a couple of years ago, i participated in a thread on this site comparing the old nwt (1984) to the new nwt (2013).
i was able to produce a nwt mash up pdf showing the side-by-side differences between the two versions of the nwt.
herethis site claims it will hold the file for download for a long time.
@fastJehu:
Good news and bad news. The goods news is that I downloaded the German version, and it worked! The bad news is... that it didn't work for you. I would need to know a bit more information. I think it is something on your side because it fires up for me on a stand alone installation and starts exporting the German version with no issue.
MMM
a couple of years ago, i participated in a thread on this site comparing the old nwt (1984) to the new nwt (2013).
i was able to produce a nwt mash up pdf showing the side-by-side differences between the two versions of the nwt.
herethis site claims it will hold the file for download for a long time.
@Bobcat:
I take it back - I think WT Library was done with Visual Studio C++ with MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes). I can tell by the "class name" used for the main window. It is auto generated with the same pattern that platform used.
MMM
a couple of years ago, i participated in a thread on this site comparing the old nwt (1984) to the new nwt (2013).
i was able to produce a nwt mash up pdf showing the side-by-side differences between the two versions of the nwt.
herethis site claims it will hold the file for download for a long time.
@fastJehu,
It should work with any language - although, I can't test it to make sure. The link below is a download for the traverser and diff programs only - NO NEED FOR VISUAL STUDIO. I posted the code a few posts back, and if you have Visual Studio 2010 or greater, you can run it from that, and even modify it. However, for anyone that wants to give it a shot without the need for code, here are the binaries only.
The traverser and diff programs are .NET 4.0 or above. I used common controls for these applications so if you are running any recent version of Windows, it should just run without issue.
When you run the program is should look like this:
Just:
1) Start WT library - don't navigate anywhere in the WT library. Just start it.
2) Click "Find Windows & Process Info"
3) Click "Visually Confirm" - which should flash the List View in the WT library window
4) Click Next to move to the next page.
5) Pick an export location
6) Click RUN
It should start to navigate through the WT library and dump the contents. I might try a different language later if I can get my hands on a copy somewhere. However, I think it would work as-is.
MMM
a couple of years ago, i participated in a thread on this site comparing the old nwt (1984) to the new nwt (2013).
i was able to produce a nwt mash up pdf showing the side-by-side differences between the two versions of the nwt.
herethis site claims it will hold the file for download for a long time.
@fastJehu,
Thanks! If you have any questions, let me know.
MMM
a couple of years ago, i participated in a thread on this site comparing the old nwt (1984) to the new nwt (2013).
i was able to produce a nwt mash up pdf showing the side-by-side differences between the two versions of the nwt.
herethis site claims it will hold the file for download for a long time.
@Bobcat,
The WT is most likely programmed in C or C++. I have my bet on C. Reasons: 1) It is a fairly old program. 2) if it used Java or .NET, there wouldn't have been a memory leak. Any of the more modern languages that run in a "virtual" environment tend to employ a garbage collector. If any object becomes unreferenced, the garbage collector will reclaim the memory. This happens automatically. To get the type of memory leak I see in the WT library, you need to use a language that will allow you to allocate memory, and it won't give it back until the programmer explicitly calls for it to be free.
MMM
a couple of years ago, i participated in a thread on this site comparing the old nwt (1984) to the new nwt (2013).
i was able to produce a nwt mash up pdf showing the side-by-side differences between the two versions of the nwt.
herethis site claims it will hold the file for download for a long time.
@keinlezard:
I don't see why you couldn't dump the french version of the WT library with the program. I think it would work with any language.
If you have a way to traverse wol.jw.org, and you had it constantly looping through (slowly of course), looking for anything different.. that would neat. I think at that point you would need to introduce a database of change history.
MMM
a couple of years ago, i participated in a thread on this site comparing the old nwt (1984) to the new nwt (2013).
i was able to produce a nwt mash up pdf showing the side-by-side differences between the two versions of the nwt.
herethis site claims it will hold the file for download for a long time.
@Anders Andersen,
It would be interesting to see how much a publication from, say, 1980 has changed since the original version. But that sounds like another big project... ha ha.
MMM
a couple of years ago, i participated in a thread on this site comparing the old nwt (1984) to the new nwt (2013).
i was able to produce a nwt mash up pdf showing the side-by-side differences between the two versions of the nwt.
herethis site claims it will hold the file for download for a long time.
@darkspilver:
That would be another interesting project: to pull the contents of wol. Judging by the structure, it looks similar, but not exact. I wonder if WT would detect massive traversal hits on their site and shut it down.
MMM
a couple of years ago, i participated in a thread on this site comparing the old nwt (1984) to the new nwt (2013).
i was able to produce a nwt mash up pdf showing the side-by-side differences between the two versions of the nwt.
herethis site claims it will hold the file for download for a long time.
Code ZIP: Here
MMM
a couple of years ago, i participated in a thread on this site comparing the old nwt (1984) to the new nwt (2013).
i was able to produce a nwt mash up pdf showing the side-by-side differences between the two versions of the nwt.
herethis site claims it will hold the file for download for a long time.
@Anders Anderson,
Sure I have no problem sharing. I will be posting the code soon. I am going to remove all the bin and obj files and post soon. I imagine anything above Visual Studio 2010 will work. This was originally done on a Windows 7 virtual in VS 2010 (you can see it in the videos).
The WT library contents themselves are about 300 MB unzipped, 164 MB zipped. This is somewhat of a larger upload. But I will give it a shot at some point here. The code is definitely going up soon.
About the small changes: Yes, I ran across a lot of those. I filter a great deal out. Since the diff code works on the character level, it detects all these annoying little changes. As I mentioned, the WT, in some cases, decided to change the unicode characters it used for the Greek letters. The characters render the same, but are different byte-wise. You have to handle these things on a case-by-case basis. When you see an annoying little change, you can code an exception and it will ignore it.
Note: if you have your own version of WT library, and you get the code running, you can export your own copy of the WT library.
I think at some point I will post just the raw program itself. This way a non-programmer could get their own copy (for fun I guess?)
The code has some fun little gems in it, for those Windows developers that want to mess with the API. For example, you can iterate through the index numbers of a ListView without a lot of trouble. But as soon as you want to get the text value of that ListViewItem, it gets harder. The Windows API allows you to allocate memory and provide the memory address so that it can be filled with the item text. But that allocated memory has to be a part of the ListView process - in this case, the WT library. So at one point I had to allocate virtual memory in the WT library process and then copy the memory back into the automated program.
MMM
