[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