Ah, the Easter long weekend. 4 days in a row to be at home.

Time to finally get some stuff done.

I emailed Jonathon Chandross, ex-moderator of Comp.Sources.Apple2, to remind him about ressurecting the csa2 material that he was responsible for. It looks like the site that it was most recently on has gone 404 which is kinda disturbing. What I really want is the FTP material to be made available again because there was stuff on FTP that was never posted to the newsgroup. Google has archives of the newsgroup but it appears nobody has archived the FTP server :(

I emailed Doug Granzow, publisher of II Sysops, to remind him about hosting the II Sysops newsletter. He seemed open to the idea (and amazed that I'd found him) when I first approached him, but since then there's been no word.

I scanned and PDFd all the II Sysops issues that I have (7). I'm not sure how many Doug published. I hope that I can make these available to everyone soon. There are some great articles about the different BBS packages, and an interview with Andy Nicholas (Apple Engineer) which I think would be great to have available to all.

I added a few short TOC entries to the Juiced.GS index. I have some ideas for what I'd like to be available in the index, but not sure how to do it in a Wiki. At some point I'd like to get others involved in creating the site and I hope that the common vision provides what I want. I guess whatever gets created will save me from doing the lot myself so I should be thankful! :)

I was the highest bidder on an Apple II Workstation card on Thursday. Now I have to pay for it and get it shipped to me. I liked the idea of being able to network my platinum Apple //e and still have the use of a super serial card (all the slots are full). I'm thinking perhaps of implementing a MacIP interface for Contiki so that the Workstation card can become another method of getting a //e onto the net. I'm not sure if it's possible or not, but the idea inspired me.

Ewen announced his SNAP  newsreader application this week. I'm glad he's announced it so I can finally talk about it. I've been beta testing it for the last few months while he's been writing it. The beta testing has taken a bit of my spare time and hence I haven't been doing other things.

It's great to see a new application (SNAP) using Marinetti - especially one that is complex and pushing the networking connectivity.

That's it for now. Still two days to go!

I've been working on the Perl script to convert the articles from text to html and to produce an index as it goes. I recently found some existing code txt2html.pl that does the dirty work of escaping special characters. Today I managed to get the script to traverse two levels of directories (years/months) to do its work. The results are very promising.

A few days ago I found the disks that contained the article archive. It looks like it is not fully complete, which is a shame, however I'll get what I have up and then see if I can fill in the spaces.

I'm very happy that the script is working so well.

Another well attended chat session, including a newcomer.

Great to see that the trend is continuing.

Q: How to convert lots of text files into HTML for better display on the web?
A: Write a Perl script to do the dirty work for me.

In one of my more satisfying stints of productivity in a long time, I found a Perl package for Windows, installed it, got it working, worked out what Perl I needed to know, wrote my first script, tweaked it, and converted an issue's worth of files.

Now I just need to work out how to avoid typing in the file names. I'm currently thinking about WinBatch. There's probably a way to do it in Perl, but I haven't found it yet.

Last night's chat went well.

One of the major topics of conversation was Michael's conversion of a IIe case to take a IIgs motherboard. He wanted a sturdy but capable system for his 2yr old daughter to use. I'm now thinking of doing a similar thing for Charlie.

Now I need to find a IIe case somewhere.

Pity I threw one out about a year ago.

I've been promising for a while to make content from the Apple Users Group, Sydney publication Applecations from my time as Apple II sub-editor available on the web.

I found a ProDOS 3.5" disk with some articles on it last night and moved them over to a PC (using Balloon under Bernie to compress them into an archive on the PB1400 RAM disk, then copied onto a PC formatted floppy, transferred via sneakernet, and then extracted with CiderPress). CiderPress does a great job of converting the articles from ProDOS text to PC text format.

The articles were from 1990 and 1991. I sat and read through some of them for a while. A number of the articles included pricing of RAM (1MB = $1000) and systems (IIgs $2450).

I can't believe that you can pick up this gear on ebay for a few dollars now. I'm looking forward to the day when I can get my 30" Apple Cinema Display for a few bucks!

Now that the articles are on the PC, it's just a matter of quickly adding bare minimum HTML tags and uploading them to my webspace. They should start to trickle through soon.

Yeeha! What I've been waiting for has finally arrived.

Today in my email box I found a message from Richard with an attachment containing the source code for the Marinetti CDEV.

This is the last of the Marinetti source code to be released by Richard.

I installed ShareClip on two machines at home and used Ethereal to capture the packet exchange between the two as the clipboard contents were exchanged.

The good news is that it is a simple TCP push of the content to the listening machine. There is a four byte length and a four byte type that preceeds the text. The text is sent as 8 bit ascii.

This should be straightforward to emulate with any machine that can send TCP packets. Great news. I'm looking forward to coding something to prove it.

The first Downunder chat was well attended and well received. There were 6 of us present from Australia, 1 from the UK and another joined us later in the morning from Canada. Those present from AU were receptive to the idea of exchanging email addresses for easier contact.

Tony mentioned a tool for sharing clipboard contents between machines. This intrigued me as I have often wanted to transfer text between machines that I have. Usually I would email something to myself from one machine and then read it on the other, but the IIgs doesnt have a good interface for email so I've had to resort to retyping in the past.

Creating a utility for the IIgs that interoperates with this tool would be an ideal solution and should be a straightforward one to achieve. Especially since the author invites requests for the source code.

I've requested it. Stay tuned....