I can't emphasize this enough.

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think

“I know, I'll use a spreadsheet.” Now they have two problems.

(This was originally about regular expressions. And AWK. See http://regex.info/blog/2006-09-15/247)

Fiction writer F. L. Stevens got a list of literary agents …

See {filename}/blog/2016/06/2016_06_10-database_conversion_or_schema_migration.rst

People talk about CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment).

They also need to talk about CM (Continuous Migration).

"Wait, what?" you ask.

When we roll out a new version of the software (CD) there are three common situations.

1. The new software uses the …

I was told a horror story about a bad database schema migration. Let's call the author of the horror story HPL.

HPL related a tale of woeful conversion problems from a mismanaged schema migration.

While I could feel HPL's pain, the reasons given for their pain were wrong. They didn't …

First, and most important, Omni Outliner is a super-flexible tool. Crazy levels of flexibility. It's very much a generic-all-singing-all-dancing information management tool.

It has a broad spectrum of file export alternative formats. Most of which are fine for import into some kind of word processor.

But what if the data …

Appleworks (formerly Clarisworks) is software that's been dead meat since 2007.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleWorks#End_of_Appleworks

Which is fine unless you have an old computer with old applications that still works. For example, a 2002-vintage iMac G4 http://www.imachistory.com/2002/ still works. Slowly.

When someone …

After talking about some experience with legacy modernization (or migration), I received information from Blue Phoenix about their approach to modernization.

Before talking about modernization, it's important to think about the following issue from two points of view.

Modernization can amount to nothing more than Paving the Cowpaths.

From a …

See this article: "The COBOL Brain Drain" in ComputerWorld. This article is very, very well written and repeats a number of common fallacies.

The fallacies lead to expensive, labor-intensive in-house software development and maintenance. Either there's a lot of effort poking at the COBOL code. Or there's a lot of …

Extracting legacy data can be really, really hard. However, it's of central importance because data lives forever. Application "logic" and "business rules" come and go.

Today's case study is a dusty old Dell Inspiron Laptop running Windows 98 with Chartview software.

Problem 1. Chartview. No extract or export capability, except …