Today is
OS2DAY Homepage
Level: Beta 0.75
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OS2Day at
gaylord.async.vt.edu
Contents
- Introduction
- History
- Customization
- Examples
- New Reminder Format
- User Support
- You Can Grab From Here
- Disto Sites
- Statistics
- NetMind Registration
- Contacting Author
Have you ever thought it would be nice to know what interesting
things happened on a date in history? When famous, or not so
famous, birthdays occurred? TODAY will tell you. When the program
is run, it looks at the system date, or a date you supply, then
tells you what things of interest happened on that date. You can
even create a file of dates important to you and be reminded of them
right along with the Marquis de Sade's birthday or the first
commercial radio broadcast.
For a quick start type: os2day /help
TODAY/PC was originally written in Datalight C for IBM PC compatible
systems by Patrick Kincaid in July of 1986. It was inspired by a
program originally written by Mike Butler in PL/1 on an IBM VM/CMS
system. He should be credited with the original concept and the bulk
of the wonderful data in the
original files.
You will notice a
distinct San Francisco flavor to the databases. Who says programs
can't have class?
OS2Day now use all data files with extentions
.jan, .feb, ..., .dec
(e.g. one data
file for each month of the year), all data files with
extention .all (data file for a whole year).
You can also have a personal file(s) named *.own. This is so
all YOUR important dates aren't scattered
among 12 files. All files are plain vanilla ASCII in this format:
| Column 1:
| The record type which can be a B for birthdays,
S for special dates in history
or R for a reminder.
|
| Cols 2-5:
| Month and day as MMDD with leading zeros. Zeros
for either month or day cause ALL months or days
to match when being scanned. For example 0001
would match the first of every month while 0400
would match every day of April.
|
| Cols 6-9:
| The full year of the event as four digits. It
may be left blank or, for Reminders only, you
may enter another MMDD that is an ending date
corresponding to the starting date in columns
2-5. See New Reminder Format
below for details.
|
|
Column 10:
| A special processing flag. Values may be:
BLANK for no special processing.
C to continue a message from the previous line.
Note, that you MUST repeat the date fields.
DAY-OF-WEEK DIGIT where 1=Sunday ... 7=Saturday
This will cause the message to display only if the
date falls on a certain day of the week. Look in
the November file for voting day examples.
|
|
Cols 11-70:
|
The message to display for this date.
*mmddyyyy Birthdays
*-------- ------------------------------------------------------------
B09011875 Edgar Rice Burroughs, novelist, Ah-ee-ah-ee-ah!
B09021838 Queen Liliuokalani (last queen of Hawaii).
B09021952 Jimmy Connors, tennis brat
*mmddyyyy Events
*-------- ------------------------------------------------------------
S09011939 Germany invades Poland, starts World War II.
S09011952 Sutro Baths purchased by George Whitney.
S0901 2Labor Day, a legal holiday
S09021620 The Mayflower sets sail from Plymouth with
S09021620C102 Pilgrims.
*mmddyyyy Reminders
*-------- ------------------------------------------------------------
R0001 Pay the mortgage!
R0401 Taxes due in two weeks.
R0415 Last day to pay taxes!
Leave the headings in or you may get a nasty surprise. Note that
Labor day must be on a Monday and the Mayflower gets two lines of
coverage befitting that momentous event.
This format applies to *.own also. You can put in birthdays,
anniversaries, holidays etc. Messages in your personal file will
tend to be only Birthdays and Reminders. Also, try putting in
reminders a few days BEFORE the date in question to give youself
some warning.
Reminders used to be a one shot deal. You could have them appear
on any one date or on any one day every month. But reminders are
most useful when you can get jogged for several days. After all,
you might not even get on the computer every day. Here's the
answer: the four columns immediately following the month and day
normally hold a four digit year or blanks. You can now put a
beginning month and day in columns 2-5 and an ending month and day
in columns 6-9. This way you don't have to put in a separate
reminder for every day. It saves a lot of typing! For example:
R05010507 Forget Yours Birthday at your peril!
R0508 Did you remember your birthday TODAY?
reminds me not to forget my wife's birthday every day from May 1
to May 7. Then on the 8th, there is the usual one shot reminder.
Another nice feature is the monthly reminder. Just set the month
portion of the date to zero and the reminder will appear every
month on the days you specify. For example:
R00050014 First mortgage due on the 15th.
But it gets even better! What if the date you need to be reminded
of falls on the 5th of the month and you want to be reminded from
the 27th of one month to the 4th of the following month? No
problem! If TODAY sees that the day of the month for the second
date is less than the day in the first date, it assumes that the
second date is in the following month. Not bad eh? Here's how:
R00270004 Second mortgage due on the 5th.
I think this new reminder system is a vast improvement over the
old one and will prove much more useful.
Don't send money, send more dates!
I would like the
program distributed far and wide for free with this understanding: if you
like it, make up more date files and spread them around. Let's
create some REAL shareware.
I'll very appreciate any comments, suggestions and bug reports.
Fill free to mail me to
Oleg.Titov@fis.cinvestav.mx
Page was created on December 28, 1995.
Last page update was done on
February 24, 1997
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Oleg Titov