Re: pacer and lollapalooza

["Aaron Swartz" <xx@aaronsw.com>]

> unfortunately, i'm out the door 6am tomorrow on a 5,000 mile road trip
> (igotf.org plus stops to see state officials in montana, wyoming, dakotas,
> idaho), so your two discs will have to wait until I get back and we can
> figure out how to pass this data privately to you ... just be aware that
> they update the stuff monthly when you start writing your loading routines.

got it

> my preference on the usps data is that we "extract the facts" rather than
> just publish what they have wholesale.  so, we both need to spend a bit of
> time with it and figure out what kind of a transform it is we end up making
> available to others on the net.  we'll have a stronger case in the courts
> with that approach than a simple rip and upload job.  I know they are an
> instrumentality of the united states, but they have serious volume selling
> this stuff and i'd prefer the extra degree of indirection of having
> extracted the factual data.

OK. Still in SF but from what I can tell from their website it's just
a fixed-length-record text file, so it'd be easy to parse it,
rearrange it a bit, and spit it back out as JSON or XML or something.