6ixStringJack's Software Project by second

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

6ixStringJack's Software Project

POSTED BY: SECOND
UPDATED: Sunday, March 2, 2025 16:40
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Sunday, March 2, 2025 7:43 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

6ix’s obscure software project status reports:

http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=65350&mid=12081
10#1208110
Tuesday, December 17, 2024 9:01 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

. . . I told you about how I accidentally changed the language of my dad's first big TV. What was different there was when you scrolled through the language and picked one it didn't ask you to confirm the change and it just did it. That panic was probably the first event in my life that got me to where I am on computers today, even though outside of 2-color Apple computers at school, I didn't have a computer of my own to work on until I was in high school.

My mom paid a stupid $2,000 for that back in early 90's money. I never looked into what computers cost back then and compared what she got for her money, but she got it off HSN on a whim and I think they probably made a lot of money off of those.

It was always slow and it was a chore to get the good games to play, or when you could get them to play they wouldn't want to play the sound effects and music. Some guy gave me a "secret code" to open a game called DOOM and it worked. What I didn't know was that was just a keyboard shortcut to bypass Windows and I was typing out commands to run the game without all the memory being taken up by Windows first.

Back then computers were so slow and the hard drives were so small I was always learning new tricks to optimize the performance to get good games to play. I learned so much just because I wanted to play the games. I knew how to edit the system startup to do all sorts of things. But when I was running out of space I borked the whole thing by trying out a program in DOS called "DoubleSpace". It basically compressed all the data on your hard drive and gave you twice the space that you should have, but the problem was that everything you tried to use needed to be decompressed on the fly, and since my computer was already slow as hell, this made it basically unusable for anything. And it was IRREVERSIBLE.

Crap.

That's when I first learned how to reinstall Windows... On my own, with a little advice of a friend in real life since I'd never even been on the internet yet. My mom was going to kick my ass if I didn't get that thing running again.

And that was before Microsoft used the Rolling Stones' Start Me Up in their ad campaign for Windows 95. This was Windows 3.1 installed over DOS off of a few floppy disks.

It's crazy thinking back about all of that and realizing how difficult everything was when it was new and super expensive. That's why only us nerds were messing with them back then.

http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=65350&mid=12106
37#1210637
Wednesday, January 22, 2025 5:02 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Surrounded by a wall of things to do and not knowing where to start.

I feel you.

When I finally wrap up my project and get back to real life I don't even want to think about the large pile of crap that needs being done.

Getting really close to the state I want to leave it in. It will never be completed in my lifetime, but I do believe that I'm leaving it in such a way that it will entice people to want to work on it more when they see it presented in a light it's never been seen in before, and just how useful and beautiful it is in this state. Not only that.... but because I'm not a coder, I don't suffer from the coder's biggest downfall... bad documentation. I'm leaving behind a very easy to follow roadmap for the next people, so they don't have to spend years figuring out much of that on their own. Not that it's simple or easy, but at least there's guide now.

The amount of work that I've done leading up to this, is only a small fragment of what could be elevated to this level. And I think with good coding skills that are beyond my level, people could see what I've done so far and come up with way easier and faster ways to add more to it. I didn't have the coding skills, but I've got the vision. Sometimes all you need to do is spend a few years of your free time doing it the hard way so that somebody who has the skills can have the vision too.

This is all about elimination of double work, in an area that gets so few people who want to help out, but whenever anyone does, all too often they have spent far too much time working on the same thing at the same time, or working on something that was already finished because they didn't know that somebody else had already finished it.

It's the only positive example of putting SigSigma to use. I guess when nobody is making any money and that's not part of the equation, SixSigma is a great thing. Who'd have thunk it?

I'm going to have an "If you build it, they will come moment". Or I won't.

I have no idea what will happen.

Maybe it all gets forgotten about once I walk away for good and some random AI stumbles on it the project 1,000 years from now and finishes the whole thing in 1/10th of a second for me.

http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=65350&mid=12106
78#1210678
Thursday, January 23, 2025 8:10 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Yes. All-consuming is a good way to classify this. Outside of sleeping, this project has probably taken up 70% of my Time since the first or second week of August. All unpaid work, of course.

There are some days I feel really burnt out on it, but usually once I get into the groove, hours can pass without my realizing it. It's almost like highway hypnosis or meditation. It's not easy to get into that state, but once I'm there it's basically unstoppable until I need to sleep.

http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=65350&mid=12113
35#1211335
Saturday, February 1, 2025 3:06 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Finally broke down and did some code learning yesterday. I've always known how powerful metadata tags could be, but until now I've only limited myself to what other people allow with them in their programs.

For example, if you want to really have power over your music library, you can use a free program called mp3tag to somewhat easily change tags in your entire library at once, in a big graph format. It allows for bulk renaming as well as just individually clicking on a tag for a song on the graph and changing it. You still have to put quite a bit of effort into setting these things up, but you end up with a collection of files that are far more useful than just sorting by file name.

But if I was working on something else with tags, I either had to find a similar program for a different kind of file, which in any case has never been as robust and useful as the mp3tag program, or I just had to abandon the use of them since I didn't have any control over them.

Then I found a program called exiftool. The easiest way to explain what it is, is to say it's a plugin for the faux DOS in Windows 10 that allows an entirely new library of commands to use in Command Prompt, all relating to metadata tags on pretty much any file that uses them. Now the only thing holding me back from having complete control over them is my lack of coding skills.

I've hit a couple of walls with it, but I've been able to break through all of them eventually after some more research and trial by error. I got stuck on a pretty tricky issue last night, but I solved it pretty soon after getting a good night's rest this morning. The worst part was when something didn't work like it was supposed to and I thought I destroyed around 300 files I'd have to rebuild from scratch, which would require a ton of extra work with all the steps involved to build them back up to where they were, but I was able to manage to figure that one out too and we're back on track again.

I've already managed to automate a process that can edit several hundred things at one time once I've set the parameters I want. I was doing all of that by hand up until yesterday morning. Initially, the only reason I went down this rabbit hole was to resolve that issue. After getting several thousand files to a certain state, I realized I wanted to make a minor change to all of them, but because that change was in the "generic" tag section that has tons of variables, I couldn't figure out a good way to do it with the options on the 2 free programs I have. My only option was to basically start from scratch after burning about a day's worth of work, or figuring out how to automate that fix.

I automated that fix, but I found out there were two other improvements I could now easily make, that I wasn't going to make before because it would mean doing the same thing several thousand times, two times over by hand.

Though there's still plenty of jank in the process since I have to move this whole setup from sub-folder to sub-folder and run it, but that's mostly because I still don't trust it not to screw things up if I let it go wild. I could probably further code this to handle everything I throw at it at once, but if I was wrong about it and didn't back up 20GB worth of stuff before I ran it, that could be a disaster that loses days of work.

So far so good though. One fix that saved me a dozen hours of mindless tedium and it only cost me 2 or 3 hours to research and test out. And if I ever come back to this work it's going to be an extremely useful tool in my kit going forward. And just the fact that I was able to make those two other upgrades to the experience which I was going to abandon outright because of the 50 or so additional hours of mindless tedium it would require is awesome.

http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=65350&mid=12113
42#1211342
Saturday, February 1, 2025 6:04 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Thanks.

Yeah... It's working out really well now.

I actually have some ideas about how to create a tool or two of my own based off of this to give it away to other people who may take this whole thing further. (Fingers crossed)

That's actually how I came upon this tool in the first place, so I think it's on me to pay it forward. I just randomly stumbled upon some tech-help blog I'd never heard of before and somebody had used this program inside of a folder structure he created with a few random batch files to process metadata tags on PDF files at his office.

I guess they worked with PDF files so much there that he wanted to create something that was so easy anybody at his office could use it without bothering him with questions. He didn't say where he worked, but I kind of gleaned it was a lawfirm.

I'll do good with those powers rather than whatever evil they were getting up to at the old law office.

That's how I do my coding. I'm no good creating something from a blank page, but once I have something that does a thing close to what I want it to do, I can beat the hell out of that code until I shape it into what I'm looking for.

http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=65350&mid=12116
09#1211609
Thursday, February 6, 2025 6:00 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Hitting another major milestone on my project tonight.

I ended up having to do a lot more work by hand than I wanted to, and I also ended up adding several new bits of functionality as I went along, which did require going back to the beginning several times to ensure everything was up to any new standard I created. All of these things are going to be great for the end user, and go far above and beyond what the initial scope of the work was meant to be, but admittedly they will make keeping everything in the future up to the same standard quite a bit more of a chore for anyone involved unless we can find some good coders to come in and automate things with my prototype out there to be the basis for the code.

The few people involved on the periphery have gotten glimpses and they're drooling right now wanting to get their hands on it. I'm about to finish some semi-final core stuff and let them have a test drive to kick around and tell me about any issues they find that I missed. It's going to be pretty damn close to perfect as-is, but there's always a weed that needs pulling here or there.

http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=65350&mid=12116
28#1211628
Thursday, February 6, 2025 11:39 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Great to hear, SIX!!

I hope you get some really insightful feedback. Let us know how it goes!

Yeah. Wasn't sure if I'd get it to where it needed to be tonight or not, but it looks like I will. I'm just running a few basic checks that will require a bit of time and my full attention, but I'll be done with it for sure early on tomorrow if I don't call it a night before it's ready.

There's other things that still need doing, but I'm going to be very careful about adding the last puzzle pieces in and I'm not worried about them not seeing that stuff until it's too late to have extra eyes on things. 99.9% of what could have bugs or typos will be out there for them to beat up while I'm wrapping up the rest of it. I know at least one of them is as detail oriented as I am, so I'd be really surprised if he doesn't come up with anything for me to fix the time I'm finished.

http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=65350&mid=12118
52#1211852
Monday, February 10, 2025 2:39 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

It still hasn't made it out the door for testing. Not for lack of trying. Adding bits to it piecemeal after the fact is a fairly laborious process that I should have saw coming, at least until a lot of this can be automated anyhow. My underestimation of how much work I needed to do to add things after the fact got me in trouble.

I actually made a pretty big error by missing one single step the other day. Nothing I couldn't fix, but when I did "fix" it, I realized that I only fixed something down the chain that wouldn't need fixing had it been fixed earlier up the chain, so I had to go back and re-do a bunch of work I shouldn't have had to do twice to fix it right.

It's fine. He was out of town for the weekend anyhow, and I'm the one putting a time frame on everything. Me not getting a prototype to him isn't going to slow down what he's doing at all.

I've got another fairly big tweak that I'm doing today that I skipped a long time ago just because I didn't think I'd have time, but I do. It's only going to put me back another day or two now. I would have saved half that time if this was part of the plan 2 months ago, but it's worth it so I'll just do it now.

http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=65350&mid=12119
51#1211951
Tuesday, February 11, 2025 11:58 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Man... Wish I could go into more detail about the project here....

A contact I made briefly last year had teased that they may have been in possession of something that has been a bit of a holy grail for the better part of 2 decades. They did mention that they were super busy for the holidays and it would take some time, and true to their word I didn't hear back from them again for about 5 or 6 weeks.

So I figured I would write them and ask how their holidays were and if there was any luck with it yet. No luck yet, and they were having family in town for the Superb Owl, but they would try to look harder for it this week.

So, me usually being the Expect Nothing and You Won't be Disappointed type, I never really took this seriously. They did seem genuine though, and that alone was enough for me to mention this possibility to a few other people over the last few months, but we all pretty much agreed that we'd be getting our hopes up over nothing and shouldn't think about it much...

I open up my email today....

I'll be damned. He has it.

http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=65350&mid=12120
03#1212003
Wednesday, February 12, 2025 2:18 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

It's nothing game-changing. It's more of a glorified missing puzzle piece than anything else. I've found quite a few of them along the way, which can tend to get real tricky when you expand internationally and you don't have any contacts in Asia. I've actually learned how to read some basic Japanese here on the side too.

Not really read it, but there are quite a few words that repeat often enough that I can recognize the characters of quite a few words. And once I started to figure out how to use translation tools and integrate that into my searches I found a few huge boxes of missing puzzle pieces to work on which have kept me busy for the last month or two.

But up until now, there were two pieces that should have been relatively simple to find, but just never surfaced in nearly 20 years. About a month or two ago, I found one of those pieces on accident in a google search, which lead me to a website in Spain. I remember when I first saw that how my jaw dropped. Out of the two, this should have been the MUCH harder puzzle piece to find. And there it was.

But this other one... Just couldn't find it anywhere. Even at a place that had found puzzle pieces we weren't missing that were extremely adjacent to it. It just wasn't there either.

But that got me in touch with the guy, and bingo-bango we've got it. He had it the whole time.

This piece was just huge because it completes a major core component of the project. Had it been located somewhere else in the project where lesser things are still missing, it wouldn't have really been exciting at all. But now I will be able to finally complete something that started back in 2008.

The scope of my project is far larger than the scope of that 2008 project was, but it's pretty awesome that once I package this up and release everything that they will finally have their own project finished off as well.

http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=65350&mid=12124
13#1212413
Thursday, February 20, 2025 12:51 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Hit a major milestone on my project over the last few days. Everything I had to work on other than going back and tweaking some minor side stuff and testing is finished. It's perfect because I am still waiting on a few last minute things from a couple of collaborators that I'm keeping up with as they come so that list doesn't get too out of hand while I'm focusing on other things. Although, it can't even really get all that out of hand anymore with how little is left to do.

I ended up having to leave out one pretty major add-on that I wanted to put in here, but I severely underestimated how much time all of this would take just like I always do when it comes to real world projects. Well... to be fair though, the vast majority of the last 6 months of my work was doing a completely different add-on that hadn't really even crossed my mind when I got back into this, and now that I can finally see it all in action I think the results are far more impactful than what the other add-on was going to offer. I know my two collaborators would agree with that since they were all about this add-on and aren't concerned with the other one. Maybe that may be a singular thing that I come back to when it gets cold again in November, but there's no more time for it right now.

I've been putting in about 12 to 14 hour days every day for about 3 weeks straight without any off in between. Kind of regretting some of those longer stints of not doing anything for a few days or a week at a time earlier this winter, but even with all of the frustrations I've run up against today (there were a few...), things are going very smoothly overall and I don't think there will be any problems getting this behind me before it's time to mow the lawn.

http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=65350&mid=12132
01#1213201
Saturday, March 1, 2025 4:27 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

We got some last-minute help straight out of Japan on the project. More work for me too, truth be told, but I still think I'm on schedule to wrap it up when I wanted to.

I think I'll probably stick around part-time for a while, at least to check in from time to time and answer any questions and offer advice, but not doing any more project work myself. It looks as though we've got a growing handful of collaborators already, and although I have several places we can go to converse, they're looking into creating their own spot right now. What we need is a top-shelf coder, so I hope that happens eventually. What we've been doing only required a small bit of coding here and there that we were capable of figuring out, but the general usefulness of the entire thing would rise exponentially with a few small programs or specialized front-ends for existing programs, based off of my creation as the template for what the code needs to do. I doubt without that we would see much progress in the future because of all the tedious work that needs to go into it right now. I'm not saying I'm the only one out there who can focus long-term on a task like this, but good luck finding more of them like me that would want to help.

It looks as though a few of them think this thing is going to be a lot bigger than I expected it to be. The guy who has been kicking around a working prototype says he's going to make a video to introduce it.

It's actually very hard for me to expose myself like that. Trust doesn't come easy, and even up until the very moment I put that prototype out there I had that small voice in the back of my mind telling me that it would be stolen. Not that this really matters because I want it out there for everyone for free without any paywalls anyway... I dunno. But I've been working with the guy for going on half a year now and I really felt like I could trust him. It feels good having my judgment reaffirmed like this. It's been fantastic working with him so far.

It's just so cool collaborating on something like this. It's been a long time since I did anything requiring anything resembling team work.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Sunday, March 2, 2025 11:10 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Wow. What a creep.

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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Sunday, March 2, 2025 11:40 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Wow. What a creep.

--------------------------------------------------

"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

6ix wrote:
I think I'll probably stick around part-time for a while, at least to check in from time to time and answer any questions and offer advice, but not doing any more project work myself.

You don't seem to realize that you are writing a suicide note. You're abandoning the project at the point where you should be continuing on. You gave birth to this child and then the baby has to depend on the charity of others to survive because you are going away to follow your bliss.

Almost all the Trumptards at work are having child support payments deduced from their paychecks because they abandoned their wives and children. I have had a part in reconnected women with their disappearing exes so that the women could go to court and collect from the sneaky bum who won't look after his previous family. My detective discovers things about employees they want forgotten.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Sunday, March 2, 2025 1:34 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

You say the weirdest things, SECOND.

Hubby was a top- notch coder, he even wrote his own operating system for a lab-based PC that he built before such PCs were available. He could write in everything from direct binary instructions and assembly up thru command lines in various versions of DOS, and for compilers like C, C++, LISP, and other advanced languages. His favorite OS was IBM's fully object-oriented OS/2, but he was fully onboard with Linux after IBM killed OS/2.

Point is, I've seen a lot of development in my day. What SIX is doing is what every contributor does to free ("free as in freedom, not beer") software:

Collaborate.
Release your beta versions for testing and improvement.

Apparently, you don't know how things work in the real world of computing.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

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Sunday, March 2, 2025 4:03 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

I don't even understand the point of his last post, or this thread in general.

I think we may have finally split second's brain open like a coconut.

And yes. I want all of this to be free for everyone. I know that there are places where it will be put behind their existing paywalls, and I will let it be known within the product that I don't mind and that I want it everywhere, but I will also let it be known in the project that the product was free for everyone and if they paid and joined a site just to get it that it was made available for free at other places and they should quit the group and try to cancel that transaction.

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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon

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Sunday, March 2, 2025 4:25 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
I don't even understand the point of his last post

Advert for your project when it becomes widely available?

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA

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Sunday, March 2, 2025 4:33 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:
I don't even understand the point of his last post
Advert for your project when it becomes widely available?

Geez... let's hope not.

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Sunday, March 2, 2025 4:40 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Man... Just thinking about that creeps me out because I know how these people operate.

Some of the people I'm collaborating with leave themselves wide open, not only communicating with email addresses with their actual names, but they've got pictures of their faces on 'em too.

Retired Leftist Billionaires with a grotch spend all their free time online trying to destroy other people's lives.

Even if somebody like that was never able to find out who I am through my project after it got released, they could go back through my drunken post history here and try to destroy those other Known people just for associating with me. At the very least in that case, I'd probably have a lot of explaining to do if I wanted to keep up those relationships after somebody pulled something like that.

Maybe, maybe not. I have no idea. I have zero clue what anybody's politics are because we never talk about anything related to politics. I never bring it up, and if somebody else did I would tell them it's the last time I want to hear anything political out of anyone. Refusal to not abide that rule would mean that I don't need their help anymore.

Giving everyone the freedom to go around talking politics while on the job even at a "company" that doesn't make any money and won't make any money is just bad business. Best case scenario it's a complete time waster. Worst case scenario, it would just devolve into another RWED cesspool.

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