Re: dsktool.rb and Ruby Questions

["Bill Buckels" <bbuckels@mts.net>]

"jonnosan" <jonnosan@gmail.com> wrote in message 
cc50e4e7-631b-4f74-870f-01ac26badbb1@i24g2000prf.googlegroups.com">news:cc50e4e7-631b-4f74-870f-01ac26badbb1@i24g2000prf.googlegroups.com...

>Good stuff, Bill! Thanks for taking the time to clean everything up so the 
>next person wanting to dabble with this stuff will (hopefully)have a much 
>less frustrating time.

That's the idea of course. There was nothing about dsktool.rb to clean-up. 
As you correctly recognize, the paradigm shift to ruby is beyond the 
capabilities of most Windows users without going through the same process I 
did. The frustration leads to enlightenment. If you remember the analogy of 
"milestones" and "inch pebbles" I like to think that doing something like a 
website provides the inch pebbles that we all need to achieve the 
milestones.

Michael Haardt (cpmtools) would like a copy of any TV commercials that I do 
for cpmtools put on youtube. I promise to do the same for dsktool.rb:)

Udo Munk points out quite correctly in an earlier thread: > "I'm just 
wondering how someone wants to debug 8080 code with ddt, when not able to 
install an development environment on some sort of Windows box ;-)"

Ruby is essentially a complex development environment. Bridging the gap 
between a developer's understanding of  his application and the lowest 
common denominator of luddites who use Windows machines (by packaging these 
tools for the luddites, myself included) seems a worthy goal.

When I set-out to use your package after you mentioned it to me, it was with 
the intent of making it more widely accessible. For example, I still have 
some more work to do in expanding the examples in dsktool.rb. And I did not 
spend much time expanding your notes on exploring disk images in Internet 
Archives. I am not quite sure how to explain to someone who just discovered 
their browser how to do this, so I am going to provide some Windows specific 
web pages that have dskexplorer.rb links as you have noted and that start-up 
dskexplorer.rb from the browser.

I did not want to deviate too far from what you wrote either.

As Mutt Jenkins pointed-out: >"4. Chastise yourself for shooting your trap 
off before doing some elementary research."

The problem with living in a glass house as I have done with this is that 
most people won't.  The average Windows user will neither do research nor 
ask questions especially in a public list for fear of reprisal. And what 
possible good does this do for the next person?

>BTW I'm tidying up a few loose ends prior to packaging the latest versions 
>of peekbot + ripxplore into a gem - how would you feel about beta testing 
>that for me?

Yes of course but did you really need to ask? I was gearing-up for that 
which you also correctly understood. peekbot.rb and dskexplorer.rb are 
perfect applications for ruby + users

Being a C64 and Apple II + CP/M user and quite familiar with other platforms 
like C128 and even CoCo this is not hard. Writing in ruby is hard for me 
because I haven't done much in perl cgi or java in the last 10 years and 
being immersed in ASP.NET and now Silverlite and XAML I cling to the old 
ways of C and C++ for comfort in my hobby life.

Here's the gotcha on all of this. One needs to learn ruby to do the 
documentation. One needs to do the documentation while testing. One needs to 
fix the bugs while testing. Isn't it interesting that saying yes leads to so 
much more:)

>if there are other files you think are worth extracting, and you know the 
>algorithms, then depending on your interest, it's pretty easy to code up 
>convertors for various file types hosted on dsks, so either I could give 
>you some pointers on how it's done, or else you could send me some samples 
>of files and explanation of the file structures and I could add them in.

Well I have lots of source for C64, Apple, and other disk image formats. I 
did have a look at some of your code in dsktool.rb of course. Lots of us are 
interested. The time to do this is the only limiting factor. What programmer 
wouldn't want to learn this?

To share all the disk images of the world for all the vintage computers of 
the world, and to list them where they lie, is a worthy goal but it seems 
like so much more is possible like ruby emulators and so forth.

Maybe we can get mdj, udo, and Peter Dassow interested as well. They've 
certainly got the brains for it.

Like Peter, I want to work on expanding my websites as well in the coming 
months.

Bill