2003 November: Massive changes in the control software and the server software:
All images (light, background, annotated jpg, non-annotated jpg, thumbnail) are processed at the client system using "wolf", and copied to the server. The server is now only copying the files to the directories and generates the movies.
Star labeling was added to the annotated jpgs.
Photometry ascii files are generated at the remote machine and copied to the server via scp.
2003 November 24: A new industrial PC was sent to kp and connected to the camera. The industrial PC replaced the broken laptop.
2002 December 23: Ever since the Leonids and the forced fit of a moon-occulter, the KP CONCAM has been slightly out of focus and even slightly off-kilter. We are working to have the problem corrected. Past that, it works fine.
2002 August 26: A software bug caused data not to be posted to concam.net. This bug has now been fixed.
2002 August 21: This time the problem was an ftp non-connect between the KP field laptop and the host concam.net computer. This will happen when you upgrade the software. We do not expect to have this problem again.
2002 August 20: Another interet outage occured last night. We have yet to re-initialize contact. New programs are being tested on the concam.net end that are attempting to do real-time photometery on bright stars in the field. Please bear with us as this software is debugged. (Similar software already works on data from the Canary Island CONCAM.)
2002 August 18: An internet outage between KP and concam.net caused a service interuption. Programs have now been reset.
2002 August 11: We can now connect to the new laptop. The new software will be tested for the first time tonight. This involves a lot of new lines of code, although many were tested on the Canary Island CONCAM. It is likely the software will not last the night and so we will study the results and try again tomorrow. We expect this will all be solved in days, not weeks.
2002 August 10: The CONCAM laptop at Kitt Peak is being replaced/ upgraded. This will be good in the long run as camera operation should become more robust and secure. In the short run, however, we are having trouble connecting to the laptop. (Yes, we tested it before it went out.) We expect the outage to be days not weeks.
2002 July 17: We got word that the present disconnect was caused by lightning at Kitt Peak interfering with general internet and was not CONCAM specific. We have now reestablished contact and expect the KP CONCAM to run nominally tonight.
2002 July 16: Contact has been temporarily lost with the Kitt Peak CONCAM. We have asked local support to cycle the power which should bring the KP CONCAM back up within the day.
2002 June 24: Another planned power outage at Michigan Tech. will have the system go down for a day between June 25 and June 26. We hope to be able to bring back the systems by noon (EDT) on June 26.
2002 June 17: The KP concam stopped for an unknown reason on the morning of June 15. The processes have now been restarted, and should work fine. However, the system will probably go down again for a few hours on the morning of June 18, due to a planned power outage at Michigan Tech.
2002 May 9: A student inadvertently deleted all the files in the Kitt Peak top level directory. We can recover and are now rebuilding but one thing which cannot be replaced is, of all things, the old log file. We will now do a better job of backing things up. We have not lost any key data, but the html files that linked to past data will have to be regenerated. This may take a few days. We apologize for the inconvenience.