[GEMPAK #TPI-961663]: Error reading MTSAT McIDAS area files

Hi Kwan-yin,

re:
> Yes, it has indeed been a long time.  I am still doing fine here,
> working at HPC.  Thanks.  How about yourself?

I am doing well, thanks!

re:
> Unfortunately, I don't have access to McIDAS at HPC now.  They only
> support GEMPAK.  That's why I am trying it that way.  I also cannot
> access my account at City College either.  I don't know if it is
> because the disk has filled up or not.  (Can I confirm that
> remotely?)

You can confirm that the machine is up, but, as far as I know,
not anything else unless you can login.

re:
> When I had access to McIDAS, I had displayed the MTSAT
> images by accessing PUB/MTGLOB04I2.

OK.  I will create a couple of test images from this dataset
for Michael to use in GEMPAK.

re:
> I am also considering the possibility of running McIDAS at home.  I
> only have a Windows XP home edition for the moment.  I am aware of
> McIDAS-V and McIDAS for XP but I think XP Professional is reqiured.
> Am I right?

For McIDAS-V/IDV, the answer is no.  (Just so you know, McIDAS-V is
based on the IDV.  Currently the great majority of McIDAS-V is the
IDV with a little different look.  The piece of McIDAS-v that is different
and exciting is Hydra, a package one uses for analysis of hyper-spectral
data).

I run both the IDV and McIDAS-V on my Acer Aspire One netbook
under Windows XP Home with no problems.  Both would run great on a
machine with more muscle, of course.

I also run VMware Player (free) on the same netbook and run a variety
of virtual machines in it (but not concurrently).  Right now, I use
Fedora 11 and Ubuntu as Linux virtual machines, and both run nicely.
By doing this, I have can have my familiar Linux environment with me
on my Windows machine.

By the way, I do not recommend running the Windows version of McIDAS
simply because you have to:

- load an X Windows client like Exceed, MI/X, or Hummingbird, and
  these are not free

- load Microsoft Services for Unix (this is free)

Going the route of running a virtual machine has the advantage
of running in a real Linux environment of your choice.  The X Window
support is, of course, built in, and everything works as expected.
Since I keep my virtual machine on an external USB hard drive, I
can use the virtual machine from any Windows machine on which
VMware Player is loaded.  This came in very handy at the AMS
show in 2009 when a Linux machine on which we were going to run
the LDM and all decoders died.  I cranked up the virtual machine
on a laptop, and ran the LDM to ingest and decode all data desired;
nice.

re:
> Also, even if I can run McIDAS-V, it seems that I cannot
> run the McIDAS-X scripts that I have built.  Am I right?

You are correct, you would not be able to run your McIDAS-X
scripts directly.  You could translate them into Jython scripts
and run them in McIDAS-V or the IDV.

re:
> How about running them in McIDAS-lite?

Actually, I don't know.  I haven't played with McIDAS-Lite in
a _long_ time, and I didn't do that much with it anyway.

I suggest you strongly consider taking a hard look at the IDV
or McIDAS-V.  I think that you will be amazed at things you
can do in that environment that you could never do in McIDAS
or in GEMPAK.

Cheers,

Tom
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Ticket Details
===================
Ticket ID: TPI-961663
Department: Support GEMPAK
Priority: Normal
Status: Open