Information Resources
Contents
As the last part of your Introduction to BaBar Offline Computing,
this section of the Workbook tells you where to go for information
other than this Workbook.
The main entry point for BaBar information is the SLAC BABAR Detector Home Page, the URL
for which is
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/BFROOT/index.html
Optionally, this URL can be abbreviated to
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/BFROOT/
Collaborators not based in North America may get faster access by
viewing a "mirror site" such as the
RAL BABAR Detector Home Page, the URL for which is
http://hepunx.rl.ac.uk/BFROOT/index.html
Some items, such as those that access the PEP-II database, cannot be
mirrored and must always be performed directly to the US.
In general any public web page can be accessed from any BaBar web
mirror simply by replacing
//www.slac.stanford.edu/
with the server address, such as:
//hepunx.rl.ac.uk/
The remaining part of the URL (BFROOT etc.) should be identical.
Most collaborating institutes also have their own web pages, often
continuing a lot of information relevant to BaBar. See BaBar
Collaborator Home Pages.
Take a quick look at the following pages to develop a sense of what is where.
HyperNews ("HN") is BaBar's newsgroup system. Here you can ask experts
questions, discuss BaBar problems and issues, and get feedback from
other BaBarians. Hypernews items are archived and are searchable, so
if you have a problem, you can search Hypernews to see if anyone else
ever had the same problem, and if they found a solution.
There are hundreds of BaBar forums. Some of them are on general
topics of interest to most users, while others are used mostly by
a single Analysis Working Group (AWG) or other BaBar group.
As a minimum, you will probably want to sign up for:
- The HN forum for your AWG.
- The HN forums concerning code or analysis tools that you are using.
Another useful forum is the Preliminary Unconfirmed Bugs, Problems, Frustrations, Fixes forum. The signed-up members of this forum are mostly experts. But it is intended for non-expert users to post their computing problems and receive feedback from the experts.
(Note: You do not have to sign up for a forum to read the postings
in that forum. You can do that from the HyperNews page. Signing up just
means that you will receive all the postings for that forum by email.)
To see a complete list of available forums and for instructions
on how to sign up for a forum, go to:
The BaBar HyperNews Page
As with all of High Energy Physics, email is heavily used in BaBar.
Your SLAC email address is probably username@slac.stanford.edu.
If you do not intend to use SLAC email as your primary email address,
it is a good idea to forward all of your SLAC emails to your primary
email address, so that you do not miss important SLAC announcments.
BFMAIL allows you to send email to centrally-managed BaBar mailing lists. It provides something in between the open nature of Hypernews and the more closed nature of simple email. Hypernews (discussed above) is a better approach if you want your discussion to be open to all collaborators.
BaBar makes extensive use of telephone meetings. Such meetings are
most often held at 8:30 AM pacific time since that catches European
collaborators still at work (5:30 PM for many).
Details on meetings are usually posted on appropriate web pages. For
example, the very popular Physics/Reconstruction/Simulation Forum
meetings are discussed on the
Forum web page.
Some BaBar groups have begun to use the new BaBar Meeting Organizer (BMO). The BMO provides meeting schedules and details, and stores presentations and other documentation from current and old BaBar meetings.
Many Unix commands are described in online manual pages. From the
Unix console, one can see these pages by issuing the command
man followed by the command name, as in:
> man cd
You will be given one page of output at a time.
Hit the space bar to get the next page of output.
Type the letter q to quit this help system.
Man pages can also be browsed over the web.
Standard unix commands have man pages located on the web at the
following URL:
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/cgi-wrap/slac-man/page?<command>.
BaBar-specific commands have man pages located on the web at :
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/cgi-wrap/bfman/page?<command>
BaBar Analysis Documents, or BADs, are documents related to BaBar physics analyses. The BAD system includes supporting documents for an analysis, documentation of performance of physics tools or detector subsystems, and drafts of papers for journals or conferences. Nearly every past and present BaBar analysis is documented in a BAD.
The BAD index is searcheable - you can look for documents by topic, title words, author, or date.
There are a number of search utilities that you use to find BaBar information:
The following links can help you locate people at BaBar:
The HOWTO's are a package of ascii documents created by
Pete Elmer,
which can be checked out like any other package of BaBar code.
The three HOWTO's that are of more general interest are:
You can see the latest versions of the HOWTO files in the
"newest" BaBar code release at:
or you can check out the HOWTO package like any other BaBar software
package (see the Quicktour
section of the BaBar Offline Workbook for information about checking
out new packages):
addpkg HOWTO
Since the HOWTO package is updated relatively frequently, it is
perhaps best to look at the newest version of this package, as well as
the version associated with the currently software release you are
using.
Page maintained by Adam Edwards
Last modified: January 2008
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