Author Topic: ThumbsPlus 7 (+ older) tech support newsgroup archives  (Read 4169 times)

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Daan van Rooijen

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Until some time in 2010, Cerious Software's developers and staff used to offer technical support through its cerious.news newsgroups. The newsgroups contained a wealth of information on many advanced subjects, which was lost when the newsgroups were replaced by this forum.

For those interested, I have exported my newsgroup archives into 'unix mailbox raw' format, zipped them up and uploaded them to my Dropbox account, from which you can download them. You should be able to import the many thousands of messages into your own newsreader and then browse and search them. Original attachments such as SQL scripts and web wizard templates are included too.

It's a 117 MB download. The link is: [link=http://db.tt/XCpOgxHr]http://db.tt/XCpOgxHr[/link]

The archives are not complete (many older and less relevant messages are missing) but in all, they contain many thousands of messages from these newsgroups:

cerious.webclient.beta
cerious.webclient
cerious.tips-and-tricks
cerious.thumbs8
cerious.support
cerious.suggest
cerious.misc
cerious.capsnapper
cerious.beta.plugins
cerious.beta.old
cerious.beta
cerious.announce
cerious.advanced


For those who have already downloaded my archives when I made them available last year ([msg=67]here[/msg]): these are the same files, so you wouldn't benefit from downloading them again.

I hope that this is useful for many of you!
I'm volunteering as a moderator - I do not work for Cerious Software, Inc.

mschnell

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ThumbsPlus 7 (+ older) tech support newsgroup archives
« Reply #1 on: 2012-06-03 03:42:11 »
Hi Daan,

As, since the newsgroups have been canceled, you are the only senior expert, who answers questions to dummies, I need to bother you :(.

We (www.bschnell.de) are long time rather happy professional users of TP 7 (on a multi-user license).

I fear that in a time frame of some months, our main *.tp4 "Access" database file will reach the 2 GB limit.

My plan has been, to first migrate to the newest TP release and after that migrate to a Postgres database engine (as same has been recommended over MySQL).

I already successfully installed and tested (not with TP) Postgres on my (Linux-) server to prepare the migration.

But of course I first need to thoroughly test TP 9 on our data in the daily work (managing photos in a thousand directories and some hundred hierarchical "galleries", using keywords and annotations, heavily making use of the complex search functionality, ...) , and creating web galleries for our customers - see the website mentioned above). Unfortunately the "tp4 conversion" function of TP 9 does not work for me. So I am stuck. (In fact I am rather eager to use the Python scripting ability of TP9 to create some rather complex automatic jobs, once TP9 really works for us.)

Do you think it would make sense to first migrate the database to Postgres and stick with TP4 ? As I never really used server based databases, I am a bit reluctant with this step (e. g I need to make sure that the automatic backup - using dirvish - )works perfectly).

Please come back here o by mil to mschnell @ (the domain mentioned above).

Thanks a lot,
-Michael

Daan van Rooijen

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ThumbsPlus 7 (+ older) tech support newsgroup archives
« Reply #2 on: 2012-06-03 18:32:30 »
Hi Michael,

Well, I know ThumbsPlus v7 almost inside-out, but I'm afraid that I can't really help you with 3d party databases.. I have very little experience with (and knowledge of) those. The best that I can do is usually to point people to information from the old newsgroup archives, but you already have those.

If you are sure that the database is approaching its limit (i.e., you have already removed all orphans and deleted records, you are using JPG compression and small thumbnails to keep it as small as possible), and you don't want to split it into multiple databases, then I guess a SQL-type database is your only option (or, with v8/v9 you could use external thumbnails). Personally, I would start by running a 3d party database locally, and only when that works well, I'd try to run it in a client-server configuration (just to keep things 'simple', so that when it doesn't work, it will be easier to locate the problem..).

As for the type of database, the newsgroup archives hold some good MySQL scripts that you could use with TP7, and I'm not so sure if there are any good ready-made Postgres scripts. As for TP7/TP9.. yes, please do thoroughly test v9 to see if it can do everything that you need reliably. I agree that the Python scripting option could be a real benefit, but for me personally, the stability and reliability of v7 (and its IPTC/EXIF editor) are still more important and that's why I still prefer that old version for my own uses.

I'm really sorry that I can't be of more help.. Best of luck!

-Daan-

ps: Since you speak German, you could also check the forums at www.thumbsplus.de to see if there are still any MySQL/Postgres experts there.
I'm volunteering as a moderator - I do not work for Cerious Software, Inc.

mschnell

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ThumbsPlus 7 (+ older) tech support newsgroup archives
« Reply #3 on: 2012-06-04 13:38:18 »
In fact here:

http://forums.cerious.com/forum/index.php?id=30

recommended Postgres to me. And here:

http://www.cerious.com/databases.shtml

He provided a scrip.

-Michael

wingfield

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ThumbsPlus 7 (+ older) tech support newsgroup archives
« Reply #4 on: 2014-08-16 14:11:13 »
hello,

has anyone managed to import these raw text files into a newsreader with success?  it'd be much easier to use than searching through the raw text files.  if so, what newsreader?  I'm having a difficult time finding an open source newsreader these days.

thank you

Daan van Rooijen

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ThumbsPlus 7 (+ older) tech support newsgroup archives
« Reply #5 on: 2014-08-16 14:51:01 »
Well, I exported them from Forte's Agent newsreader which still exists, but not as open source. Their last free release was v3.3. I see they still offer v3.3 for download (http://www.forteinc.com/agent/download-all.php) but I have't checked if that can actually still be used for free indefinitely. Still, you could give it a try (it's very old, so I'd install it to a folder that's not UAC managed, e.g. D:\agent).

For alternatives, maybe this can help: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Usenet_newsreaders ?
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wingfield

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« Reply #6 on: 2014-08-16 20:36:23 »
Daan,

ever since I started taking a look at these forums; I've seen you always be willing to offer helpful responses.  thank you so much for the quick response.  I've downloaded agent and am happily importing all the old Cerious newsgroup .txt files that you so kindly provided.

best regards,

David