Progress report on RR magazine index.

[steinjr]

I just read a new post on the Model Railroad Hobbyist message board giving a progress report on the index. It is under the thread titled "Discontinued Magazine Index". It will be at the bottom of the last page currently, and it looks like they are making good progress at restoring and updating the index into a more modern and useful format.

I've been following the same thread over at MRH. If I was to summarize status, it would be like this:

1) Original index program and data has *not* been handed over from Kalmbach to NMRA
2) Joe has *not* announced that he has actually gotten a team together working on making a new index from scratch
3) A bunch of amateurs(*) are trying to code a new program from scratch, in three or four different and non-compatible initiatives.

(*) I call them amateurs since they are
a) getting surprised that putting words with a ' (like O'Reilly) in a text string can make sql hickup if you don't make substitutions in input
b) having just drawn their first ER diagram, not understanding that it sometimes is smarter with a type field than a new table
c) thinking that a default AND in a search pattern is a huge improvement over a default OR, instead of just having two text boxes in the GUI ("Find articles containing ANY of these words"/"Find articles containing ALL of these words")

Sadly, in my judgment, we are not very likely to see anything *usable* from any of these people anytime soon.

But I would be *extremely* delighted to be proved wrong. I miss that index.

Stein