazon Web Services and how to use them. Specially in the hook for new customers with 12 month free tier. I have mention it about a month a go.

I have there some sage sheets that in other alternatives didn't finish the calculation (there is a sheet timeout when there is no activity). With my own installation, I can be aware of when this instance is being crazy and forget this timeout to continue the calculations.

But there is something more with sage in the cloud. Further than install sage in a machine in the cloud, there is a new sage project to take advantage from the cloud: cloud.sagemath.com

I have started using it, not much yet, but I like specially to mention one of the talks than William Stein did:

I recommend this talk very much.

Sage(math) in the Amazon Web Service

A few days a go a new version of Sage has been released, the 5.11.

When I was doing a coursera's High Performance Scientific Computing, I've learn how to have a small machine in the Amazon Web Services. In particular I've set up, as the course shows but was just one of the options I would do, an Ubuntu 13.04 Amazon Machine Image (It look that the ami I used is no longer available).

With this very small virtual machine (64bits, Up to 2 EC2 Compute Units (for short periodic bursts), 613 MiB memory, 8GB Hard disk, I/O Performance: Low). And for the first year the service is for free.

What to do with a machine in the cloud? Lets be sage...

There is a easy way to have your sage installation and someone else will maintain the sagemath package. With 3 commands you can have an installation in your ubuntu.

The thing I did by hand was and script to insert this as a service in the init.d:

#!/bin/bash
# configuration
SAGE_OPTS="-notebook interface='' secure=True"
SAGE_LOG="/var/log/sage/sage.log"
SAGE_USER='ubuntu' #default in aws machine
# commands
CMD_ECHO="/bin/echo"
CMD_GREP="/bin/grep"
CMD_SLEEP="/bin/sleep"
CMD_KILLALL="/usr/bin/killall"
sage_start() {
        $CMD_ECHO "Starting Sage..."
        (su - $SAGE_USER -c "sage $SAGE_OPTS" 2&>1 ) >> $SAGE_LOG &
}
sage_stop() {
        $CMD_ECHO "Stopping Sage..."
        # CAUTION : maybe you kill something important in your server
        #$CMD_KILLALL python
        ps -ef |grep "sage -notebook" |grep -v grep|awk '{print $2}' |xargs kill -9
}
case $1 in
        start)
                sage_start
                ;;
        stop)
                sage_stop
                ;;
        restart)
                sage_stop
                $CMD_SLEEP 5
                sage_start
                ;;
        *)
                $CMD_ECHO "Use: $0 {start|stop|restart}"
                exit 1
                ;;
esac
exit 0

After that, a simple:
$ /etc/init.d/sage_daemon start
is enough to have the notebook  up and running. Perhaps you would prefer to insert it to the boot process
$ sudo update-rc.d sage_daemon defaults 95
(this is only an example)

Best of all is that since I installed it (it was version 5.9) to the current 5.11, those two updates have been as simple as:
$ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade


Incredible, I'm really happy with this, the only point I'm missing is to have those binaries also available for debian's installations.

working with git(hub)

After so many years of work with cvs and later with svn, many of the project I work with uses git. It's not so easy to start with git, but once you did, you will fall in love.

I only can imagine what a young developer can start using version control directly from git, but my knowledge is conditioned by my previous experience. First time I've work with cvs, I never remember how the commands works, what they mean, which order was the correct. But you learn. Migration to subversion, was good. Many of the things starts to work the way you think.

But git is a big step further. It has been a big change for me. To mention to books have helped:

• Magic Git (pdf) and,
• pro-git (pdf)

Shorted than books are videos, and the one that I prefer about git is:

Power Your Workflow With Git

Recently I've seen another video that helps me on improve my way to work with git: the git flow.

This, together with the decentralized repository schema, make me happy. A long a go I was trying to find a way to have code in more than one repository and have them synchronized.

Nowadays this feature is even documented!

For example, the work with the Lima project. The main sources are on github but instead of have all the developers working in parallel and all of us committing to the same trunk (specially because I know a very short number of people that works with subversion with branches), each of the developers have their own branch by make a fork. That is great! You have your own branch, and with the sync feature mention before it's incredibly easy to get the official changes to your repository:

The first time you do it, from your clone of your fork:

$ git remote add esrf-bliss https://github.com/esrf-bliss/Lima.git

And when you like to take those changes:

$ git fetch esrf-bliss

$ git checkout master

$ git merge esrf-bliss/master

And with this you can upload the result of your synchronization:

$ git push origin master

Further than that, you can have as many remotes as forks it has. And you can repeat this with any of the branches that the other developers can do (remember that the master is only one branch more with an special name, meaning what you think is the trunk).

Scopes refactoring

Usually august is a good time to think on refactorings. During the year normal operation there is never enough time to look back. The sentence "I want all, and I want it now" it's a classical sentence from clients and bosses (many times followed with a "I want it fix, but don't touch any thing").

Also is good because too many managers doesn't care about refactoring. They don't really understand what this means and didn't give to it the real value of this action. For them, often, the maintenance of some code is sort of magic, they don't know how this can be made. Furthermore they don't care, and only think in do it fast an cheap.

In the case of the scope, we are currently using the scope waveforms in a Filling Pattern calculation using the Fast Current Transformer signal. This was the fpFCT project. In this case, we went far away from the original design of the access to the scopes. This original design was already improved long a go, and looks that now it's time to remade it base on the newer requirements.

The current bottleneck is the Visa middlemen. The agent that shows the user the interface of an instrument like an scope doesn't know about protocols. This agent knows the language to talk with the instrument, but not the channel used to have bidirectional communication with it.

From Max IV, there is a proposal to talk directly via socket. This will remove from the scene one of the actors, and for sure will improve.

The second proposal, should be helped by a new feature requested in tango: give the information to the device that someone is listening (or not) over the events on an attribute. This is, avoid to request information to the instrument if noone is listening.

Current idea of the refactoring is to use proposal one, and by commands (until the mentioned feature is available) configure the attributes that are being updated by an isolated thread, optimizing the scope access, in an approach to proposal two.

Update 20130806: Max IV has contributed with their nice idea in a branch.

Some more numbers from Alba, last 3 months

Some time a go, I wrote about numbers that are around this facility. I have say some summary, in the update at the end of the post, about the operation calendar. But this calendar has been changed by the management (unilaterally) after the problems we've faced after eastern until June.

I didn't post anything about those almost 3 months of unexpected shutdown, because I saw what happens as surrealistic.

After the week shutdown of eastern (April 2nd), it was not possible to start up the machine. Some of the collected data from the latest days shows that in March 27th the flow on certain places of the water cooling system went down due to an unknown reason.

Ok, at the beginning all of us thought that this will be a short problem, easy to be fixed in commissioned and well known system. But it wasn't the case. Day after day, the system was not recovered. Shifts of beam time where cancel. During April very shy, beam time cancel by weeks (but working shifts not). First week many people was purging the water cooling system in shifts. Popularly we start calling Alba as the purgatory (as a joke word combination).

Well, days pass and the origin of the problem was not found. In May the beam time of the month was full cancelled, one complete run. Even that, the work shifts wasn't. The workers on shifts gets the notification of the shift cancel by half a week, on average (but the spread makes people notified that the night shift is cancelled when they arrive to the facility).

Finally, past June was found a working point of the cooling system (meta)stable. Many things has been changed and from the information given to all the workers, it looks that is not fully understood what had happen, neither know what or which of the things made has make the system running.

But this was the end of the water cooling system issue, but the beginning of some other collateral problems. One of the things is that some dirt was found in the water circuit. As far as I know previously, this was a circuit of deionized pure water, but looks not compatible with what was found in there.

Another problem faced was a poor materials quality in some hoses. During one of the affected weekends, it has been explained to the workers, one PLC that manages the cooling system was weirdly hanged (no new values measured, but the last read was send with a new time-stamp as if it was really read). Because many equipments where in test, specially magnets, they heat up the water temperature and some hoses vulcanizes. Water leaks started, the circuit gets half empty, pump cavitates, and on Monday morning the problem was faced as burned pumps.

After 2 months trying to realise what was happening, this last was slap. Undermining the moral. But wasn't the latest issue. Even if you cannot believe, a TLD placed in a insertion device (ID) with standard stick to measure the dose in some encoders, fells on the cavity of the ID and when the gap was close it dent the cavity: enough to hit the beam, having to change the section.

By today, the synchrotron is up again and giving beam time for experiments. But the new calendar has magically appeared:

What has special this calendar? Well it sets the unexpected shutdown as "warm up" not as "off" as a shutdown is. Well, yes, it can be think like that. Many people has work very very hard this time, and no one of us was something like "off". (I'm not saying that "off" is no work because many maintenance tasks waits from those "off" periods).

One of (the many) issues of this calendar is that it is trying to recover the lost time telling the workers as "we have to complain with this unexpected problem". But is forgetting the efforts already made, and is asking renewed efforts foreseeing the problem as unpredictable. It wasn't an accident, this was a lack of knowledge! We still don't know what causes the problem, neither what fixes it (or looks like it fixes). There is no proves that this will not happen again.

But how the calendar has changed?

The expected 4992h of machine up time (57% of the year) it reschedules to 4592h (52%, converting the 2.5 months of shutdown in only a 5% of the year time). From the experimentation point of view, the beam time was scheduled to be available for 3600h (41.10%) and now would be 3312h (37.80%) only 3.30% of reduction.

But what has been lost in this unexpected shutdown is 1008h of the scheduled beam time (1176h of the machine up time).

It we lost the 11.50% of the beam time, how can be possible that at the end of the year this drops down to only a 3.30%? Easy, stilling the rest time. Now some of the "off" days and what was originally scheduled as "warm up" is now beam or machine time.

It's easy to realize that the 6 extra weekends that now are planned to work in shifts will not be worked by the rescheduled calendar...

Even all of those things, this morning, planned to have beam for users, the "solved" problem peep again:

No beam... 

Universal (Hexa)Decimal Classification

Since I have started with research over elliptic curves, many papers, book and other similar stuff has been read by me to take the knowledge. But there is an issue when the number of this things get too big. How can I organize the information of those papers (or books and so) in order to get back to this information and refresh the memory contents?

Very long a go, I did a course on bibliographic search and catalogue. In this course I have learned the way that the libraries in general organizes the books in there: the UDC (Universal Decimal Classification). I've looking how can I reuse this to classify the documents I think relevant for my research.

I have set up my own main classes and also I have tried to let at least one of them vacant for further updates, that mean to extend the fields of research. Event that pretension, by today, it's full again. This means that probably I'll have to do my second refactoring of this structure, because in the past I had once already this problem.

There is another way to modify my classification to have more vacants, that is think in another base. As far as I understood, the UDC was restricted from 0 to 9 to have like only one character field. Then why not a computer scientist can think in a Universal Hexadecimal Classification (UHC)?

For the records, my current main classes and their categories:

• 0.Mathematics
• 010.Number Theory
• 020.Abstract Algebra
• 030.Information Theory
• 040.Logic
• 050.Elliptic curves
• 1.Public Key
• 101.Finite fields cryptography
• 102.Elliptic curves cryptography
• 103.Hyperelliptic curves cryptography
• 110.Cryptoanalysis
• 111.Finite fields cryptoanalysis
• 112.Elliptic curves cryptoanalysis
• 113.Hyperelliptic curves cryptoanalysis
• 120.Isogenies
• 121.Isogeny volcanoes and stars
• 122.Isogenies cryptography
• 2.Symmetric cryptology
• 210.Rijndael
• 3.Hash functions
• 310.SHA
• 320.Elliptic and hyperelliptic curves
• 4.Stream cyphers
• 5.Secret sharing
• 6.Homomorphic encryption
• 7. vacant
• 8. vacant
• 9. vacant
• A. vacant
• B. vacant
• C. vacant
• D.Computation
• D10. Distributed systems
• D20. Parallel computing
• E.Hardware
• E10.Embedded systems
• E20.Smartcards
• E30.Rfid
• F.Standards
• F01.Internationals
• F10.European
• F20.North American
• F30.Russian

Because to the uncategorised classes, I think this is full and it's the first place to start merging classes and dividing them in categories. The solution of the hexadecimal, even if I have already applied, is not fixed for ever. May some day, certain categories would be subcategories. Currently this classification contains 409 documents (papers, books, and so on). My bibtex files aren't and they should.

What this system is not complaining is how to archive the notes that I wrote in the margins on the papers I read and place in here or the marks I set labelling pages on books, and so on. But this is an issue that this tool is not useful for.

How to have a search tool on this structure and inside those documents, including the posted comments?

(more) frustraited @ work

Alba is broken like since eastern. When we come back from that shutdown at the end of March. Water cooling problems, the water flow was unstable; sponges were found in the "clean water" cooling pipes, together with other dust; a weekend instrument hang causes a temperature increase and bad quality of hoses become vulcanized (below the specs) and caused a disaster in one of the two main power supplies of the booster; a TLD wrong placed in a weird space and when an Insertion Device was moved, it bends the beam pipe blocking the beam orbit, requiring to vent and replace a section. It's like we stomp shit.

This is one of the issues in this accelerator complex, but there are others that may interact.

Panic reaches the management at the beginning of this years when 12 people announces their new positions in other institutes. If you take into account that we are 145 workers, you can realizes the magnitude of the problem. From the people that says goodbye, 8 were from the computing division (around 50) and from those 4 were from the controls section (of 14). This panic didn't mention the 1 or 2 per month that has announced that the left during the past two years.

Management has announced 3 months later the creation of a commission from work behaviour improvements. Now, in July, this commission has made the first meeting by last week.

As I mention in the previous post, another reason of personal sadness: my bosses didn't case about a worker that has been called to do a talk in the university.

I didn't write here since then. I didn't found any reason to write about software design here.

But last reason to get one step further in frustration went last week.

Starting 2 months a go, in the tango meeting, there was a request to the tango community to introduce security embedded inside the tango implementation. From the last 4 years I've been trying to start a PhD in cryptology (but too busy due to the work at Alba), and I've been getting closer and closer to the field of the RFIDs and the smartcards. During the presentation where this was requested, I thought that many of the schemas to ensure RFID can be also valid to be applied in between the communication of the agents in a distributed system, like tango.

I thought it can be interesting for Alba and the tango community, to exploit that one of the workers has a hobby in cryptology and security. In this terms I've talked to my boss.

For that, I need 3 weeks to talk to my boss (this is already one problem). During this time, I've been able to, out side working hours, explain this idea to the research group in the university (they are in another city, 150 km away). I found a great acceptance about "Ensuring Tango control system", even more I've seen enthusiasm about the idea of a PhD based on an application of all the cryptological work made by the whole group (many things about public key -specially elliptic curves- symmetric cyphers, stream ciphers, secret sharing, homomorphic encryption and field like that).

At work, the response wasn't that good. The answer was like: "do what ever you like in your free time, but this must not affect your current duties at all. It's not possible to dedicate any of your working hours in such a thing". Clearly have said, if I do a PhD, is not meaning anything for Alba at all. Ooh!! This is a very clear way to motivate a worker. For my partners, also fun when was said "if you do, others would ask to do this", what's the problem on workers training?

Went I talked to my boss, I said many time to him and have to point here, that my duties have been increase every time that a partner left. Last Friday, there was a presentation about the Alba's controls system, and when the subsystems of the machine was listed, half of the elements on that list are on my behalf (and not all my duties were there).

When I went to talk about this with my boss, I went there offering my free time to work in a industrial PhD. My proposal was not to stop doing my job and disappear for full time dedication to this, my proposal was mostly the free time, but being realistic that the brain thinks at any time. As a collaboration between the university and the industry, all the involved has to put something, specially the PhD candidate.

Well done, with this deal, the simpler solution is that Alba will not appear at all in my PhD. Or if it appears will be to be mention explicitly that they haven't contribute at all; even worst Alba's position was opposition to doing a work like that.

untitled

Yesterday I gave a talk in the college where I studied the Bachelor and the Master degrees and where I am now starting the PhD. What stuck me most is the lack of interest from my bosses in this informative talk. After tell them about the invitation received from the university the answer wasn't further that "oh, that's nice".

But what ever. I take this opportunity to present to the students how an engineer can work in a place that often is not in the main path of jobs that one have.

Starting with how I got this job, and explaining that 6 months before start working here I didn't know what a synchrotron was, I have explained the heterogeneous different jobs I had in the past. I've put the accent in the English, because it has been told to me that many students didn't evaluate as necessary to have a good English level. Well, is not a thing to have a absolutely very nice level, but starting with a communicative sufficient level (and with practice the rest will come).

I have explained to them, with some youtube videos, has is not a synchrotron. Why start the other way around? The idea behind this was more a way to list other kind of scientific facilities where an engineer have job opportunities and sometimes are not in the main target because is not known.

Two basic ideas can summarize my talk: internationalization and search for jobs in more unexpected fields. And an important thing in the job search it to apply to those offers. Without this step it's impossible to get it!

Some numbers from Alba

Yesterday, I've placed some numbers in the post and I think there are other important numbers on this facility.

From the operation calendar, some numbers can be extracted. The synchrotron will be running 5184h (60% of the year time).

Well this is more the number of hours that can be running, because the 27% of this time (1416h, 16% of the year) are machine studies and accelerator test. This means that during this time is not necessary that we have beam in the storage.

For the users, it's plan that we will deliver 3768 beam hour. This represent the 72% of the available running time (or the 43% of the year time).

The rest of the year is dedicated to maintenance and improvements (984h, 11% of the total) and warm-up (2432h, 27.7%). There are special time slots dedicates to the Personal Safety System (64h, 0.7%) and the CSN (spanish acronym of the Nuclear Security Council).

This give a total amount of 8760h (365 days).

More numbers?

The storage ring has a perimeter of about 270m, designed to have an energy of 3GeV and the accumulated current at 400mA. In this circumference there are:

• 32 bending magnets that generates a magnetic field up to 1.42T each and a magnetic gradient (G) of 5.5T/m.
• 112 quadrupoles
• 120 sextupoles with B=1.12T
• Those sextupoles have additional coils to apply corrector dipole field.

The booster ring has a perimeter of about 250m, and is the propeller phase that accelerates the electron beam from 100MeV to the 3GeV that has to be given to the storage ring. In this circumference there are:

• 40 bending magnets with a B=0.89 T, and G=2.2T/m
• 60 quadrupoles
• 16 sextupoles 
• 72 correctors

In total we have more than 700 magnets:

More numbers? There are many more fields where numbers can be written here. This may starts a series of articles.

Update 20130228: Summary:

Off	984h	11%
Warm-up	2432h	27.3%
Beamtime	5184h	60%	Machine	1416h	27% (16% of the year)
			Beamlines	3768h	72% (43% of the year)
CSN	96h	1%
PSS	64h	0.7%
Total	8760h

Why some of our cameras die

From the 54 cameras that we have in side the tunnel, there is one location that is registering more failures than the other positions. Years a go, to find the cameras on their places (and the power source for all of them) I did by hand a map:

You have to have on mind that, following the current information in our cabling data base, we have 18767 cables (with a total length of 168km, on average 11.33m), with 6683 equipments of 728 different types, located in 374 racks.

But back to the reason of this post, there is one ccd camera location, where the hardware dies too often. The technical service from the manufacturer, Basler, have answered to us, something like "what the hell did you did to those cameras!?". They didn't saw this level of damages before.

It is on the top of the map image, but a detail will de useful:

The circles indicates locations of cameras. In red the "sr16/di/fs-01" that to often dies, in blue other cameras. The one near is the "bt/di/fsotr-03" who is not failing (at least not by now). A picture of the place is:

On this picture, the camera is the black box (with white letters saying Scout) on top with a grey network cable on the top. 

It's a very important camera, due to the long list of uses it has, specially because when an injected beam to the storage ring is seen here means that one turn is completed (no obstacles in the path).

But why it dies? We know that we are placing this equipments in the tunnel and they can suffer mal functions due to the radiation, but why this is the only place where this cameras die? It looks that we found the reason.

The first hypothesis was: synchrotron light from the transferline. This camera is almost aligned with the second bending magnet from the booster transferline. But is not convincing us.

Basically this camera is 40cm up to the beam pipe. Like, in radians from the aperture, the blue circle at the exit of this bending, where a synchrotron radiation is placed and is not failing.

A secondary hypothesis is neutron scattering. But this is neither easy because the last camera of the booster transferline is also there. Its blue dot is near. The only difference is that the one in the transferline is down the beam pipe and perhaps those particles could have more obstacles in the middle. Maybe yes, maybe not.

Lest look on the storage injection in more detail. Remember the drawing with the coloured circles, there where two boxes besides the red dot, after a bigger box and followed by two more boxes from the first size. The four with the same size are kicker magnets, and the bigger one represents the septum magnet.

Those are pulsed magnets that when there is no injection they don't act, but when there is a beam injection the kickers divert the beam trajectory in four squares and the septum is placing the incoming (blue) and the stored (red) beams very very close:

A very schematic view of what is happening in the septum can be (yes, it can be draw by a kid):

The green line in between both beams is a metallic shielding to isolate the magnetic field of the septum for the booster incoming beam (blue), that the stored beam (red) should not see this field.

The current hypothesis now is that we maybe heating this shielding, scattering back "something" (probably neutrons) and they find the camera in the path. The last camera of the booster transferline is not in the same plane than this shielding.

fpFCT: bugfixing

After the development of this study of the filling pattern using the fast current transformer it was time to search for bugs. From a result like:

This calculation doesn't have good sense and looks like there is a bug. This only 2 groups doesn't look nice. Even worst when we execute the code under an scripting way, the result was different. And we found the error: the number of giga samples used in the calculation. We've seen a 10th factor and we found that using the scripting mode, it reads the attribute from the scope, but from the device server it uses a default initial value of 4e10.

We've been lucky that the default value wasn't the same than what was expected, or we would get crazy if some day it changes. For example if the scope samples at 20GS/s instead of 40.

After last bug search we can see results like:

There are things to review, we didn't finish completely this development. But what is true is that the scientist already have usable data for their studies.

fpFCT: with beam

A month a go I have work in simulate the beam of the storage ring by its bunches in the Fast Current Transformer (FCT). Well now we are in a run of 3 weeks (the operation calendar is available on the web site), and we can see the signal in the scope from the FCT and apply the algorithm developed in accelerators using the device server developer by the controls group.

To see those inputs and those outputs we need our Tango Graphical User Interface (GUI) called Taurus. And with a "simple" command line like:

$ taurusform sr/di/FillingPatternFCT-01/{nAcquisitions,StartingPoint,Threshold,ScaleH,OffsetH,TimingTrigger,resultingFrequency,FilledBunches,SpuriousBunches} sr02/di/sco-01/{Channel1,CurrentSampleRate,ScaleH,OffsetH} sr/di/FillingPatternFCT-01/{BunchIntensity,State,Status} &

This command line, looking so complicated is only listing all the attributes (and their sorting) to be set in a taurusform, by using a feature of bash to write the (almost) minimum.

For example, first parameter is: sr/di/FillingPatternFCT-01/{nAcquisitions,StartingPoint,Threshold,ScaleH,OffsetH,TimingTrigger,resultingFrequency,FilledBunches,SpuriousBunches} An this means to get from the device server sr/di/FillingPatternFCT-01, the attributes listed.

That command will open a small window like:

There are two button in the attribute space because they are 1D data (spectrum in tango), Clicking them a taurusplot will be launched for each. One for the FCT signal:

And another for the Bunch Intensity calculated:

With Taurus, it's so easy to have a little simple gui to start with. Also the General Taurus Gui is neither so difficult.

Brain drain

After many years working at Alba this January 2013 has exposed one of its biggest weakness: a brain drain. There is a general talk in the corridors of this excellence Scientific&Technician Singular installation, the number of people that is renouncing to the job to go to a better place.

In a place that work about 140 people, between the confirm number of people that say good bye and the rumours, there are between 9 and 14 people. And this is only this month! That is a coincidence, because the search for a new job is not a magical thing that happens fast. This people has been searching for a period of time and I can bet to say that others are on the way.

The trickle of people that renounce has been set almost constant this last years. Almost every month there where one or two that did a farewell celebration. In the past, when someone left, there where a diner with some of the coworkers. It was something special, it happens sporadically, but this last years this have become monotony, repetitive, a routine... Further than that, there where overlapped farewells.

I hope there will be someone thinking on the reasons of this and thinking in solutions for that... This is not the normal movement between research institutes. Many alba's workers have left to go work to the ITER, fusion4energy, cern, esrf, maxlab, desy, and others, but scientist, engineers or technicians from those places are not coming here!

Update 20130124: By today, the list of 9 people has been increased up to 11, and if the rumours are taken in the count the 14 raises up to 16.