I added MIDAS Makefile rules for building ARM binaries: "make linuxarm" and "make cleanarm" will create 
(and clean) object files, libraries and executables under "linux-arm" using the TI Sitara ARM SDK or the 
Yocto SDK ARM cross-compilers (GCC 4.7.x and 4.8.x respectively). (Makefile rules for building PPC 
binaries have existed for years).

The hardware we have at TRIUMF are "ARMv7" machines - TI Sitara 335x CPUs (google mityarm) and Altera 
Cyclone 5 FPGA ARM (google sockit). (as opposed to the ARMv5 CPU on the RaspberryPi). The software 
binary API standard settled by Fedora Linux is "hard float" (as opposed to "soft float" used by older SDKs).

So "ARMv7 hard float" is what we intend to use at TRIUMF, but ARMv5 and soft-float should also work ok, 
so please report successes and/or problems to this forum.

K.O.

• Anonymous checkout can be done now with
  svn co svn+ssh://svn@savannah.psi.ch/afs/psi.ch/project/meg/svn/midas/trunk midas
  svn co svn+ssh://svn@savannah.psi.ch/afs/psi.ch/project/meg/svn/mxml/trunk mxml
  Use password svn (you might have to enter it several times). The mxml package is now outside from midas, so you have to check it out separately.
  
• Non-anonymous access (for commits!) is only possible if you have an account at PSI. While it is possible via
  svn co svn+ssh://<your_name>@savannah.psi.ch/afs/psi.ch/project/meg/svn/midas/trunk midas
  it is more convenient if you access the repository via AFS, since then you only have to obtain a valid AFS token once a day and do not have to supply passwords on each SVN access
  
• Before you do a checkout, delete (or rename) your old CVS working directory
  
• Subversion does not use file revisions, but a global revision number for the whole repository, which is now at 2752. To get some idea about subversion, read this very good book
  
• The Web access to the repository is at http://savannah.psi.ch/viewcvs/trunk/?root=midas
  
• The ViewCVS web interface allows on-the-fly generation of TAR balls from the current repository. Just click on the link Download tarball
  
• The old CVS repository has been switched to read-only and will be completely closed in a few weeks
  
• The machine midas.psi.ch will in the near future not be available any more for any repository
  
• All the $Log: tags in the midas files have been replaced by $Id: tags, since the former ones are not supported by SVN (for good reasons actually). To view the change log, do a svn log <filename>.
  

• Do not use the Cygwin subversion package, but the binaries from here if you plan to access the SVN repository through AFS at PSI (or other places where AFS is available). If you map the AFS repository for example to "Y:", then the binaries access this under file:///Y:/svn/meg/... whicl the cygwin ones access this under file:///cygwin/y/svn/meg/... While this is ok in principle, it gives a conflict with the TortoiseSVN which expects the first path. So if you want to use command line utilities together with TortoiseSVN, the Cygwin package won't work.
  
• Use the TortoiseSVN package. It's really great! It has a very nice "diff" viewer/merger, it's integrated into the Windows explorer, has a spell checker for composing comments for commits, etc.
  
• For the SVN binaries under Windows, you have to set the environment variable LANG=en_US, otherwise svn will talk in German to you on a standard PSI Windows PC.
  

Dear All,

I have created a custom page (please see the attachment) and imported into 
MIDAS with key name "Control panel&" (without the ""). I have the following 
two questions:

1) I display the status of the run with <odb src="/Runinfo/State">, but it 
returns numbers which is not user friendly. How can I make something 
like "Running" with green background and "Stopped" with red background in the 
default status page?

2) When I click either Start/Stop/Pause/Resume, it can performs the right 
things, but afterward it jumps to the page "http://domain.name:8081/CS/" which 
shows "Invalid custom page: NULL path". How can I make it returns to the 
correct page "http://domain.name:8081/CS/Control%20panel"?

Thank you for your attention.

Best Regards,
Jimmy

Dear All,

I have one more question. I use <odb src="odb field" edit=1> to display an 
editable ODB value, but how can I show this value in hexadecimal?

Thanks.

Best Regards,
Jimmy


> Dear All,
> 
> I have created a custom page (please see the attachment) and imported into 
> MIDAS with key name "Control panel&" (without the ""). I have the following 
> two questions:
> 
> 1) I display the status of the run with <odb src="/Runinfo/State">, but it 
> returns numbers which is not user friendly. How can I make something 
> like "Running" with green background and "Stopped" with red background in the 
> default status page?
> 
> 2) When I click either Start/Stop/Pause/Resume, it can performs the right 
> things, but afterward it jumps to the page "http://domain.name:8081/CS/" which 
> shows "Invalid custom page: NULL path". How can I make it returns to the 
> correct page "http://domain.name:8081/CS/Control%20panel"?
> 
> Thank you for your attention.
> 
> Best Regards,
> Jimmy

> 1) I display the status of the run with <odb src="/Runinfo/State">, but it 
> returns numbers which is not user friendly. How can I make something 
> like "Running" with green background and "Stopped" with red background in the 
> default status page?

Sorry my late reply, I was really busy. You need JavaScript to perform such a 
task. See the attached example.

> 2) When I click either Start/Stop/Pause/Resume, it can performs the right 
> things, but afterward it jumps to the page "http://domain.name:8081/CS/" 
> which shows "Invalid custom page: NULL path". How can I make it returns 
> to the correct page "http://domain.name:8081/CS/Control%20panel"?

You add a hidden redirect statement:

  <input type=hidden name=redir value="CS/Control panel">

Best regards,

  Stefan

> I have one more question. I use <odb src="odb field" edit=1> to display an 
> editable ODB value, but how can I show this value in hexadecimal?

Again with JavaScript:

  var v = ODBGet('/some/path&format=%X');

this will retrieve /some/path and format it in hexadecimal. Then you can set a table 
cell with "v" as I wrote in the last reply. If you want to change this value 
however, you need to encode this yourself in JavaScript.

- Stefan

New version of MIDAS has a feature where it seems to automatically resize the
message page horizontally in order to fix each MIDAS message into one line. 
Some of my MIDAS messages (in particular error messages, where I need details)
are very long.  The result is that the MIDAS page automatically becomes very
wide and I have to scroll a lot left/right in order to read my messages.  This
is annoying.

I would vote to roll-back this new feature.

> New version of MIDAS has a feature where it seems to automatically resize the
> message page horizontally in order to fix each MIDAS message into one line. 
> Some of my MIDAS messages (in particular error messages, where I need details)
> are very long.  The result is that the MIDAS page automatically becomes very
> wide and I have to scroll a lot left/right in order to read my messages.  This
> is annoying.
> 
> I would vote to roll-back this new feature.

Issues should be reported in the bitbucket issue tracker. I moved this issue over there.

/Stefan

> online monitor would show (almost in real-time) the 
> gain, the dark noise, and the pedestal for all the channels, the 2D tracks 
> inside the detectors for each spill and so on.

Hmm... I now realize that the midas distribution does not include an example web page that 
integrates all these elements into one easy to understand html file.

I think an example page that would answer your questions and the questions from the other 
thread about starting/stopping runs, should include following elements:

- the general midas web page framework (the midas left-hand side menu, the top side 
status display, Stefan's new odb tags)
- buttons to start and stop runs (javascript code to call the run transition RPCs)
- embedded images for history display (old style gif and new style canvas)
- embedded images for ROOT histograms (via the ROOT http server and jsroot)
- code to live-update all these elements independantly from each other (to allow history 
plots and ROOT histograms to update at different frequencies).

As for the web page code for showing a mini-event-display, I think we do not know yet how 
to do - the event data lives inside the analyzer as C++ data structures, so somehow it 
needs to be encoded as json (this code is missing - but one can use the ROOT C++ to json 
encoder/streamer), needs to be transported to the web browser (we know how to do this) 
and at the end, plotting the json data on a canvas is the easy part.

I know some experiments have done all of this, and I think we should have such a pipeline 
available as part of the ROOTANA package. Maybe some day...

K.O.

Dear Thomas and Konstantin,

thank you very much for the feedback. I found the ROOTANA javascript display a good source of 
information and references.

As Thomas said, maybe the simplest thing would be to use the ROOT THttpServer. Honestly, I do 
not think that ROOT was ever meant to act as an online monitor due to its wacky memory 
management and abysmal multithread support. In other words, I think that by using ROOT we would 
inevitably lose some performance. 

Perhaps there are better ways of achieving the same goal. For example, I was leaning towards a 
plotly.js based approach where I would encode a series of vectors in base64 strings (for better 
transmission performance), send them to the client through the MJSONRPC mechanism, decode them 
and then feed them to plotly.js. But in this case, I should study many new libraries 
(plotly.js, the library for the base64 encoding, the Gaussian fitting, etc...) and I do not 
have the time to do that now: "beam is coming".

So ROOT it is. I will use the ROOTANA javascript display as a reference. Do you happen to know 
who wrote that part? 

In that example, you have some "static" histograms that you keep always in memory, while in our 
case the number of channels is so big that we have to dynamically generate the histograms only 
when needed (when the user select a single channel).

Best regards
Giorgio

> 
> As Thomas said, maybe the simplest thing would be to use the ROOT THttpServer. Honestly, I do 
> not think that ROOT was ever meant to act as an online monitor due to its wacky memory 
> management and abysmal multithread support. In other words, I think that by using ROOT we would 
> inevitably lose some performance.
>

Yes. The previous data analysis frameworks - PAW/PAW++/CERNlib (CERN), NOVA (TRIUMF) - certainly had
support for online monitoring. In CERNlib/PAW the histograms were stored in shared memory,
the analyzer running in the background was filling them, the PAW/PAW++ display was displaying
them "live". I was very surprised to find this function removed/not implemented in ROOT, given
that the same people were behind both projects (Rene Brun & co).

We tried to roll our own implementation of this in ROOTANA/ROODY, with mixed success.

I am glad the JSROOT project finally gained traction and web based "I can see the data" is now
available in ROOT.

> 
> Perhaps there are better ways of achieving the same goal. For example, I was leaning towards a 
> plotly.js based approach where 
>

There are many web/javascript graphics libraries out there, all have the weak spot - how do you
get your data into them?

Going forward, I see us standardizing on JSROOT: https://root.cern.ch/js/

>
> ... send them to the client through the MJSONRPC mechanism ...
>

I am not sure JSROOT have any support for interacting from the web page to the back-end analyzer. Perhaps
we can use the MIDAS MJSONRPC library for this. Hmm... (Note that the ROOT HTTP server is a derivative
of the mongoose web server library, which we use in mhttpd, so I already know how to work it)

>
> I would encode a series of vectors in base64 strings (for better transmission performance)
>

We looked into this when deciding on the data encoding for the midas history data. There is a tradeoff
between network use and cpu use - to save on the network, you try to reduce the data size by using
compressed binary data - to save on the CPU you try to minimize data encoding.

For history data, we gave up on binary json (extra decoding needed), gave up on text json (extra decoding 
needed), gave up on compression (extra cpu use for decompression) and use javascript native binary processing
("arraybuffer").

Our thinking is that network bandwidth is usually quite big and is getting bigger, but cpu resource is limited
and is expensive. (mobile devices seems to be stuck with ~2 GHz CPUs; cpu use means battery use and
battery capacity is limited, not improving quickly)

> 
> So ROOT it is. I will use the ROOTANA javascript display as a reference. Do you happen to know 
> who wrote that part? 
> 

Yes. See "Contact" at https://root.cern.ch/js/

>
> In that example, you have some "static" histograms that you keep always in memory, while in our 
> case the number of channels is so big that we have to dynamically generate the histograms only 
> when needed (when the user select a single channel).
> 

This requires interaction with the analyzer, requires some kind of RPC mechanism. I am now curious what jsroot 
have, also it would not be too hard to add the mjsonrpc library to rootana. Cooperation from ROOT multithreading
is not required: I can queue the RPC requests in a separate (thread safe, non-ROOT) buffer, then process
them in the ROOT main event loop (this is how the ROOTANA histogram server worked in the days when
ROOT had no multithread support at all).

K.O.

Hi,

I need to install MIDAS on a Windows system (Microsoft Windows Server 2003). 
The computer has the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Express version.
I have downloaded the MIDAS packages using the tarball mechanism. I have create 
the environment variables without problems and I have create the file           
%SystemRoot%\system32\exptab 
But when I try to build MIDAS and I do 
nmake -f makefile.nt
I have the following problem:
Microsoft (R) Program Maintenance Utility Version 10.00.30319.01
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation.  All rights reserved.

NMAKE : fatal error U1073: don't know how to make 'src/mhttpd.c'
Stop.

I don't understand this problem. Can anybody help me, please?

Thanks in advance!!!

Hi Raquel,

The makefile.nt has been corrected.
Obviously Midas on Windows has not been updated for quite a while.
mhttpd.c has been converted to c++ (mhttpd.cxx) as well as a couple of other 
applications.

Please give a try,  PAA

> Hi,
> 
> I need to install MIDAS on a Windows system (Microsoft Windows Server 2003). 
> The computer has the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Express version.
> I have downloaded the MIDAS packages using the tarball mechanism. I have create 
> the environment variables without problems and I have create the file           
> %SystemRoot%\system32\exptab 
> But when I try to build MIDAS and I do 
> nmake -f makefile.nt
> I have the following problem:
> Microsoft (R) Program Maintenance Utility Version 10.00.30319.01
> Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation.  All rights reserved.
> 
> NMAKE : fatal error U1073: don't know how to make 'src/mhttpd.c'
> Stop.
> 
> I don't understand this problem. Can anybody help me, please?
> 
> Thanks in advance!!!

Hi Pierre-André, 

sorry for the long delay, another things keep me out of this computer.
Thanks a lot for correcting makefile.nt and the other applications!

Now I have try, downloading the MIDAS packages from the tarball mechanism, as
before,
and now it seems that the previous problems are solved. It remains only one small
problem, it is related to the odbedit.

I attach here the figure with the error that is reported by the computer. Is it
possible that is another file that needs to be updated? Can you help me with that?

Thanks a lot in advance!!!!



> Hi Raquel,
> 
> The makefile.nt has been corrected.
> Obviously Midas on Windows has not been updated for quite a while.
> mhttpd.c has been converted to c++ (mhttpd.cxx) as well as a couple of other 
> applications.
> 
> Please give a try,  PAA
> 
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I need to install MIDAS on a Windows system (Microsoft Windows Server 2003). 
> > The computer has the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Express version.
> > I have downloaded the MIDAS packages using the tarball mechanism. I have create 
> > the environment variables without problems and I have create the file           
> > %SystemRoot%\system32\exptab 
> > But when I try to build MIDAS and I do 
> > nmake -f makefile.nt
> > I have the following problem:
> > Microsoft (R) Program Maintenance Utility Version 10.00.30319.01
> > Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation.  All rights reserved.
> > 
> > NMAKE : fatal error U1073: don't know how to make 'src/mhttpd.c'
> > Stop.
> > 
> > I don't understand this problem. Can anybody help me, please?
> > 
> > Thanks in advance!!!

> I have a time series of slow control measurements in an ASCII format - 
> data records in a format (run_number, time, temperature, voltage1, ..., voltageN), 
> and, if possible, would like to convert them into a MIDAS history format. 
> 
> Making MIDAS events out of that data is easy, but is it possible to preserve 
> the time stamps?  - Logically, this boils down to whether it is possible to have  
> the event time set by a user frontend

It looks that the original question was not as naive as I expected and may be pointing to a subtle bug. 
I have implemented a python frontend - essentially a clone of 

https://bitbucket.org/tmidas/midas/src/develop/python/midas/frontend.py

reading the old slow control data and setting the event.header.timestamp's to some dates from the year of 2022. 

When I run MIDAS and read the "old slow control events", one event in 10 seconds, 
the MIDAS Event Dump utility shows the data with the correct event timestamps, from the year of 2022. 

However the history plots show the event parameters with the timestamps from Feb 01 2025 and the adjacent 
data points separated by 10 sec.

Is it possible that the history system uses its own timestamp setting instead of using timestamps from the event headers? 
- Under normal circumstances, the two should be very close, and that could've kept the issue hidden... 

-- thanks, regards, Pasha

UPDATE:  I attached the frontend code and the input data file it is reading. The data file should reside in the local directory
- the frontend code doesn't have everything fully automated for the test, 
  -- an integer field "/Mu2e/Offline/Ops/LastTime" would need to be created manually
  -- the history plots would need to be declared manually

Dear MIDAS experts, 

I confirm that when writing out history files corresponding to the slow control event data, 
MIDAS history system timestamps the data not with the event time coming from the event data, 
but with the current time determined by the program - 

https://bitbucket.org/tmidas/midas/src/293d27fad0c87c80c4ed7b94b5c40ba1e150bea4/progs/mlogger.cxx#lines-5321

where 'now' is defined as  

time_t now = time(NULL);

I'm looking for a way to timestamp the history data with the event time - that is important 
for HEP applications outside the DAQ domain. Yes, MIDAS infrastructure is very well suited for that, 
there could have a number of such applications, and experiments could significantly benefit from that.

So I'm wondering whether the implementation is a design choice made or it could be changed. 

The change itself and especially its validation may require a non-negligible amount of work - I'd be happy to contribute.

Any insight much appreciated. 

-- thanks, regards, Pasha