Musings
This is the start of an attempt to blog daily. Not much to report so far. Pychron development has slowed with most of
the requested data acquisition features implemented. A large number of features require testing and some features will
require heavy modification before they are ready for release. The currently release is 2.0.5 which should be installed
on Jan and Obama. The development branch is at 2.0.6. A new feature that could mitigate some user confusion (or enhance
it) is the ability to specify the root pychron directory. Previously the root directory was hardcoded and passed in to
the entry_point function via setup_version_id. This process is no longer used and the Pychron root directory
(stored in the python.paths.paths variable as root_dir) is saved in the users preference file. This process introduced
a few issues in terms of when the paths object is built and the launching process but they appear to be resolved. A
change was the users file, used to store the last logged in user and a list of available users, was moved from the
.hidden dir to .enthought. This makes same users file available for all launches on a given computer
instead of dedicated to a specific Pychron root directory. The naming format for the root directory also changed from
Pychrondata to simply Pychron. This removes the naming conflict with the database naming format of
pychrondata[_<name>]. The global initialization variables user_login and multi_user were moved from the
initialization.xml file to General preferences.
Adding labels to the LabBook notes is also now available. To handle the many-to-many relationship between notes and
labels a light-weight SQLite database called labels.db is automatically added to the LabBook directory (i.e.
data/labbook/labels.db). The user can add labels by using the Add Label toolbar button. To apply a label to a
note, 1) open the note 2) double-click the desired label to apply. Active labels for a note are displayed at the bottom
of the note. Active notes also display their color as the label background whereas inactive labels have a white
background and display the label text in their color.
Editing the initialization.xml file via a GUI was added. Access the GUI using MenuBar/Help/Edit Initialization.
This GUI allows the user to enabled/disabled plugins and toggle the boolean value for initialization globals.
Today I will continue working on exporting Irradiation data from a Pychron database to a Mass Spec database. After and/or concurently will be enhancing the manual irradition entry process via pychron and a file based import via Excel spreadsheets
