Comments on: Manx is dead

By: flo

flo — Sat, 01 May 2010 19:03:07 +0000

@Richard I have no objection at all to you using the name Manx. (I'm not sure where the capital "M" disappeared to, but if that's your preference, I don't mind!)

By: Richard

Richard — Sat, 01 May 2010 01:26:46 +0000

manx is reborn. Well, almost anyway. We've started an open source project hosted on codeplex to recreate the original manx functionality using the database dumps so graciously provided here. We'd love contributors from the manx user community. First we will reproduce the existing functionality so that Paul can take the old manx offline anytime he feels like it. Then we'd like to continue the development to allow the community to contribute directly to the data hosted in manx. Assuming Paul doesn't object, we'd like to continue the brand.

By: Jan-Benedict Glaw

Jan-Benedict Glaw — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 14:33:29 +0000

Thanks a lot for now, and thanks for working on the dumps again!

By: flo

flo — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 08:29:56 +0000

I should have done things in a different order. Sorry. I have a lot of thoughts about the organisation of the data in Manx that will be necessary to understand it and hopefully guide any future community. I’ll write more later, and try to get some time at the weekend to dump things.

By: Antonio Carlini

Antonio Carlini — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 19:23:46 +0000

Thanks for all the effort you put into Manx and thanks for hosting those few docs that I did get around to scanning.

Antonio

By: Alexander

Alexander — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 19:07:13 +0000

I’m very-very sorry. It’s site was very useful for me…

By: Dave McGuire

Dave McGuire — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 18:42:21 +0000

Consider this another request to make the content available, in ANY form; a giant .tar or .zip file would be fine. I understand that your priorities have changed, and everyone respects that, but many of us have come to depend upon this resource for our activities and it would be a great loss if it were to just disappear. Please consider just giving us the raw data and we’ll take care of the rest.

And, of course, thank you very much for having provided this resource in the first place! It has been a boon to myself and many, many others.

By: Jan-Benedict Glaw

Jan-Benedict Glaw — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 18:27:58 +0000

Manx was *very* useful to me. Surely, some links to documents pointed to nowhere, but it was a database that surely saved me from getting grey hairs here and there.

I’m thinking about reviving something like Manx. For private purposes, I worked on some OCRing of scanned pages myself, adding the text as an overlay to the PDF files. After all, that’s some kind of Document Management what needs to be done.

I tried to download your database dump (you linked it as http://vt100.net/manx/dump/dec-all-20090403.tsv in an older blog entry), but that link doesn’t work any longer. I’m really interested in working on that topic, it would be nice if you’d make the dump available (again).

However, *thank you*, quite a lot. You did a lot of good work with that database, which actually solved a real problem.

By: Richard

Richard — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 17:52:27 +0000

I’ve contributed entries to Manx in the past and like others I’ve always found it very useful. It helped me locate documentation that wasn’t on bitsavers, but was in other document collections. Like others, I would gladly help takeover stewardship of the database and help code some sort of community UI where updates could be made in a decentralized fashion. At the very least a dump of the database would be a great start.

By: Eric Josephson

Eric Josephson — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 22:27:06 +0000

Manx was a handy resource and I’m sure will be missed by many. Thanks for the effort you put into it.