Error in PCAL

Here's a question from Akshaya Rane:

I am doing polarization calibration and while trying to run 'pcal', I have encountered the following error. Does this has to do something with qualifiers?

PCAL 3: TOTAL INTENSITIES MUST BE PROVIDED
PCAL 3: Purports to die of UNNATURAL causes

Any thoughts?

I should add that Eric Greisen says that if you spend an hour trying to figure out something in AIPS, and you can't, you should feel free to email him and ask his help.

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This error paves the road to madness

Not to be melodramatic or anything.
But this error:

SCREAT: FAILED TO CREATE REQUESTED SCRATCH FILE
CALCOP: ERROR     5 CREATING SCRATCH FILE

has started popping up all over the place ever since i updated to 31Dec08 version of aips. The relevant task always crashes after giving me this error.

It often pops up when I'm just doing an innocent UVPLT-- and sometimes if I load my data up in TVFLG and wiggle my mouse around and push a few buttons, when i quit out and try UVPLT, the error will be gone. But sometimes it won't.

And i was just trying to run BLCAL and got the error for that script too! I've checked to make sure my uv data is not being read or written. I don't understand what it means. Any thoughts?

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Mystery Error: TASK HAS NOT BEGUN IN 15.1 SECONDS

A question from Tony:

Has anyone start getting the following error message:

AIPS 1: TASK HAS NOT BEGUN IN 15.1 SECONDS
AIPS 1: Begin check for any 'standard' scratch files
AIPS 1: Scratch files -- destroyed: 0 still active: 0
AIPS 1: Resumes

A few people across the department have receive the same error message, and I think it is a problem related to 31DEC08.

But why 15.1 seconds?!

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