Jim Varney's PPASINP

Bart De Pontieu (BDP@MPEPL)
Mon, 26 Aug 1996 17:11:40 +0100 (CET) 

Jim Varney wrote a few weeks ago:
[I'm catching up with old mail, can you tell ? ;-]

>For those of you who submit flash period timings in PPAS format, I have
>written a small utility program called PPAS Input for Windows.  The purpose
>of it is to make it fast and easy to convert observations into the standard
>PPAS format.  It's 16 bit, for Windows 3.1 and up.
>You'll find PPASINP.ZIP at
>http://www.quiknet.com/~jvarney

I just installed it without a problem here. I was a bit skeptical at first
when I heard about the program, because our (outdated?) SatFlash software
(ftp://ftp.physics.ox.ac.uk/pub/sat/bwgs/) pretends to facilitate entry of
flash period measurements in the PPAS-format as well.

But I'm a convert now. Jim has written a great little program that definitely
will be *my* choice for entering future observations (and I'm one of the
co-authors of SatFlash :-)

So, I would suggest that anyone interested in flash period measurements pick
up this program of Jim's. If Jim agrees, We'll keep a copy at the ftp-site
in Oxford too?

>All comments, bug reports, etc. are welcome.

Haven't tested it thoroughly (yet), but a few suggestions:

1. Capitalize the initials if they've been entered in lower-case (either
in the SETUP section or directly into the main entering window)
2. Check for nonsense input, e.g. make sure 'hours' are always 0<h<24,
minutes (in the date-entry) and seconds always between 0 and 60, flash periods
never negative (which happens if you leave 'end-period' blank)
SatFlash does this nonsense checking and it helps when you're entering large
amounts of data. 

Bjoern suggested:

>And (I was thinking of this for a program for DRAP input) input fields
>for (several) time signal times and their stopwatch recording, so the
>End Of Observation fields can be computed directly from readings ?

Any chance you could adapt it for DRA? 

Thanks and cheers,
      Bart
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Bart De Pontieu --  Max-Planck-Institute for extraterrestrial Physics, Garching
bdp@mpe-garching.mpg.de  --      http://www.rzg.mpg.de/~bdp/satintro.html
Join us at Eurosom 2, Oct 19/20 1996 -- http://www.rzg.mpg.de/~bdp/eurosom.html
BWGS-coordinator -- Flash editor -- SeeSat-L administrator -- would-be-observer
   "Life is like a jigsaw. You get the straight bits, but there's something"
       "missing in the middle." -- XTC, "All Of A Sudden (It's Too Late)"
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