Subject: US Shift Report in Iambic Pentameter
From: William Shakespeare (wills@theglobe.co.uk)
Date: Tue Feb 15 2000 - 13:15:41 EST
A COMEDY OF ERRORS
A tragedie by William Shakespeare
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
Erik Katsavounidis -- Duke of Gran Sasso
Alessandra DiCredico -- Wife to the Duke
Ianni Katsavounidis -- Martial of Gran Sasso troops
Niccola Zaccheo \
Massimo Orsini - Attendants on the duke
Roberto Guiliuani /
Bob Nolty -- Fool
Scene: Gran Sasso Labs
ACT I -- Erik's office
=====
ERIK: For one year more than ten hath MACRO run,
and sixty million muons spooled to tape.
So now to us in this time it doth fall
to set its improprieties aright;
to calibrate the measure of its bits;
in short, to maximize what physics from
our MACRO may be squeezed. And to this
we are consign'd, appointed and resolv'd.
ALLE: To this, good husband, yes; but also more.
The days of life are number'd and do fly.
There is wine to be enjoy'd and meat
to tempt your all too-weary tongue, which talks
of calibrations when it should be wrapped
around lasagne or a roasted hen.
There's music to engage the ears that now
are poised to hear a fan about to fail.
And art there is to gaze upon with eyes
now fixed upon a CRT that's filled
with num'rous numbers, too small to be seen.
ERIK: In this, as alway, my good wife is seen
to speak most wisely; yet I think it good
to take this time to plan for future wars.
But I'll for home within 5 minutes, love.
ALLE: Oft this I've heard; your minutes do contain
much more than sixty seconds. I'll to home
and there prepare our primi and secondi.
{Exit.}
ERIK: Field Martial, what the men we have at hand?
IANNI: They number four, of whom are three I trust;
the fourth I would have sent away or shot.
First Massimo Orsini.
ERIK: What is he?
IANNI: A good man, handy with a sold'ring iron,
who lately fixed the SM2 LIP board.
ERIK: The LIP was broke? I would hear more of this.
IANNI: Five runs did stall in bursts of LIP No-Qs.
Orsini is acquainted with the LIP;
oft he hath changed a voltage regulator
that makes much heat, in dropping twenty-four
volts down to five for TTL. This changed
he once again, also resoldering
a LEMO input, and he did redo
a flaky cable. Now runs stall no more.
Second, Niccola Zaccheo.
ERIK: What he?
IANNI: In faith he is a good man. None there is
who better knows STOP Master's inner parts.
The SM5 STOP Master he today
hath ope'd and found therein an Actel chip
that fails to assert the CAMAC line bit 9.
The upshot is the SM+1 bit
is never in the pattern register,
nor do TOHM clock words have bit 9 set on.
No Actel spares we have, for at Caltech
all design files were lost in a disk crash.
ERIK: But this is not a problem for our friends
the data analyzers, who will note
the SM+1+coincidence
bit *is* set in the pattern register;
and timewords that we find of int'rest do
not range beyond 2 to the power of 9.
IANNI: In truth, my lord, an issue it is not.
Roberto Guiliani is the third.
ERIK: What he?
IANNI: A rugby player, who hath worn
Italia's blue shirt in a junior match
against the fearsome Scots.
ERIK: All well and good,
but what hath he for us done lately, eh?
IANNI: Our phototubes he doth replace apace.
ERIK: A dirty bus'ness that. And who the fourth?
IANNI: A cad, a wretch, a knave, a fool, in short
a programmer. Bob Nolty is he called.
ERIK: I wish to meet him.
IANNI: That can be arranged.
ACT II -- A terminal room
======
BOB: {aside} True, DCL is irritating but
'tis from this that a perl has emerged.
ERIK: What means he thus?
IANNI: This knave refers to scripts
that he hath writ in Perl to run upon
our vaxes and our alphas, taking all
the data that's on TA90 tapes
to copy it to DLTs with which
we can reprocess all the data when
we spin the DD DLTs anon,
recalibrating as we go along
and making all the data streams for those
who analyze the data far away.
ERIK: This work is good, for we must start to spin
the DLTs within a week or so
to have a hope of reprocessing all
before the first of May, when changes all.
IANNI: But I have changes planned in CALCODE, Duke,
That will improve results a half percent.
ERIK: Enough! No more! 'Tis good enough as is.
On Monday next the tapes begin to spin.
Good sir, what is the work that you now do?
BOB: Your dukeness, now I seek the pongs our pings
do miss.
ERIK: What? Riddles all? Please answer plain.
BOB: Sure, duke. Our supernova watch doth ail,
For VMS the data hath on disk;
the metamonitor on Unix lives;
The link, a disk by NFS we mount;
But these five days the link hath not been up.
ERIK: And what the cure?
BOB: I hath emaileth those
in charge. These emails were received, except,
that to the network manager did bounce
and say the network is configured wrong.
There's humor there for those incined to see't.
ERIK: And those who did receive your mail say what?
BOB: They try to fix; but still the link stays down.
Still our internal supernova watch
is fine; but to the international
network we're absent for these past few days.
ERIK: I'll more of this anon; for now my wife
upon this screen doth message me, to wit:
"Five minutes said you half an hour ago;
forsake your lab and get thee home to eat."
I'd be wise to listen to her now.
But say, field martial, why the frowning scowl?
IANNI: The problem's here upon this CRT.
In preparation for the DLT
reprocessing, I am accounting for
all runs now known; but see, these gaps exist
of data taken but missing from tapes.
Here, for four days the data took was lost,
in February 1995.
And this is not the first gap I have found.
I'll no more on it; it hath made me mad.
ERIK: What's past is past; the present's our concern.
Tomorrow is our usual maint'nance day.
The nine o'clock navetta shall we take
And fix what's wrong, if we would earn our pay.
ACT III - a nearby grotto; next day
=======
ERIK: Once more onto the pasarellas, friends,
or fill the hall up with our oil spills!
What news, field martial?
IANNI: None that's good, my duke.
The SM3 LaMOSSKa, which has failed
to give the early stop on many runs,
(though not all runs) we did engage in war.
The tide did seem to flow our way at first;
A flaky cable we redid and saw
the stops arriving at the waveform crate.
But when the runs commenced again next day,
the early stops still often failed to come.
ERIK: There's something rotten in Hall B, I say.
MASSIMO: LeCroy high voltage crates have power supplies,
including one of 30 V; and I
have checked the one that now we call the spare,
which we removed from SM2 because
it one day turned the tubes quick off and on.
Now on the test bench I see nothing wrong --
but dare we trust it with our precious tubes?
{enter Bob, wearing a yellow hard hat}
ERIK: What means this silly hat upon your head?
BOB: I do you honor, duke, by wearing it.
ERIK: You honor, or you mock me?
BOB: Honor, faith,
For Giorgio says that we must wear these hats
When an important visitor is here.
ERIK: Be off with your hat, or off with your head!
BOB: I'm out of my head; none would be the harm.
ERIK: Thou, knave, art mad!
BOB: I am but mad east-southeast;
when the nus are westerly I know a nu from an atmu.
{Exit.} N.B. rockmap humor
IANNI: We're off now to the calibration wars.
{Exit Ianni and Massimo}
{Phone rings.}
ERIK: Hello? Yes, love? I know, dear, that we had
an evening in the symphony hall planned.
But I was not to know how much the work.
The course of maint'nance day ne'er did run smooth. {Hangs up.}
{Enter Niccola with base.}
NICCOLA: The base of phototubes is our ally,
But some o'er to the other side do fly.
See this, the first resistor in the chain,
drops more volts than its rating doth allow.
And after years enduring this abuse,
We now see its resistance grow and grow
'Til we must ope' some tank ends and replace
resistors with a higher-rated one.
{Enter Massimo, oily.}
MASSIMO: Our MACRO's wounded; from her side doth flow
(well, more like seep) an issue of her oil.
Near SM3 side 1, the floor's oft slick;
and plastic sheets above are oily too.
{Enter Roberto, with phototube.}
ROBERTO: Some phototubes do flash and they must be
replaced with any of our twenty spares.
With spares so few, we dare not go replace
the tubes in layer T that now are filled
with Helium and cause most of our TOHMs
(though bad, not yet a problem to our rate.)
{Enter Bob, with NIM scaler}
BOB: Tank 2E10 has high rate in the LIP.
I read the secondary trigger rate
from PHRASE for this box; it's a hundred times
above the rate the neigb'ring boxes have.
{Enter Ianni, with small phototube.}
IANNI: You know while pulsing LEDs, we read
the pedestals on laser ref'rence tubes.
But SM3 AREF reads nil or one,
so I suspect a DC offset there,
and pedestals that should be negative.
Still current software can't compute the slopes
unless the pedestal we read is good.
ERIK: You overwhelm me with reports of gloom.
Retreat! Retreat! 'Tis clear that fortune's doom
hangs thickly all about us in this room.
IANNI: The five o'clock navetta does arrive;
and if we catch it, we'll escape alive.
ACT IV - Erik's office; next day
======
ERIK: Why lounge ye all about and drink caffe?
MASSIMO: Because AXPGS won't allow
a login.
{Enter Ianni.}
IANNI: This was true, but now 'tis solv'd.
The large new disk brought here by Charlie Peck
replaced the old DISK$MACRO disk;
but when our old files to the new disk came,
they were reblocked, as fits a larger disk.
But small files placed in large block sizes grow
and people who were near the quota then
exceed it now; and so could not log in.
But Nazzareno hath increased the size
of quotas, so you now can get inside.
NICCOLA: To work! There's data to be analyzed.
ERIK: Now name the losses incurred on this shift.
ROBERTO: The phototubes we lost add up to five:
there's three that flashed, and one could not hold gain.
The last one, unprovoked, would sometims give
a huge output, up in LaMOSSKa range.
One other tank was ope'd to change a base.
ERIK: Good tubes, gone to the Counter in the Sky.
But now, is all else right in MACROland?
IANNI: Not all, good duke. In laser runs I see
some boxes with left-right asymmetry
of pulse response to mid-point laser light.
We check these tanks, and oft we see such things
as flashing tubes or downward-drifting gains.
But other tanks give perfect SPEs
so we can only speculate the cause.
Perhaps one tube has low efficiency,
or optic coupling to the tank end's poor.
NICCOLA: And when I check the waveforms, oft I see
the first event of runs in each SM
o'erflow with no zero suppression on.
Yet after this event's read out, no more
occurs this problem 'til the run is o'er.
Then, two tanks sometimes make some pulses strange,
some up to tens of microseconds long.
'Tis thought these might be LED discharge
of voltages built up from who knows where.
IANNI: And then, the code to iterate the LUTs
has many hacks that may have once made sense,
hardcoding certain values for some tanks
that then did not converge to LUTs that worked.
But now this code is making life a pain;
some bad tanks don't improve when it is run.
For new tubes, it can give us good results.
But many GC rates, both high and low,
are stuck and not made better by this code.
For muon physics, all is running well,
But GC thresholds are not uniform.
And when you're loading new LUTs, please take care
to see 1C13-16 load.
For, who knows why, but oft they fail and then
no triggers give 'til we stop and reload.
ERIK: To such bad news, I've only one response:
Let's to the bar; I'll buy caffe for all!
ACT V - the bar
=====
{Men at bar. Enter Alle.}
ALLE: {To Ianni.} Tonight, my love, will be a wondrous night,
for we have planned a dinner to delight,
then to an art show lovely to the sight.
IANNI: Dear lady, pardon me, for you mistook
me for your husband, who stands over there.
ALLE: Excuse me, kind sir; but you look so much
like him I swear his brother you could be.
IANNI: 'Tis odd you mention brothers, for you see,
I have a brother whom I've never known.
For in a shipwreck, mom gave birth to twins
but saved just me; her son and mate were lost.
ALLE: 'Tis odd indeed, for Erik's father says
his mother and his brother both were lost
when he was born. Now do you olives like?
IANNI: I love them!
ALLE: Then you must be he! Oh, my!
Come, Erik, meet your brother you thought dead!
ERIK: 'Tis true? I always liked this faithful man!
Come join us as this night we dine and see
an art show to delight fraternal eyes!
IANNI: So all's well that ends well; 'twas much ado about MACRO.
This comedie of errors ends herein.
FINIS
This archive was generated by hypermail 2a24 : Tue Feb 15 2000 - 13:15:47 EST