Greetings from Turkey. It's 45 degrees here and as a pale blue Scotsman, I'm f*cked!
Right, while I've never really bothered with the software preservation part of Rich's empire, I certainly do appreciate the hard work Rich puts in, and it sounds like it's having detrimental effects on his health, so my advice would be walk away, enjoy your health. Forget the software. My stuff that Dilwyn published years ago is free, will always be free, it's available from Dilwyn even as I type. What I am concerned with, is data. How much data are held, locked away,in proprietary databases, word processing files, spreadsheets etc? How can we know what is important and what is not if we can't read it? Arthur C Clarke, yes that one, once told me that he had many of his own manuscripts unavailable to even him as they were some old version of some software package or other, no longer available. (OK, he didn't tell me explicitly, he wrote it in a foreword to a book of his I read, but you catch my drift?) We need Rich's (and others) preservation of this software because out there, somewhere, someone might just have something of value thst they can no longer access. That's what is important. We also need new programs to access the data when a QL isn't around. QxlWin for example, Qstripper as another. See a pattern? Data rescue! I've done quite a bit of work in the past for Rich's online manual. It's a thankless task. The autogenerated html is crap and entangled. It's not even legal html in places, I'm surprised it ever worked! Harsh? Perhaps, but sadly true. The only reason it probably works in most browsers us the hops they jump through to cope it IE compatible Web sites of old, but for how much longer? Rich's original manual, in Text87 I think, is a prime example - we can't get a printer driver or extractor created to properly convert the text to legal html, or to extract the text somehow, while preserving or matting, or indicators of same. I tried, years ago with blank files, then some with plain text etc etc to decode the files. I failed. Preserve software, yes, but data are far more important. We need that preserving in readily accessible formats. I might get flamed, I might get ignored. I might even be right! Good luck Rich. Cheers, Norm. -- Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity. _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List
