I’m not quite sure how an engineer got invited to SciFoo, it was all very mysterious, but I’m planning on having fun! I am passionate about the possibilities for answering some of the important questions using the new sources of data we’re all creating on the web, so I’ll be evangelizing cheap web crawling, analysis using Hadoop and of course visualization. After some last minute idiocy on my part over the hotel, I’m now all set for the flight to San Jose tomorrow, and my first visit to the Google campus.
Talking of visualization, I was really curious to see where the other attendees would be coming from, I built a special-edition OpenHeatMap to display the locations of the attendees mentioned on Kaitlin Thaney’s Twitter list:
Here’s the full interactive version. You can also now do the same for any Twitter list in the main app by typing in list:user/list-name in the main Twitter Followers search box.
Pete Warden's blog 
I’ve been playing the role of mad scientist today, but have run into a stumbling block I thought you might have some input for.
Do you know of a service that will return a (or a couple) FIPS 6-4 entry for a given ZIP? The cheaper the better, but I’d prefer to not have to parse an entire webpage for a 5 digit number.
Any input would be appreciated.
Thanks.