How about this, an application that runs from command line that given a directory or file, converts the file or files in bulk to the PSN4 format. Then an INI with stored information to fill in the headers not provided in the ASCII file. With this, you then only need to specify the ASCII file structure needed. ~Travis -----Original Message----- From: psn-l-request@.............. [mailto:psn-l-request@................. Behalf Of Mauro Mariotti Sent: Monday, July 09, 2001 8:08 AM To: psn-l@.............. Subject: R: PSN file format Larry, of course, ascii files are longer. Anyway i don't want to criticize your choices for Winquake and sdr but only to examine practical aspects. About the increasing of disk space i think this is not a big problem. Using compressed archives (with winzip for example) the size become very small. On the expandibilty of PSN4 format (touchè) i'm not examined it well even if the expandibilty of a binary record is not too easy to manage especially for people that wants to stick one standard but is not so much expert on programming tecniques. Larry, really i don't want to criticize your PSN4 format. I did not discussed it when you done it with other psn members, i was'nt expert enough to do it. Now i am more expert and after analized the needs of the seismic amateurs i believe that an open, clear, easy to read, user friendly format is needed, even if it is very long in space. Hard disk space is very cheap now. You can purchase a 10 Gbytes for 120 dollars! You can have a CD disk for 0.5 dollars and purchase a CD writer for less than 200 dollars. Space is not (in my opinion) a problem. Using archive compressor the 8 char filename length is a problem. Your winquake when access a database of events do a great work analizying and reporting date time location and comments on the file you're opening. If the events file are compressed you cant'do that with winquake. Using long names you could create a database readable with Computer Resource of windows creating filenames like: 20000701_145023_PG_E-W_KURILI-ISLANDS_M6.5.TXT I think you should modify SDR to use long names. If i'm not in wrong SDR is DOS based and this can't be done. Anyway this is my viewpoint: Files should be:, readable, portable, opened, not closed to a single application. This is a REAL need here in Italy (maybe in your country PSN has different needs.) but here, where each university uses a different format, we must mantains all things more portable. Surely this can cause more confusions but any kind of problem will be solved in a few moments by an expert person without expending a lot of time and resources to understand one format or one another. PS: In 6smowin i archives logger files daily in binary format (pure 16 bits format) it generates an ASCII text reference for each binary file with info about how that data has been collected. Raw data are in binary user data are in ascii... Warmly Mauro __________________________________________________________ Public Seismic Network Mailing List (PSN-L) __________________________________________________________ Public Seismic Network Mailing List (PSN-L)
Larry Cochrane <cochrane@..............>