I have finished entering all of my lamb growth data for both 2009 and 2010 into the National Sheep Improvement Program’s (NSIP) new database tool, Pedigree Wizard. NSIP moved this year from being supported by university researchers to a commercial company in NZ Australia called Sheep Genetics, makers of LAMBPLAN. [Some info from them on their origin: Sheep Genetics is a joint program between two Australian industry research companies that represent the red meat industry (MLA) and wool industry (AWI). As such, most of the development for LAMBPLAN and Pedigree Wizard comes from Australian grower levy funds. While Sheep Genetics is operating under cost recovery for basic services, it is not commercial.] This is my first year enrolling in NSIP and I am looking forward to seeing what the metrics tell me. Here are my impressions of the new software. With apologies, because I’m a software engineer, and I live, well, here, in the birthplace of Microsoft and Amazon. So I review it from the spoiled perspective of someone who usually gets to use the latest and greatest software.
First off, I haven’t used software that looks like this since I was twelve. Yes, it looks like it was written in the ‘80s, in the era of DOS. Before the widespread adoption of the computer mouse. Do you remember such a time? My first clue that this may indeed be the case was that there are some panels, such as the above, with no click-able buttons on them. This startled me for a second, there is something disconcerting about being in a screen with no buttons, like Alice finding herself in a room with no usable doors. But then I resurrected my pre-teen memory of what to do. To get out, you have to hit <enter> as many times as it takes to traverse all the fields, and then the panel will close. Or <escape> sometimes works. The color scheme also hints at the days before UI and UX regularly fell off the lips of HR recruiters. And the fonts! Soooo retro! 
The .dbf files it generates hint that it’s written in some form of dBase, which I’ve never used. I think I’m too young, just a GenX babe who only ever learned SQL.
No Go on the 64-Bit
The database will not run on 64-bit machines. Will. Not. Run. I disregarded this advice at first, thinking surely I could overcome with the Windows 7 tricks of run-as-XP and whatnot. No can do, even Windows 7 tells you, post-install, this will not run. I had to download VMWare’s free virtual machine VmWare Player, load an old copy of XP into it (thank goodness I hadn’t cleaned my shelves lately of outdated software!), and install the app from in there. This works ok, it was straightforward to set up and to save files out to the shell OS. But this may feel too intimidating for many users, and quite a few on the discussion list have piped up saying they have 64-bit machines and had to find alternatives. The official advice from NSIP if you have a 64-bit machine: buy an old computer just to run Pedigree Wizard. Yuk.
I’ll Just Consult the Manual
There is a help manual, last updated in 2002, but it’s not very helpful or thorough or modern. And it has no specific advice for our breed’s conventions, it’s very generic. I really had to scrounge to find answers to some of my questions- through NSIP discussion groups and asking questions of our NSIP leads. The most hilarious piece of advice in the manual is this:
A backup to a floppy disk should be stored away from your computer, maybe in another location or building. When storing floppy disks wrap in tin foil and place in a plastic bag for greater protection.
Forklift Upgrade On Horizon?
Sheep Genetics promises sometime soon, they are re-writing this baby from scratch. Well, for a thirty-something software application still living at home, hey, no rush. All kidding aside, it’s not like the sheep industry has millions of potential users all clamoring for a big software company to write them a fancy app. Beggars can’t be choosers, I suppose. In some ways, it reminds me of something a grad student would have made, just a no-frills, functional piece of software; robust, but not pretty or convenient for the uninitiated. And maybe that’s its origin.
Can You Parse 16 Character Strings?
Entering the data is a little tedious. You can see the style of sheep IDs above: 64 is our breed code, 0075 is my farm code, then you add the 4-digit birth year, and have 6 digits left for the sheep’s identity. On some screens, they break it up for you, on others, it’s all munched together and your eyes have to pick out the components. It’s a little dizzying if you are looking at a whole list of them. The KHSI convention has been to use the registration ear tag string, dropping any extra numbers beyond three digits. This could be a problem for people who have more than 999 lambs in a year, but that’s apparently rare or nonexistent in our registry. I have one ewe with a longer number, JPS60224, so it seems a little weird to truncate that, but I had to. The KHSI community agreed they wanted to keep using three of the six characters for the flock code, so that people can read the numbers and know whose sheep they’re looking at.
What to Put In
I originally had visions of some massive data entry task to get started for the first year. But it turns out, you only have to enter the sire and dam of lambs, not the entire pedigree. If their sire or dam was in the NSIP before, you have to investigate to find the animal’s original NSIP ID. If it’s a non-NSIP sire or dam, you enter them with your own flock code, and a 0000 for the year inside the ID string. This apparently “tells” Pedigree Wizard that this is a reference animal, because it doesn’t include these animals in the browse windows where you can add weight, pedigree and other data for them. The other alternative is to not specify them at all, as apparently the most important data is the growth data, not the ancestry linkages which have no data.
I found it was easiest to enter all my lambs and their basic data first- birthdate, sire/dam, birth weight, birth and rearing type, sex and lambing ease; and then go back and enter their 60 and 120 day weights and other info about them in subsequent passes. It is really easy to make typos in this interface and hard to spot them. Fortunately it has a decent error checker and validation tool you can run to help you find the mistakes. I realized right at the last minute that it’s worth asking the error checker to search all records, not just those for my flock ID or the year in question. I had a couple of sheep where I’d typed the wrong breed code or birth year, and I didn’t find them until I let the error checker check everything.
To Export: Click Heels and Repeat There’s No Place Like Home
Once I was satisfied I’d entered all my data correctly, I was a little stumped that the Export Data button was grayed out, and nothing I tried would enable it. Back to the manual. It says:
Do not export data using the EXPORT DATA button on the EXPORT AND DATA VALIDATION screen. This is because there is an easier way of exporting data.
An easier method than pushing a button? I’m not sure what could be easier- maybe just wishing the data would export and it would obey my mental command? I don’t know, because the manual never says. I finally figured out that there is a harder way to export the data, and I think it’s the only way: you just make a backup zip file, and email it to database@sheepgenetics.org.au. They apparently email you an update file back that contains your EBV (Estimated Breeding Value) data, and you import that back into Pedigree Wizard to browse your numbers. Ok, so I’m a little disappointed at the tempting but grayed out button for exporting, but I guess email is still alright.
Database Went on Holiday
Data submissions are processed after the 1st and 15th of each month, so the turnaround for information is supposed to be fast. I hustled to finish my data entry by the end of December, only to be disappointed today to see an email announcement today that the guy who does the data processing is on vacation. So he won’t process our submissions until the end of January. <sigh> Oh well, I can wait.
My data probably won’t be very revealing this first year anyway. I have a few sheep that were already in NSIP or trace back to it, so I will benefit a little from that extra data beyond my own. But the rest of my sheep are just going to reflect their own growth curves based on dam age and birth type, and I’ve already done a lot of analysis on that. In theory, it won’t be until I’ve been in NSIP for a few years before it’ll start giving me cumulative data that would be impossible to hand calculate.
December 30, 2010 at 7:17 pm
Sheesh! Wow, in this day and age no less. The graphics remind me of my old Commodore.
I have to say that I have run in to some 64 bit limitations with some of the software I use, but nothing like this. My worst case is a CNC machine that only likes 32 bit, but really isn’t a resource hog, so I put it on an ancient machine with a stripped down copy of XP and then do all my modeling on a more powerful machine.
There is a positive of having to send in the database, that means that they have to work with it on a daily basis and probably have some master database, so they won’t leave you in the lurch. I have several suites that made the jump from Access or dBase to SQL and just decided that we should all start over with the new database and re-enter everything rather than go to the trouble of trying to create a parser to convert it for us. Fortunately my niche are all forward lookers and rarely need historical data… mostly!
Well Happy Silvester and Ein Guten Rutsch.
December 31, 2010 at 1:25 am
Travelingserviceman, yeah, I have to admit, when I bought the 64-bit machine, I thought “whatever” and didn’t do much research into the pro’s and con’s. In retrospect, I remember it was priced lower than the 32-bit, “on special.” I am guessing to lure consumers into adopting them, and building enough of a user base that it forces the industry to provide solutions that work on them. So with 20/20 hindsight, I think I might have paid a little more for the 32-bit and let others go through this phase of “helping” the industry evolve! 🙂
Ugh, I HOPE that when they do the new system, they don’t make everybody re-enter data. 😛 You are right, the temptation might be great, especially if they have to sweat bullets to get something delivered in 2011 like they promised!
Michelle
December 31, 2010 at 11:17 am
the problem with basing your operation on software that requires you to run it on machines that are already obsolete is that you get stuck on that hardware platform. Pretty soon, in a year or two or three, you’re out looking for a particular vintage computer, and when that breaks down, 10 years from now, you’re truly screwed.
I ran across a computer services company that was running a payroll program for a big construction company that was originally written in cobol on an ibm 704 (which see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_704 ) that was running on an emulator for a later (also obsolete machine: ibm 7090, which see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_7090 ) that was running on an emulator that was running on an emulator. this was in 1985 or so.
Since it was so far from the original machine, they couldn’t update the tax and deduction tables, so they’d run the program, and then apply a change to each check generated based on the current system. they couldn’t recompile the program because it was so ancient.
They finally replaced the whole thing with a Kaypro II (which see: http://oldcomputers.net/kayproii.html)
running a microsoft basic program. The 7090 that they had been running was melted down for the gold in the circuit boards; I think it yielded 18lbs of gold for the cpu, and about half that for the other cabinents. The operator about cried. he’d purchased it from the university of washington primarily to save it from being scrapped. The UW paid something like 3 million dollars for that computer in 1963.
Yea, it seems like a good idea to just buy an old computer; dedicate it to the task. But I’d hate to see all my data in there and have it break. I’m guessing this program doesn’t have a cloud backup option.
December 31, 2010 at 4:32 pm
Bruce, haha, that’s a pretty amazing story. I think things are a little better now, being able to virtualize OS’s so easily. Even VmWare’s freebie product does a lot of this, and their purchaseable products do a lot more, enabling software makers to test apps on many different OS variations all on the same box. And this app isn’t that antiquated yet- it’ll run on Windows 7 even, just not on 64 bit. And I think there are a lot of small companies who haven’t caught up to write drivers for 64 bit yet. But I get the impression maybe dBase might just die at this juncture, forcing its users to re-write in SQL.
For myself I’m not too worried, I actually keep all my sheep data in a modern database program for livestock management, Ranch Manager. So all I have in Pedigree Wizard are birth info and weights, duplicated from my main database (unfortunately). I think PW is able to export to a tab-delimited file, so even for people who had a lot of data in it, they could still get it out into an importable format to migrate somewhere else. For people who were already in the NSIP before this year, the programmer who took this over was able to import their data from the “old” system into Pedigree Wizard for them. Apparently they each got a customized copy populated with their own data. Now THAT must have taken the guy some time to do (which may explain why he was about a year late…); I don’t know how many breeders are in NSIP, but I think it’s a lot.
Michelle
August 10, 2011 at 2:09 pm
I’m in the same boat you were maybe in 2007? Looking for software to manage my small spinners flock sheep herd. The paper tax notebook I got from the extension office a few years back has run out of years, and I really don’t want to buy another one. I’m still working on income taxes (in August), and something has to change. I found your blog – an early post – Googling, and it has been more helpful than any of the demo’s I’ve been mucking through. Thank you! And then I looked through your subject tagged posts on software, and found this one. I have Windows 7, and could never have figured all of this out myself. Thank you again. I won’t be buying or using this software in any way until they bring it up to current times.
Gwen, aka elderberryjam
August 10, 2011 at 4:53 pm
LOL, Gwen, indeed this is a problem. I still LOVE my Ranch Manager software, but am currently bummin’ because they are slow to release a version which can run on either an iPhone or the Android operating system. Windows Phone OS and Palm are getting pretty long in the tooth, so they really need to come up to date. They’ve published that they’re working on it, but are not committing to a delivery date. So I may make the choice to just keep a Palm around for taking to the field to manage sheep, and not have the convenience of my sheep data be on my smart phone.
Re the NSIP software- though I think there are maybe a few people who use the program for their actual data management, I think most don’t- it’s definitely not a good tool for that, and I don’t think it was ever really meant to be. It’s really there just as a mechanism for us to submit our data to the system and receive it back. And even when they re-write it, they’ll probably still limit it to that. And NSIP is expensive to participate in, so unless you were after using the metrics to improve your breeding genetics and have large enough numbers to make the statistics work for you, Pedigree Wizard alone wouldn’t be worth having.
Michelle
August 11, 2011 at 3:00 am
Having a Droid app would make things perfect for me. Seems like someone should have thought of that already, huh? Can you load photographs into the Ranch Manager software? It would make my income taxes easier simply by keeping better track of my animals, I think. I wish there were a pedigree software like this included in a farm management tax-compatible software (to keep track of hay, feed, equipment, depreciation and all that) for both kinds of farm accounting so that a small farmer didn’t need to buy two different kinds of software.
August 11, 2011 at 4:58 am
Gwen, my guess is that the little start-up companies who have all made these kinds of apps eventually come to the realization that they are stuck supporting them… forever… and that it’s a lot of work, not huge pay, and maybe they get sick of them? 🙂 I know I’ve considered writing such a product before myself, but then I start thinking, “hmm, customers constantly emailing me requests for bug fixes and enhancements (like I do to them!), people depending on me to keep the thing up to date ’til the day I die…” and then I think better of it. 😀 I actually did seen an instance of a dog show secretary application where the author really did pass away, and we all temporarily freaked out because we were dependent on it, but thankfully her nephew took it over.
RM does allow you to upload photos into the whole pedigree, which is cool. And it has a bunch of financial accounting features, I haven’t been using them thus far. And it’ll dump out most data into Excel, which I love and use a lot.
Anyway, here’s crossing fingers that they manage to get Android and iPhone versions out soon… They have a FB page, that’s where they’ve hinted that the iPhone version is coming, but no promise on a date.
Michelle