Thursday, March 26, 2009

No Deadwood update today

I had every intention of working some more on the service code for Deadwood today; however this morning, as I was setting up my computer, a co-worker came to me with a huge spreadsheet with over 8,000 entries. She told me she needed a number used for Mexican ID purposes calculated for all of these entries.

There's a fairly easy way of calculating a reasonable approximation of this number if you know their full name, their gender, and in which state they were born. Well, the spreadsheet this co-worker gave me only had their full name, and the name of the city (not state) they were born in.

So, not only did I have to figure out how to calculate this number, I also spent the day downloading a list of all notable cities in Mexico (cities with zip codes) and which state they are in, and another list of names and which gender usually has a given name. I haven't really touched Perl for a few years, but this kind of data consolidation and merging is perfect for Perl, so I wrote a series of shell, Perl, and awk scripts to consolidate this data.

When everything was said and done, I was able to reasonably accurately calculate the requested numbers for about 40% of the data I got. I gave this data to the co-worker this afternoon and told her I would work more on this next week. As you can imagine, all of this Linux scripting left me mentally exhausted by the end of the day.

Needless to say, I wasn't able to work on Deadwood. I will see if I can work on it tomorrow. In the meantime, I did post a snapshot of Deadwood yesterday with a copy of the service code I have been working on this last week here, but it hasn't been integrated in to Deadwood yet.