Not exactly the way to get rich.


The following is a summary of your Amazon Mechanical Turk activity for the week ending Nov 12, 2005.


Weekly HIT Activity

 - Number of HITs accepted: 6

 - Number of HITs returned: 0

 - Number of HITs abandoned: 0

 - Number of HITs submitted: 6

 - Number of HITs approved: 5

 - Number of HITs rejected: 0

 - Amount earned this week: $0.15

Express – Visual Basic

Alright, I admit, I’m tempted. The new Visual Basic plus development environment, free (as in beer) to download today.

Should I take a look? See how hard it’d be to translate SdiDesk into it?

Things to consider, positive and negative :

– It’s .Net 2.0 only, so part of MS’s forced upgrade strategy.

– The output will probably look good.

– There will probably be good web protocol and XML handling libraries available.

– It’s a different language from VBClassic so serious rewriting will be needed. OTOH, although I’m not a fanatic, I’m a pretty sensible OO developer, I haven’t used VB that differently from the way I’d write Java, so the changes shouldn’t be too much of a shock. (I explicitly declare the types of all my variables, I use Interfaces a lot in the design)

What’s going on with SdiDesk?

bodnotbod writes :

‘Q: I would love to see section editing like they have at Wikipedia. I’ve just started working on my first ultra long page and am finding it very unweildly. One work-around would be for me to break the page up into smaller pages but for the task I’m doing that would actually not help my productivity. A way to edit a section (defining section as the text between two headlines [at the ==foobar== level, say]) on its own would be of great help.

‘Comment: I too love your product and hope you continue to develop it. I’m still using it months after I first discovered it. I am sorry to see that all your ‘recent changes’ here online seem to be spam-fighting. I hope you are able to do that with a few clicks and are not having to deal with it all by hand.

No, not fighting the spam by hand. That’s being done by the wonderful WikiMinion. Still very annoying though. 🙁

I haven’t given up SdiDesk, though I am having a play with a couple of other things at the moment. And I have a new computer, so I have to get my world from one to the other.

I’ve started looking seriously at working with XML, and doing this by way of a couple of other small projects using the Python language. This is making me realize how hampered I am by using Visual Basic classic for SdiDesk.

So, I’m back to thinking about some options for migration at the moment. (While coming up with something else I think will be quite cool.) I definitely see a Python port of SdiDesk sometime (which will, of course, work with your existing data) and will be able to grow in new directions.

Subsections (or pages which are actually trees which can contain sections and subsections and subsubsections) are actually part of the next release of SdiDesk which I’m already working on. Still some way to go before this is finished, but should be there in the next VB version.

— PhilJones

SdiDesk Wiki: FeatureRequests