RealParsing¶
350 words
Here comes an odd question in these wonderful days of Cocoa zealotry and responsible use of processing time: Is anyone out there with (a) a little knowledge and a working copy of RealBasic and (b) a little bit of extra time.
The story for this goes as follows. Back in the days, Steffen and myself wrote SETI Checker, a RealBasic application to download, store, display and analyse SETI@Home team stats. This wasn't only a good learning experience (basically boiling down to the fact that RealBasic per se isn't as bad as PerversionTracker may make you think it is) but it was also surprisingly successful. The last version we published in 2000 got a couple of thousand downloads from Versiontracker alone, not counting the downloads coming from other SETI related sites. I guess that's rather good for a program with such a limited audience.
Anyway, after that last release we went abroad, lost interest in SETI@home and in RealBasic and thus didn't want to offer any further support. Support mainly being to adjust the parsing algorithm for the statistics web pages or their URLs. To not completely screw our users, we simply put the source code on our web site for people to make the necessary fixes themselves. Sadly there hasn't been a constructive reply to that offer yet and occasionally there are request whether we can 'fix' the program to work with the current statistics web pages, which we can't for several reasons (one of them being that the latest version of the project we saved was made with a beta version of RealBasic that we eventually didn't even upgrade to and thus we can't really produce any useful executables).
So if anyone is interested in taking this one up, I am sure some people will appreciate it. While I can't analyse the problem with the application properly, I suppose all that needs to be fixed are a few lines in the parsing algorithm. At least that was the case the previous times such changes were needed.
... and I still think it was quite pretty for its time.
