[Babase] Conference call update 30 June 2004

Stephanie Combes babase@www.eco.princeton.edu
Thu, 01 Jul 2004 16:01:52 -0400


Dear Babasers (notice we are copied to Susan in camp; She apparently can't 
live another day without the excitement of these emails.  Who can blame 
her, really.),

  Perhaps you thought I had forgotten to send a summary of our last call? 
Oh no! I thought it best to let the excitement build.  I mean, it's not 
everyday we get these kind of interesting morsels of information!

Here we go!

Step 1: Steph's Confession (can you tell I was raised Catholic?!)
  You might be thinking "Oh, of course, she forgot again." But no, I 
remembered to call everyone at the designated time.  I mean, can I really 
ignore 2 large post-it notes with red ink screaming at me about some 
conference call?!  Hard to ignore, I tell you.  But, as the fates would 
have it, the call was not to start smoothly.  I managed to call jeanne, 
call karl, hang up on jeanne, hang up on karl.  Clearly, a fresh start was 
needed.  SO, I tried again (not being one to give up in the face of 
trouble).  This time, I succeeded! The official conference call could 
begin.  As now, can the official conference call update!

The conversion process has officially begun! ("Official" is the word of the 
day).  There are some bumps in the system.  For example, the last time 
Steph ran the conversion program, she needed to leave it going overnight. 
But hey, it worked!  And there were many errors.  No need for despair 
though!  In some cases, they are errors that Karl needs to deal with in the 
program.  And some appear to be a result of my not emptying out the old 
stuff in the folders before running the program again (I swear I did, but 
I'm also the one who said Wrinkle was a girl! oops).

Karl is going to add some speed-ups into the program.  And he also 
enlightened me as to how to have it tell me it's progress or interrupt it 
midway, just to see the kinds of errors that are popping up.

>From the "good errors" that came up:  (yes, apparently, there are good 
errors and bad errors.  Which ones you designate as "good" or "bad" depends 
on what role you have in dealing with the errors.  This also leaves us 
wondering what other kinds of errors might be lurking out there in the 
world.  just ok errors?  hopeful errors? I just don't know what to tell 
you, fellow philosophers.)
Right, baboon related errors - 1)we discovered that some cid's in cycles do 
not have any dates associated with them.  These are all cid's that are in 
there to link up with a known pregnancy in pregs.  new rule: ok to not have 
dates IF associated with a pregnancy.  2) some cycles have a ddate past the 
statdate.  This led to a discussion of how we use statdate and what it 
means to us.  Karl is going to make a more complicated rule that says it's 
ok to have a ddate past the statdate IF the female is still alive (i.e. the 
program will have to check the status to make sure).

It's also important to note at this point, that the rules Karl is trying to 
put into the system are not just for the conversion.  They are going to be 
rules for the final database.  So the program won't update the database 
(i.e. put in data) that violate the rules.  [ASIDE: Karl, are you keeping 
track of these so we have official documentation later on of what the 
various rules are??]

That's all the important (ok and some unimportant) news. Also, Karl and 
Steph shouldn't probably be logged in at the same time, since we might mess 
each other up.  So Karl is just going to check whether or not I'm logged in 
when he needs to make changes.

Now wasn't that worth the wait, folks?  And Susan, aren't you just so happy 
you also get a copy of this?! I think it could make a good bedtime story 
for the girls...

babase-south out,
steph