The Dog's Breakfast

Today was a much better day; I actually feel like I made some forward progress. I never did find my access card, but I was able to get a new one without any big fuss. We had our usual morning meetings. The administrative meeting was business as usual. At the whole group meeting, Tim got up and explained some of the science behind why we are drilling where we are and what they are expecting to find. It was really interesting. He's a good speaker and even though there was some pretty heavy science mixed in there, I wasn't completely lost. I also learned a new phrase: "the dog's breakfast". Both Tim and Gavin busted it out while talking. The Kiwis sure do have some interesting sayings.

After the meetings, I spent most of the day getting some issues from yesterday sorted. Since that was all non-coding work, I decided to reward myself with a few hours of coding after dinner. We're expecting to begin logging later this week so I'm updating a few things on PSICAT. I'm working on a clast plugin that should allow the sedimentologists to describe the major clasts in the core. I also have a few small UI and workflow optimizations to make things easier on the scientists.

One of the things I still have to get set up and working is a central Subversion repository for PSICAT data. PSICAT has the ability to store and retrieve its data from Subversion. This is going to be a really awesome feature for ANDRILL because they have a large contingent of scientists scattered all around the world. They will be able to access the core logs much sooner that they have been able to on previous projects. Previously they would have had to wait until the expedition was over and everyone came back from the ice. Not this time, though. They'll be able to pull up the data as soon as it is committed. And assuming that the logging team commits their changes every night, the people back in the States will actually have a negative delay because the core would have been logged on a Monday in Antarctica but be available on a Sunday in the States. :) All joking aside, I think the Subversion is a smart move because not only will it allow them to disseminate data, it will also allow for tracking changes and add a bit of accountability.

Well I had better get to actually working on PSICAT instead of just talking about all the cool things it can do :) Cheers.