Bazman's Journal: that friday feeling

Friday. Working at 8.40, and about to leave. At least
today I'll get home before 11. Working hard for a
deadline next week to get some web-based reporting
of food poisoning cases done. I've found a great
web-based free GIS 'mapserver' (google for it) and
thats saved a lot of work and made it all possible.
Now I just have to get the data into it.

Every day we are sent updated data by email which gets
filtered by procmail, gunzipped, un-pgped, and stuffed
into a Postgres database table. Then the idea is that
every midnight or so a job gets the data out of the
table, matches up the postcodes (like zip-codes) with
the small area-based units we use (census tracts of a
sort) and computes incidences over space and time.
Then all this data has to go into a Dbase .dbf file
cos thats what the GIS uses.

So not only am I building a GIS, doing stats analyses
with R (www.r-project.org), I'm also writing code for
R to write out dbf files. Hence the late nights.

And I'm making a documentary about sea otters that has
to be done in a couple of weeks. Aaaaah.

So its Friday, but I dont think I'm going to have a
restful weekend somehow.

  Happiness to all of you.

baz