I can't find my copy. I do know it exists on a machine that is powered
off, but that doesn't help me much. :)
Anyone have a copy handy that can be fetched from outside of HECnet?
-brian
OK,
Here's a really quick draft of what I'm thinking, feel free to add your thoughts
The parseable info begins with ".BEGIN-HECNET-INFO" and ends with ".END-HECNET-INFO"
The following columns must be present and named in the first line of the parseable block:
- ADDR - DECNET address of host
- NAME - DECNET node name of host
- OWNER - Person who owns the box*
- EMAIL - Contact email for the box's admin*
- HARDWARE - What hardware the box is running*
- OS - What operating system / software stack the system is running*
- LOCATION - Textual location of box, optionally long/lat info in some sane format*
The fields marked with an asterisk can be left empty but must be present in the header.
Example:
.BEGIN-HECNET-INFO
ADDR |NAME |OWNER |EMAIL |HARDWARE |OS |LOCATION |NOTES
8.401|CHIMPY|Sampsa Laine |sampsa at mac.com |AlphaServer DS10 |OpenVMS 8.3 |London, England |Main SAMPSACOM system, SMTP gateway (CHIMPYMAIL.COM)
8.400|GORVAX|Sampsa Laine |sampsa at mac.com |SIMH VAX on OSX/Intel |OpenVMS 7.3 |London, England |MULTINET bridge to Area 2, Area router
8.403|RHESUS|Sampsa Laine |sampsa at mac.com |HP rx2600 Dual 900MHz |OpenVMS 8.4E |London, England |File libraries available
8.500|PYFFLE|Sampsa Laine |system at pyffle.com|VMWare |Ubuntu+Pyffle BBS |London, England |Waffle reimplementation BBS, log in as pyffle for access
.END-HECNET-INFO
On 19 May 2013, at 20:07, Sampsa Laine <sampsa at mac.com> wrote:
On 19 May 2013, at 20:03, Cory Smelosky <b4 at gewt.net> wrote:
On Sun, 19 May 2013, Sampsa Laine wrote:
On 19 May 2013, at 19:58, Cory Smelosky <b4 at gewt.net> wrote:
#6 is a provlem I've noticed with INFO.TXT. There's no order.
When me and Steve Davidson originally thought of adding parseable info to INFO.TXT we had the idea that the file itself would be free-form text with a machine parseable block at the end, with delimiters.
If you look at http://rhesus.sampsa.com/cgi-bin/hecnetinfo/hecnetinfo.com?q=chimpy you'll see what I mean, there's a clearly defined block of machine readable CSV at the end.
How many people followed that though?
No idea - I don't think anyone ever wrote a parser.
But here's a brief outline of how I think this should work:
1. Someone (=me) defines the CSV format formally in a document
2. This document is passed around and corrected until majority is happy with it
3. Someone (=brian) writes a parser
4. People nominate boxes from where their INFO.TXTs should be pulled (one can cover a whole area or even more)
5. This is integrated into the DB using the parser from 3 periodically.
On 19 May 2013, at 20:03, Cory Smelosky <b4 at gewt.net> wrote:
On Sun, 19 May 2013, Sampsa Laine wrote:
On 19 May 2013, at 19:58, Cory Smelosky <b4 at gewt.net> wrote:
#6 is a provlem I've noticed with INFO.TXT. There's no order.
When me and Steve Davidson originally thought of adding parseable info to INFO.TXT we had the idea that the file itself would be free-form text with a machine parseable block at the end, with delimiters.
If you look at http://rhesus.sampsa.com/cgi-bin/hecnetinfo/hecnetinfo.com?q=chimpy you'll see what I mean, there's a clearly defined block of machine readable CSV at the end.
How many people followed that though?
No idea - I don't think anyone ever wrote a parser.
But here's a brief outline of how I think this should work:
1. Someone (=me) defines the CSV format formally in a document
2. This document is passed around and corrected until majority is happy with it
3. Someone (=brian) writes a parser
4. People nominate boxes from where their INFO.TXTs should be pulled (one can cover a whole area or even more)
5. This is integrated into the DB using the parser from 3 periodically.
On Sun, 19 May 2013, Sampsa Laine wrote:
On 19 May 2013, at 19:58, Cory Smelosky <b4 at gewt.net> wrote:
#6 is a provlem I've noticed with INFO.TXT. There's no order.
When me and Steve Davidson originally thought of adding parseable info to INFO.TXT we had the idea that the file itself would be free-form text with a machine parseable block at the end, with delimiters.
If you look at http://rhesus.sampsa.com/cgi-bin/hecnetinfo/hecnetinfo.com?q=chimpy you'll see what I mean, there's a clearly defined block of machine readable CSV at the end.
How many people followed that though?
sampsa
--
Cory Smelosky
http://gewt.net/ Personal stuff
http://gimme-sympathy.org Experiments
On 19 May 2013, at 19:58, Cory Smelosky <b4 at gewt.net> wrote:
#6 is a provlem I've noticed with INFO.TXT. There's no order.
When me and Steve Davidson originally thought of adding parseable info to INFO.TXT we had the idea that the file itself would be free-form text with a machine parseable block at the end, with delimiters.
If you look at http://rhesus.sampsa.com/cgi-bin/hecnetinfo/hecnetinfo.com?q=chimpy you'll see what I mean, there's a clearly defined block of machine readable CSV at the end.
sampsa
On Sun, 19 May 2013, Brian Hechinger wrote:
On Sun, May 19, 2013 at 05:41:43PM -0000, Cory Smelosky wrote:
CSV as a data format is actually quite powerful, flexible and simple.
Let's just use Excel 97!
Shush you.
;)
6) This all needs to be documented somewhere.
#6 is a provlem I've noticed with INFO.TXT. There's no order.
This has been the problem with a lot of things for a long time. "Hey,
let's do this cool thing" comes up a lot, but nothing ever gets
documented so the usefulness of each thing fades as there is no
consistency to it.
I would like to change that this time around.
I would as well. This can go places.
-brian
--
Cory Smelosky
http://gewt.net/ Personal stuff
http://gimme-sympathy.org Experiments
On Sun, May 19, 2013 at 07:34:53PM +0200, Sampsa Laine wrote:
On 19 May 2013, at 19:32, Brian Hechinger <wonko at 4amlunch.net> wrote:
I'm happy to write a doc describing the format we eventually settle on.
If you want to, feel free. You probably have more free time than I will
over the next several weeks.
-brian
Actually I'm quite busy with a client project but am happy to do this, if there's any significant take up.
Let me know if/when you get around to it. If I haven't heard from you
before I have time myself I'll take care of it.
How many HECnetters would participate in creating INFO.TXT's for their areas / boxes?
I'll definitely be doing it once I've got some stuff running again post-move.
I'm also considering pulling INFO.TXT files as part of my mapper as it
walks to network. What I'm going to do with them at that point is hard
to say, but we'll figure that out when the time comes.
First things first; Paul needs to finish NCP in his DECnet stack. :)
You hear that, Paul? It's now officially your fault. :-D
-brian
On Sun, May 19, 2013 at 05:41:43PM -0000, Cory Smelosky wrote:
CSV as a data format is actually quite powerful, flexible and simple.
Let's just use Excel 97!
Shush you.
6) This all needs to be documented somewhere.
#6 is a provlem I've noticed with INFO.TXT. There's no order.
This has been the problem with a lot of things for a long time. "Hey,
let's do this cool thing" comes up a lot, but nothing ever gets
documented so the usefulness of each thing fades as there is no
consistency to it.
I would like to change that this time around.
-brian
On Sun, 19 May 2013, Sampsa Laine wrote:
On 19 May 2013, at 19:32, Brian Hechinger <wonko at 4amlunch.net> wrote:
I'm happy to write a doc describing the format we eventually settle on.
If you want to, feel free. You probably have more free time than I will
over the next several weeks.
-brian
Actually I'm quite busy with a client project but am happy to do this, if there's any significant take up.
How many HECnetters would participate in creating INFO.TXT's for their areas / boxes?
I would. Connor would, too. He'll either make it, or I'll make it for him.
sampsa
--
Cory Smelosky
http://gewt.net/ Personal stuff
http://gimme-sympathy.org Experiments
On Sun, 19 May 2013, Johnny Billquist wrote:
On 2013-05-19 18:14, Brian Hechinger wrote:
On Sun, May 19, 2013 at 05:02:18PM +0100, Robert Jarratt wrote:
Well, if the separator is | then it isn't a CSV file :-)
While I do understand the origins of the term CSV, the C really doesn
stand for character. Tabs are used quite commonly as well as commas. Any
character is valid, so long as it's accepted by all consumers of said
file.
The C standing for comma is antiquated and outdated and should be
changed. In my not so humble opinion, anyway. :)
He says, to a crowd of people running antiquated and outdated software
and hardware... :-D
Anyway, while I think I agree that technically, C stands for comma, I
also think | is a better separator in this case.
Feel free to call it anything. The acronym for the format is less
important. We could call it BSV then.
I'd find | easier to read in this case.
We could call it SSV. Separator-separated values. That's pretty all-encompassing.
I have no issue with this except that allowing the columns to appear in any
order, while nice and flexible, makes it harder to write the software. It
does not seem worth the effort to have that flexibility given the low
enthusiasm for writing this software, so a simplification would be to fix
the column order.
It really isn't that hard to write. I've implemented such a thing in many
languages (including very stupid ones) and it is *always* worth the effort.
I honestly don't know what I think on that subject. Or, actually, I do.
I think it would be even better to just have key-value pairs. Why
overcomplicate things?
Any unknown key is just ignored. We could expand with new keys without
having the code synced. And then the values can hold any character
except newline.
Actually I am thinking that I wouldn't mind writing the program myself, but
don't wait for me, I have a host of other things I want to do as well.
I'm always open to writing anything. :)
Knock one out for RSX? :-)
I'll try and get back with some more thoughts about file formats and
whatnot in a while. My pizza just arrived...
Johnny
--
Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus
|| on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se || Reading murder books
pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol
--
Cory Smelosky
http://gewt.net/ Personal stuff
http://gimme-sympathy.org Experiments
