AIPS quarterly report (Q3), Oct 04 1999
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Versions
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At present we are in the process of creating the final standard
distribution of AIPS (15OCT99). TST will become 31DEC99, the so-called
"AIPS for the Ages". It will be available from our ftp site continuously,
and will continue to be patched and developed where necessary over the next
two to three years. AIPS is currently distributed nightly to all NRAO sites
and to 7 non-NRAO sites in the US, Europe and Japan.  In the future we
expect the nightly distribution list to grow as the "Midnight Job" becomes
the standard method for obtaining AIPS.  Full support for SVLBI processing
has been available since 15APR98. 

The 15OCT98 version of AIPS has been distributed to over 300 sites,
running Solaris, Linux, DEC Alpha, HP and SGI versions. The overall
number of AIPS installations has continued to grow over the last two
years.

The majority (75%) of AIPS distributions are now received by ftp,
although the CD-ROM distribution is still in stong demand.  


General Issues
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- continued support of GPS external calibration information.
- various bug fixes in support of single-dish beam-switched processing.
- bug fixes and upgrades to PCCOR.
- new pseudoverbs were added in support of task-based SAVE/GET files.
- Improvements to interactive editing tasks.
- Improvements/bug-fixes to experimental data-writing task FITAB.
- New task to generate IMAGR clean regions based on NVSS information; this
  task is very useful for low-frequency imaging. 
- EXTAB: A new task to export AIPS table data to other programs
  (e.g. spreadsheets and databases) via text files. Also serves as a
  paraform for translating AIPS tables to text formats with data selection.
- CLIPM - New task - a CLIP geared to multi-source input files with flag
  table output. 
- The solution SNR calcualtions in KRING for the Least-Squares and FFT
  sections now agree; other capabilities were also added.
- The NRAO midnight job now uses Secure Shell for access control.