[Babase] Next five weeks

Susan Alberts babase@www.eco.princeton.edu
Wed, 13 Apr 2005 15:35:57 -0500


Dear all,

Karl and I made some plans about the next five weeks, which is the 
period in which the conversion wil be completed. This is an update.

We will have a conference call tomorrow Thursday Apr 14 to discuss 
various aspects of this. Jeanne and I can do 1 pm East coast time. 
Karl with this work for you? Leah and Catherine any problems?

The major conversion issues are the interpolation and the 
reproductive tables. All the rest is fairly small stuff. Karl needs 
to spend the next week catching up on personal and other business. 
Then  he will come back to the interpolation on the 19th of April. 
He estimates that it should take another week to finish the 
interpolation.

So:
1. karl works on interpolation (in Chicago) from 19 to 25 April.

2. On 25 April we have another conference call to get an update and 
to discuss his starting the reproductive tables.

3. Karl will work on reproductive tables from 25 Apr to 1 May, at 
which point they should be done.

4. Karl will come to Duke on 2 May and will stay through 18 May. 
During this period the data conversion will get completed and 
hopefully all the program conversion will happen also. This will be 
an intensive time, as there will be a lot of error checking and 
correcting stuff.

Concommitant with Karl's programming work, the rest of us need to be 
reviewing the rules that he is encoding. These rules will eventually 
be written in the documentation, and ideally we would have done the 
documentation/planning first (but this is hindsight). instead, Karl 
will send us instructions for how to extract the rules from the code 
itself (they are inserted as comments, and these comments will form 
the backbone of the documentation eventually). Leah and Susan will go 
over the tables one by one, and send comments on the Jeanne and 
Catherine for comments. The faster we get this done, the better. This 
won't prevent us from having to rethink and deal with errors but it 
will be a first step and will icnrease Karl's efficiency.

Also regarding documentation, Anne Hubbard in Chicago will start 
working again on the documentation this Friday. Her plan is to 
complete the conversion to docbook by the time I leave for Kenya. We 
will check in after a week (around Apr 27) to see how it is going for 
her.

Please confirm that a conference call tomorrow will work for you.

Susan
-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Susan Alberts, Associate Professor
Department of Biology, Duke University, Box 90338, Durham NC 27708
phone 919-660-7272  fax 919-660-7293