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1990-02-17
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121 lines
Thought For The Day
(TFTD)
Copyright, 1987-1990, Jim Perry, All Rights Reserved.
L E G A L S T U F F
────────────────────
There are no guarantees associated with this program, either
expressed, or implied. The end user of TFTD assumes all
responsibility, and liability, for it's proper operation and
usage, and, by using TFTD, agrees that the author is blameless,
should anything yucky happen to your machine, as a result of your
usage of TFTD. There is no fee requested for the usage of TFTD,
and it may be freely copied & given away, as long as this
documentation, and the program itself, is not modified in any way.
The program itself remains the copyrighted work of the author.
H I S T O R Y
─────────────
Thought for the Day (TFTD), was originally written in 1987, by
me, for me. I like to remember a lot of different quotes, by
various people, and this was a way for me to do that. The first
revsion of TFTD was in TP 3.01, and was really limited in what it
could do, and what it expected for a quote file. This version
doesn't suffer from those failings, and represents the first time
that I feel TFTD is ready to "go public". TFTD is now written in
TP 5.5, and is much faster, and a lot more user friendly than it's
predecessors.
O P E R A T I O N
─────────────────
TFTD expects to find two files when it runs, the quote file,
(TFTD.DAT), and it's index file, (TFTD.IDX). First, the quote
file. TFTD.DAT is a plain ASCII file of quotes you'd like
displayed. Each quote has no set number of lines, and is
terminated by a blank line, that is, a line with nothing on it,
except a CR/LF pair (/x0d/x0a). There is an upper limit on total
number of quotes, but it's sufficiently up there, that you should
never have problems. If you want TFTD to display a blank line,
make sure there is at least one space character (/x020) on that
line. If not, TFTD will see the line as a delimiter for that
particular quote. The first line of the quote file must not be
blank, and the last line of the quote file needs to be a blank
CR/LF terminated line. I know, kinda strange, but that's the way
it is!
The index file (TFTD.IDX) is created whenever 1)TFTD can't find
an index file, or 2) the quote file has a later time/date stamp
than the index. In general, you don't ever need to worry about
the index, TFTD will handle that by itself.
TFTD expects to find the aforementioned files in the directory
where it was executed from. For example, if you have TFTD in
C:\UTILS, then TFTD will look for it's quote & index files in that
directory. It never looks in the local directory, unless, of
course, that's where it was executed from. I did this for several
reasons. One of them being, I don't have to do a lot of file
presence/absence checking, which slows operation down. I also
don't have to rely on an environment variable to be set to find
the quote file. The only drawback to this methodology, is that is
only good under MS/PC-DOS 3.0+. It will not work under DOS 2 or
less. Sorry 'bout that, but if you're using DOS 2 in 1990, you
need to 1)get a life, and 2)get DOS 3.3 or better!
B B S O P E R A T I O N
────────────────────────
TFTD is also designed to work with most BBS systems, rather
seamlessly, I think. I use QuickBBS 2.63, and it has the
capability to display various files to users when they log on. I
wanted to be able to shoot a quote at a user when he logs on,
without having to run some sort of door that takes 5 minutes to
load and display a 1-line quote. To have TFTD put it's quote in a
file, give it the following command-line parameters:
TFTD <path\file> /s"Header to display before quote"
The path & file is simply a fully qualified path and filename
where you want TFTD to place it's output. The /S parameter is
text that you would like displayed before the quote. For example,
on my system, I use the following command-line:
TFTD d:\quick\text\news.asc /s"Here's your thought for the day, #6W"
The first is the path to my news file, and the second displays
the quoted text as a header in front of the quote. The #6 is a
Ctrl-F (/x06) that, when followed by a W, displays the user's
first name, when this particular file is displayed. If you want
to put in any characters that are not in the range of 32-126
decimal, you need to preface that particular character with the #
character, and then enter the ASCII code for that given character.
This will tell TFTD that you want a non-printing char put in the
header line. If you have embedded spaces(or tabs) in your desired
header line, the whole line must be enclosed in quotes, as shown
above. This method of routing a quote to a text file will allow
almost any BBS system to use TFTD in it's daily operation.
L A S T N O T E S
──────────────────
I've included my quote file for you to get started with, feel
free to add or delete from it, at your pleasure. I do ask that if
you distribute this archive, you include the original quote file,
as I've distributed it. Be warned, that there are some quotes in
the file that might be offensive to some! None are vulgar, it's
just that a few poke fun at some American sacred cows. If you
have any good quotes, feel free to drop me a message, I can be
reached at Fidonet 1:375/10, USR HST, 24hrs/day.
Compliments, suggestions, attaboys > Jim Perry, 1:375/10
Complaints, flames, bad vibes >NUL
Jim Perry
Montgomery, Al
February, 1990