Thanks John,
for all your hard work, and especially the capabilities for Grib access.
Just an FYI our NOMADS servers had 160 million downloads during FY13;
serving 860TB of data. Much of that from TDS. Further, the sub-setting
stats are going up so users are getting just what they want- making room
for- well, more users.
As someone once told me at NCAR (NSF rep:): "Glenn, you likely don't get a
degree in meteorology in the U.S. today without going to NOMADS". So, I
think until NCEP can go to NetCDF (and I've asked Louis to do this and it's
being considered I'm told), it's certainly "worth it" to NCDC, and the
community!
Can't wait for our feature collections to be operational.... ;)
Best Regards, Glenn
On Tue, Apr 8, 2014 at 9:42 AM, John Caron <caron@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 4/7/2014 5:23 PM, Jeff McWhirter wrote:
>
> Hi all,
> I've been staying out of this discussion since I don't use the IDV or the
> TDS anymore but John's note raises some red flags that I think Unidata and
> its governance committees should address.
>
>
>
>> The rollout on friday hit a few snags, compounded by me being sick so I
>> couldnt respond quickly.
>>
>
>
> Considering what Unidata has gone through in the past with losing key
> personnel and the impact that that has had on its products it is
> disconcerting that one of its core products is still tied so closely with
> an individual developer. I don't fault the developer - John is incredibly
> dedicated and works very hard - rather I fault management and its
> continuing inability to address these (albeit difficult) issues.
>
>
>
>>
>> You might think "Why didnt we find these problems before releasing?"
>> Because we dont have a separate test team, like commercial software release
>> cycle does. We constantly improve our testing, but plenty gets past us. We
>> rely on the users to find the last set of bugs. And its all but impossible
>> to get users to try beta software. Fact of life.
>>
>>
> This is a cop-out. There are 5 engineers who work on THREDDS (
> http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/committees/usercom/2014Apr/agenda.html) and 2
> engineers that work on the IDV. The TDS has been in production for over a
> decade. These were *not* edge case errors. They were errors in core
> functionality and should have never gotten into production.
>
>
> -Jeff
>
>
>
> Hi Jeff:
>
> Thanks for your thoughts, and your perspective.
>
> There were 2 defects that would normally have been caught and fixed within
> a few hours, in normal circumstances. The inability of some to tolerate a
> few days of intermitant downtime highlights the tension between
> thredds.ucar.edu as an operational server and as a vehicle for continuous
> innovation.
>
> The TDS is complex and possibly over ambitious software for the size of
> Unidata, which has about 13 software enginers and about 15 software systems
> and projects. The TDS is providing access to large collections of GRIB
> files in a way that no other software in the world can do. This has
> occupied more of my time than I wanted, to the neglect of other issues; in
> retrospect Im not sure if GRIB is worth it. But I think we have the bulk of
> it done, so we'll see how it rolls out.
>
> Meanwhile, we feel like we have some solid ideas on how to improve things
> going forward. Thanks everyone for your continued support and feedback.
>
> John
>
>
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--
Glenn K. Rutledge
Meteorologist/Physical Scientist
NOMADS PI and Team Leader
National Climatic Data Center
Asheville, NC 28801
(828) 271-4097
nomads.ncdc.noaa.gov
