(PST V2.0) Help Desk Comments - February 2010

Main Problem Areas

Reports


Administration

1. I have received a new password to login into the PST (see below) but for unknown reasons, I cannot enter the system.

2. I was trying to set my affiliation at https://my.nrao.edu/ , but I could not find a way of doing it. Would you be so kind to set my affiliation

3. I have registered numerous times in the past. So I asked for my password; got it emailed for user harris@cfa.harvard.edu. changed temporary passwd and got into a message that previous accounts had been discontinued, and henceforth I was to be known as username DanHarris. well, I don't mind... so I asked for a temp password, and got in again with new username. This time, when changing to a new password, every time I hit the 'login' button, it just blanked the 4 lines....I tried about 5 times, even with different passwords, but could not prevail. any suggestions?
 
I suppose one might enter an 'enhancement' so that some sort of meaningful error message would appear when the items entered on the 'reset password' page resulted in a blanking of all entries and nothing else (i.e. it was a failure). In my case (yesterday), I SUSPECT it happened because the 'approved' account (username DanHarris) had the email version (dharris@head.cfa.harvard.edu) and I did not know that, so I used what I always use, harris@cfa.harvard.edu. i.e. the mismatch between what i entered for email, and what was in the db caused the login attempt to fail, but with no indication as to why. I tried different things like changing to a completely new password, but I failed to guess that it was the email.... anyway, I am logged in now and have changed password successfully.

4. Your proposal submit tool has a bug: it does not allow to set an affiliation which is not in your database. How to reproduce:
Log in under your name, to to "Profile", Click "Add" at your affiliation, fill field "My Institution:" ( for example 'anywere' ), "My department", "Country" and "State" and the click to to "Save". Instead of recording your changes, the system rejects them with answer "Please select an affiliation".
There is an error in Java-script logic. By the way, I have reported this bug last year. Up to now, my affiliation recored in my profile is wrong. Will you be so kind to fix this bug?
 
I appreciate your efforts to help, but the problem is still not solved. The same wrong affiliation appeared at the title of the proposal. My colleagues are already asking me why I did not informed them that I left the place where I was working. So far my boss did not see the title of the proposal, but I do not know what will be his reaction when he will notice it. You mentioned that it was NRAO policy to prohibit users to set their affiliation at their own. I have doubts that Dr. Lo or somebody else in the management said just that. I guess the observatory would like to collect statistics of affiliations automatically and would like to avoid counting the same organization, but with slightly different spelling, as different institutions. There are many ways to solve the problem. For example, maintaining a table of aliases. I would not like to elaborate more, but I think you have already guessed that I am deeply frustrated.

5. The affiliation for ThomasJones in the "Available Authors" database is wrong. The name and email are correct, but the affiliation should be University of Minnesota. Would you please correct, or send instructions to twj@astro.umn.edu about how to do so? Thanks.

6. There appears to be a problem for me logging into my.nrao.edu – I get a HTTP Status 500 error.

7. I've been attempting to establish a new PST account and the registration page continues to tell me to 'Please Select an Affiliation' with 'NRAO' or 'National Radio Astronomy Observatory' in the Organizations & Affiliations box.


General

1. I will be submitting a proposal for more asteroid radar observations with the VLBA stations either today or tomorrow. The proposal tool asks that I specify a scientific category, but there is no Solar System option for the VLBA. Can this be added? If not, which category should I use?


Authors

1. I'm trying to add an author that is not in the database to my proposal and I can't. The country list does not appear (only the Select item shows up). I have this problem in firefox under linux and in safari under MacOSX, so it's a pretty general issue.

2. I have created a new proposal for the approaching GBT deadline. I was able to add a couple of co-authors who were in the NRAO data base (as well as myself) but I didn't succeed in adding the names of other 3 co-authors who are not in the data base. I don't see any option to enter their information (email-address/affiliation/etc.), as suggested in the documentation . Could you please guide me through the required steps ?

3. My supervisor (Nathalie Brouillet) and I have a problem with the proposal website. We can not access to the proposals (submitted or draft) for which we are co-authors.
The proposal numbers are:
1) Submitted:
a) VLA/10A-134 (Legacy ID AW773)
2) Drafts:
a) VLA/2010-00-175
b) VLA/2010-00-161
c) GBT/2009-08-047
How should we proceed to access them ?


Scientific Justification

1. I initially tried to upload a scientific justification whose file size was too large for the server. I've now fixed the file, but can't upload it because I get this error on the scientific justification page:
java.lang.NullPointerException


Sources/Resources/Sessions

1. I'm inputting some sources into the VLA PST, and for galaxies with negative velocities/redshifts, the PST won't accept the redshifts, because it says that they are not floating poing numbers.

2. Is there any way to redistribute sources among groups, or copy sources within a proposal? It seems that there should be a way simpler than entering all the source information again.

3. I'm in the process of preparing my first (E)VLA proposal and am writing to clarify some points. Any help on the below questions would be greatly appreciated.
The aim is to observe the NH3 inversion lines (1,1), (2,2), etc through to (5,5) in the C configuration of the array.
1. In "Resources" of the online proposal tool, do I need to create a separate request for the WIDAR OSRO2 option for each transition separately, even though they will use exactly the same settings? When manually entering rest frequencies, it would seem several can be entered simultaneously, but when picking from the list of common transitions, only one at a time can be entered.
2. In "Sessions", do I understand correctly that the five transitions should be specified under one session?
3. In "Sessions", what does the "Add subarray" option mean?
4. While these observations will be part of my PhD thesis project, they are not the main part. Can or should I still submit a "Plan of Dissertation Research"?

4. I was trying to input Galactic coordinates into PST for an EVLA proposal. Unfortunately, I am not able to use the normal convention in degrees, but am asked to input the coords in the sexagesimal system. Is this a feature or a bug? Anyway, it is very unusual for Galactic work.
Things are even worse Galactic longitude is the the RA format, ie 24h. This does not make any sense for Galactic corrdinates. So I guess there's a bug in the PST. Galactic coords should simply be accepted in degrees on both axes.

5. I am trying to upload my source file which is like this:
L1689-SMM16;1;J2000;Equatorial;16:31:39.2;-24:49:48;LSR;Radio;5;
I believe it follows the required format:
SourceName; Group Names; Coordinate System; Equinox; Longitude; Latitude; Ref Frame; Convention; Velocity;
but I keep getting these error messages:
Summary: 1 source(s) read, 0 source(s) added, 1 source(s) failed.Line: 1 - Error : Data 'Equatorial' in column - 4 is not a valid Equinox valueLine: 1 - Error : Coordinate System 'J2000' is not permitted for Telescope - GBT

6. When I try to specify the coordinates of the Galactic centre in gal lon and lat (both in degrees), I receive the following error message:
"The degree value, '359', in 'Galactic Latitude' must be between -90 and 90"
As can be seen in the attached screen shot, the error message is clearly not appropriate considering the labels of the text input boxes. Please help. The deadline is approaching soon...

7. I cannot submit my "use case" without providing a legacy ID. However, that ID will only be assigned to me when I submit my proposal. How should I deal with that? Should I fill in a temporary value?

8. I was working on several EVLA proposals and was trying to import a list of positions into the source list. I had positions around the galactic center l=0, b=0. When I tried to input coordinates of 359d 57m 30s the system complained. that it was an error:
Line: 1 - Error : Longitude: '359:57:30' should be in a correct format.
Gustaaf suggested replacing 359 with 23, which worked but isn't the correct galactic coordinates. Attached is the non-working and working (but not correct) input text files.


Student Support


Proposal Processing

1. I was putting the finishing touches on Proposal ID: VLA/2010-00-123. I was going through the proposal on-line one last time, just before submitting. Then, it disappeared! I think I was on the sources page just checking when it disappeared. I went back to the proposal list and it was gone. Whatever I did, I did not try to delete the proposal with the 'X' on the proposal page and confirm the deletion. I don't think there is any other way of deleting a proposal. I had just submitted a GB and VLBA proposal successfully about five minutes ago. Have you had this complaint before? Since I still have the scientific justification and a print out of the nearly complete proposal, it won't take too long to regenerate it. But, it this has happened before (and it's not just me), check it out or tell me what to do further.

2. The General, Observing Proposal page on my screen shows no EDIT button anywhere. There is a window labeled Options and above that there is a Validate and a Print icon. No Edit. This is weird.

3. I am just preparing a proposal for EVLA C-configuration which is essentially a copy of one for D-configuration. This should be straightforward since I can just copy the resources for the D-config proposal. However, when I edit the resources and change the configuration to be used, the rest frequencies and correlator setup are reset. This seems unnecessary; it means that I have to copy down the values from the D-config proposal and re-enter them by hand. It ought to be a simple tweak to the web tool to fix this behavior. (No urgency, I've done it now.)

4. We just received a GBT RSS proposal. It was given the incorrect ID of GBT10C-001. This has the wrong trimester for the ID - it should have used trimester 10A. I think the correct ID should be GBT10A-076. Can someone please fix this?


Miscellaneous

1. The June 1 deadline should show as 5pm EDT = 21 UT


Server (my.nrao.edu)

-- DanaBalser - 2010-02-17

This topic: Software > ProposalSubmissionTool > PSTFeedbackFebruary2010
Topic revision: 2010-02-26, DanaBalser
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