Spacelog

This is the source code for Spacelog, a website for experiencing space missions through radio transcripts and photography.

With the exception of the font and some icons (credited on the mission about page), everything outside the missions directory is released under the CC-0 license. Mission images are credited in the mission's _meta file.

We hope you have fun with this -- we have!

The Spacelog team

Getting involved without technical knowledge

Correcting minor errors

For small errors (whether transcription errors, or something like spelling mistakes on the rest of the site), it's probably easiest to just email them through to us at [email protected].

Helping transcribe a new mission

If you download the PDFs from NASA for a mission you want to add, you'll discover that you can select text in them and copy it out into a text editor, or something like OpenOffice Writer, Apple's Pages or Microsoft Word. You'll see lots of lines that look like this:

02 07 55 20 CMP I believe we've had a problem here.

However some of the lines will have errors (from the small, such as O instead of 0, to the large such as entire lines being completely garbled). If you go back to the PDF, you can usually quite easily figure out what was originally typed out but which the automatic OCR didn't get right.

There are also some non-dialogue lines. These should all be indented by a single tab; the most important ones are:

    TAPE 2/1
    PAGE 9

which happen at the start of a new page of the PDF. In this case they mean that it's the first page of the transcript of tape 2, and is page 9 of the complete transcript. We particularly need the page number so we can link back to the original typescript in the site.

If you clean up the text version like this, and send it through to us, we can do the rest (although it may take us a bit of time). Since some of the missions are quite long (hundreds of pages of transcript), you may want to share the load between a group. Whether you do that or decide to go it alone, it'd be great if you could let us know at at [email protected] what you're working on, so we can help you out, and make sure you don't duplicate others' effort.

A quick note about multiple transcripts

For Mercury-Atlas 6, there is only one transcript available, that of the air-to-ground radio communications (John Glenn's mike was hot through the entire mission). For Apollo 13, there is a second transcript from the Command Module recording, but it cuts out very early into the mission, so we didn't consider it worth including.

However for many other missions there are multiple transcripts. If you're adding missions to Spacelog, please keep these transcripts in different files. We don't yet have support to identify them distinctly, but if you move them all into one big file it'll be impossible for us ever to work on that!

Getting involved with technical knowledge

Getting set up

Source code

Clone the repository from git:

$ git clone git://github.com/Spacelog/Spacelog.git

For any changes you make (fixed, new missions, or even new website features), you can issue a pull request to us from another github repository).

Software to install

• python (and pip)
• redis (often packages as python-redis; we need Redis 2.0 or later)
• imagemagick and optipng (for stats images on the phase pages)
• Xapian and its python bindings (the search engine library we use; often packaged as python-xapian)
• CSS::Prepare (a perl library for managing CSS; sudo cpanm -f CSS::Prepare; if you don't have cpanm there are straightforward installation instructions available)
• various python modules (run pip install -r requirements.txt)

The easiest way to grab the python modules may be to build a virtualenv in the Spacelog checkout:

virtualenv ENV
ENV/bin/pip install -r requirements.txt

then use ENV/bin/python where normally you'd use just python. (If it's recent enough, virtualenv may install a script to "activate" its copy of python in your shell, which you run as source ENV/bin/activate, or ENV/Scripts/activate.bat on Windows.)

A word of caution

Currently we are tracking the trunk of Django, because we both use upcoming 1.3 features and need a bugfix not yet available in an alpha release. This does mean that occasionally the latest version is broken; we will move away from this situation as soon as possible.

Hosts setup

To make it possible to work with multiple missions, you need edit /etc/hosts to include an alias artemis, plus aliases of the form <mission>.artemis, such as apollo13.artemis and mercury6.artemis; these all need to point to localhost (or to your virtual machine, if that's how you develop things). For instance, here's an /etc/hosts entry using localhost (put this in addition to the localhost line already in there):

127.0.0.1		apollo13.artemis mercury6.artemis artemis

and here's one for a virtual machine (you'll need to change the dotted quad at the start of the line):

192.168.56.101	apollo13.artemis mercury6.artemis artemis

Running the code

Make sure redis-server is running, then run make reindex in the checkout directory (it will take care of the virtualenv for you; if you're not using one, use PYTHON=python make reindex instead), which will import all the mission data into redis. You may also want to do make s3assets to pull down the PNGs of the original transcript pages, and make statsporn to build the graphs for the phases page of how much was said at different times (and, in case we've added more graphs but haven't updated this, other things :-).

You then need to have some other servers running on top of redis:

• make devcss will run CSS::Prepare in development mode, so changes to CSS files will be reflected automatically; if not using a virtualenv, PYTHON=python make devcss should do the trick
• make devcss_global will run CSS::Prepare for the project homepage
• make devserver will run the mission-specific websites
• make devserver_global will run the project homepage

The project homepage will appear at http://artemis:8001/, and the per-mission sites at http://apollo13.artemis:8000/ (which will show the Apollo 13 mission), http://mercury6.artemis:8000/ (Mercury-Atlas 6) and so on.

Reindexing

Whenever you edit information about a mission, or add a new one, you need to run make reindex again. If you get errors you may find the lognag.pl script in mcshred/src useful: just give it some transcript files and it'll tell you where it finds possible errors or weirdnesses. (For new missions, you'll probably have to add things into the valid speakers list at line 71.)

External Source Images

We make use of external source images (which we haven't created ourselves) in the form of:

• .pngs of transcript PDF pages
• Original NASA photographs

For reasons of size these aren't stored in git, they're stored in the spacelog Amazon S3 bucket (served by Cloudfront on http://media.spacelog.org). By default, our settings point you to this host. If you want to test adding your own images, you can change the MISSIONS_IMAGE_URL in website/configs/settings.py to serve them locally. File a github ticket if you need images uploaded to S3.

Adding a new mission

You'll need to create a directory in missions. For Mercury-Redstone missions these should start mr, for Mercury-Atlas ma, for Gemini they start just g and for Apollo a. If anyone wants to do non-NASA missions, or Shuttle missions, then get in touch and we'll figure out a naming convention.

Look in transcript-file-format for a description of how we lay out files. If you're transcribing a mission we don't have, you will find the example _meta and TEC files useful, since they are the main two files you'll need to create (if you're going to include more than just the air-to-ground transcription, you'll want to put that in TEC, the command module transcript in CM, and so on). If you can make them in that format (or get as close as you can), and send them through to us along with a link to the original transcript PDFs you used, we'll do the rest. (If you are gifted in design, the source files for all the artwork we've created is available, although we haven't yet put it online -- yell if you need it as a basis for making things like orbital diagrams.)

Multiple transcripts

As noted above in the information for non-technical folk, if you clean up multiple different transcripts for a single mission (for instance you might do not only the TEC ("technical" ground-to-air) recording but also the CM and/or LM recordings), then please keep them in separate files rather than merging them.

Technical glossary

Within the system, there are a number of terms that describe pieces of the system but do not necessarily match what is shown on the websites.

• TRANSCRIPT FILE -- our textual representation of the original transcript; see transcript-file-format/TEC for a commented example
• TIMESTAMP -- four colon-separated numbers that represent the GET (Ground Elapsed Time), the time since launch within the mission; the four numbers are days, hours, minutes, seconds, so ignition is 00:00:00:00; these are used in the transcript files, and also in URLs
• LOG LINE -- smallest linkable chunk, identified by timestamp and transcript file
• RANGE -- a range between two timestamps (can be the same two)
• LABEL -- a keyword applied to a range within a specific stream (note that labels are not currently used)
• META FILE -- a per-mission file called _meta that contains information such as glossary items, pull quotes for the homepage, and acts (see transcript-file-format/_meta for a commented example
• CHARACTER -- a speaker who appears in a transcript file; additional information about them appears in the meta file
• SHIFT -- a range where one "role" character (such as CAPCOM or the flight director) can be identified with a "real" character (such as Charlie Duke or Deke Slayton); ranges are defined in the meta file

From this we generate a number of higher-level pieces which are used in the website.

• ACT -- an editorially defined range that represents a segment of the mission, which may for instance reference orbital mechanics (in the websites these are referred to as phases)
• KEY SCENE -- an editorially defined point in the transcript where an important event or exchange starts
• STREAM -- a collection of related content arranged on a timeline

Code layout

The main code is two Django projects and a python library for managing transcript files into a redis data store. There is also a directory full of per-mission information (transcript files, images and so on), and some other tools directories.

• website/ runs the per-mission websites (Django project)
• global/ runs the project global homepage (Django project)
• backend/ (python library to load transcript files into redis/xappy, generate stats images, and provide an API for accessing streams and other information)
• transcript-file-format/ (documentation of the transcript file format)
• missions/ contains the per-mission data, particularly the transcript files and meta file, but also images and so forth
• tools/ (standalone python tools)
• mcshred/ (python and perl programs for dealing with OCR data from NASA PDFs)
• ext/ (historical mechanism used during development because pip doesn't work in forts)