UPLOAD-AND-BLESS output files
RJW, 1/09/08

"Blessing" a data file means checking it to verify it is usable and not just garbage. 
Hans Berns created "daq_bless", a program to check for garbage lines in standard DAQ card 
output files.

Suppose you upload data file <filename>.zip, which should contain only one DAQ card output 
file, <filename>.txt.

Once your zipfile has been uploaded to our walta website at UW, you can choose to process it 
by selecting the file and clicking on "analyze". Then your data file is fed into daq_bless, 
new files are produced, and stored in your site's data directory. Processing takes place "in 
the background" to avoid tying up our computer whenever someone uploads a big file, so we can't 
give you a visual signal showing progress - just check back a minute or so later.

Here are the files produced by daq_bless:

<filename>_blessed.txt  = blessed data, including valid GPS and status data lines, as well 
as apparently clean counter data from the DAQ card. This is just a cleaned-up version of your 
raw data file.

<filename>_error.txt    = unblessed leftovers; lines from your data file which were blank, or 
determined to be invalid.

<filename>_events.txt   = trigger event summaries (1 line per trigger), like the following:
2006/04/04 23:19:58 1f45e2f3 1144192798.592174963 41666667 A10 {3}
data items in this example line are:
 1. date       
 2. time in ordinary format (but UTC, not Pacific time)  
 3. hexadecimal coded time, raw data from the DAQ card
 4. Time of trigger in Unix computer time code ( = seconds since midnight UTC on 1/1/1970) down 
to nanoseconds; this has all possible corrections applied and is the event time you should 
use for physics data analysis.
 5. DAQ card's clock "ticks"/sec (lets you check GPS quality: should be within a few ticks 
of 416666667)
 6. "A" = valid GPS data, "V" = NOT valid (sorry, but that is the industry standard!)
 7. Letter code is followed by the number of satellites visible (10 in the example shown).
 8. The data last item, "(3)" in the example, is the number of data lines in the raw event data.

<filename>_summary.txt = summary of statistics: number of good and bad lines, number of 
coincidences of each type, GPS statistics, etc. This file is displayed once your file has 
been processed.

<filename>_freqhist.txt = CPU clock frequency histogram (should have a big peak at 41666667 
counts/sec).

One additional file: coordinates.txt contains your site's GPS latitude and longitude.
Every time you process another data file, its GPS coordinate reading is added to the file.

Sorry, but for now you cannot directly access these files, other than summary.txt; soon we 
will prepare software tools needed to view and download all of them.