After the successfull restart of the LHC, the first collisions with two 3.5 TeV beams colliding at 7 TeV will take place on march 30th. From 8:30 till 18:00 (UTC+01) there will be a live webcast at
http://webcast.cern.ch/lhcfirstphysics/
The first collisions will probably take place between 9:00 and 11:00. The tentative schedule can be found here.
Update: An interesting page to watch the beam is the LHC Operations beam status page.
If you run a python script that imports GaudiPython (or any LHCb modules for that matter) inside gdb on any lxplus node, you will run into an error like this:
[lxplus223] ~ > gdb python
GNU gdb Red Hat Linux (6.3.0.0-1.162.el4rh)
Copyright 2004 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
GDB is free software, covered by the GNU General Public License, and you are
welcome to change it and/or distribute copies of it under certain conditions.
Type "show copying" to see the conditions.
There is absolutely no warranty for GDB. Type "show warranty" for details.
This GDB was configured as "x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu"
...Using host libthread_db library "/lib64/tls/libthread_db.so.1".
(gdb) set args test.py
(gdb) run
Starting program:
/afs/cern.ch/sw/lcg/external/Python/2.5.4p2/slc4_amd64_gcc34/bin/python test.py
[Thread debugging using libthread_db enabled]
[New Thread 182894205120 (LWP 11117)]
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "test.py", line 1, in
import GaudiPython
ImportError: No module named GaudiPython
Program exited with code 01.
(gdb)
This is due to our group-login script (including the “rc” one)
using LbLogin and that reshuffles the paths. When gdb starts
the process to be debugged and if a SHELL variable is present,
it is started with “$SHELL -c”.
When it is perfectly legal for bash (it only starts a new shell),
with (t)csh it starts a new *login* shell corrupting the already
setup paths (PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, PYTHONPATH etc).
So in order to solve this you have to unset SHELL inside
gdb (maybe best to place that in .gdbinit):
unset environment SHELL
Since today Google Streetview is available for Switzerland. It covers quite a few streets and among them is the road to CERN.
Here you can see the main entrance:
And here you can see the ATLAS building
… the CERN Globe:
LHCb Experiment:
Yesterday we played board games in the CERN restaurant. Talking about an official event on friday one of the guys said, that he probably won’t be invited to official events for some times, because of a recent dispute with the CERN management. Surely we wanted to know what he did and he told us, that in his blog he pointed to a talk given by CERN Director-General Robert Aymar where one of the topics was the status of the LHC. The interesting thing about the talk was, that it contains pictures from the LHC incident on September 19. In his blog he pointed to the slides of the talk which were publicly accesible, but hidden deep inside the CERN Web.
Shortly after he posted the link to the slides, the access to the slides was restricted. So he contacted the CERN Press Office, why this was done. The official reply from the CERN Press Office was, that they wanted to inform the CERN community first, before publishing the pictures to the general public.
The incident has happend quite a while ago and it’s good to finally see some pictures of it, even if many members of CERN criticize the lack of openness regarding this topic.