Subject: Blue ribbons and new interchange formats

From: David Byers <davby>
Date: Sun, 11 Feb 1996 17:21:48 +0100

I am reorganizing the Pinball Pasture (http://www.lysator.liu.se/pinball),
removing old information and material I don't care about. One think I'm
going to do is place a blue ribbon graphic on just about every page, both
in the header (as a sort of bullet) and in the footer (together with a
slogan.) You can see what I have in mind by viewing a copy of the new
front page at http://www.lysator.liu.se/index.new.html (note that the
links on that page are duds.)

Since the blue ribbon is a political statement, I want to ask everyone
involved in the IPD if there are objections to my placing these graphics
on pages related to the IPD. Please let me know what you think!

If you don't know what the blue ribbon stands for, point your favorite WWW
browser at http://www.eff.org/blueribbon.html or by clicking on the blue
ribbon graphics on the new front page I mentioned earlier.

And in a completely unrelated story, the beta 1 version of the IPD is on
line at http://www.lysator.liu.se/pinball/PinballDatabase.html. Drop in
and make spot checks to see that it came out right (this is the first time
the database was imported from a DIF file, so there may be unexpected side
effects ...) A new feature is that searching for a production of zero will
get you records for machines that were never produced.

And in a story related to that, how do you feel about using DIF as an
interchange format? It can easily be handled by Excel, has tagged fields
(at least the file I got from Chick did, but perhaps that was simply tie
first record) and is simple enough to support hand editing. I think that
most database programs should be able to import DIF, and if you're writing
your own software, reading DIF (at least to the extent needed for the IPD)
is easy.

David Byers.