Viewing a .ERWIN file - erd

How can one open/view a .erwin file if your company does not have an ERWIN licence?
Is it possible?
Requesting an alternatively formatted file is not an option.

You could try ERwin's community edition software, though as the comments point out, the 25-object limit will make complex models unviewable.

Related

Version diff in alfresco

Alfresco allows uploading newer versions of documents in the repository and also keeps track of the version history, it seems. However, I could not find any way to compare or diff a document with its prior versions.
Is this possible? are there any good external plugins or tools for this?
I assume you think of something similiar to the good old Unix diff tool which basically compares text files and can show the result in a human readable form.
The general equivalent situation in alfresco is far more complicated. You have an arbitrary amount of properties of different type. The text file you might think of just happens to have character bytes in cm:content.
So to answer your question : I don't know of any extension providing a general diff between versions, but it should not be two hard rolling your own for text files other simple special comparisons. In the former case you might want to have a look at Java library for free-text diff for libraries providing the base functionality.
Looking for the same functionality and found this Alfresco addon
http://code.google.com/p/versions-difference-alfresco-plug-in/

English dictionary needed for a word game

I'm looking for a way to include a full blown English dictionary in an iPhone app (a word game), the database must be able to include all conjugation possibilities for verbs, must include singular and plural spellings. So my app can query the database to check if the spelling is correct.
Is there a free or commercial database that would include those data?
You can use UITextChecker for spell-checking.
Regarding a dictionary, when I built an iOS dictionary library sometime ago (www.lexicontext.com) I used WordNet. WordNet contains a lot of interesting semantic info ...
NSSpellChecker is your easiest option, but it might be more complete to use the online Scrabble official dictionary as well and check it against both (only one match required.)
You could do a web-service request using http://www.hasbro.com/scrabble/en_US/search.cfm
http://www.a2zwordfinder.com/cgi-bin/scrabble.cgi?Letters=&Pattern=______&MatchType=Exactly&MinLetters=3&SortBy=Alpha&SearchType=Scrabble
Change min letters to get different results
The best place to find a database for a spell-checker is probably a free text processing application. So, I'd try with Open Office version of Word. Download it, install it and simply find the dictionary file.
Open Office is licensed under LGPL, so it should be fine, just check if the licence covers the data as well (i.e. the dictionary file).
Maybe this English corpus helps: http://www.wordfrequency.info/free.asp

Where can I obtain dictionary files for use in checking spelling?

I thought this was asked before, but 15 minutes of searching on Google and the site search didn't turn anything up...so:
Where can I obtain free (as in beer and/or as in speech) dictionary files? I'm mainly interested in English, but if you know of any dictionary files, please point them out.
Note: This question doesn't have a right/wrong answer, so I made it community-wiki. However, I feel that it might be valuable to not only myself, but anyone who wishes to implement or use a spell checker with various dictionary files.
I have found a SourceForge project called Word List, which appears to have a number of dictionaries. I have downloaded a couple and am currently checking them out.
On Linux you can look in places like /usr/share/dict/words
I would presume that OpenOffice contains dictionaries for several languages.
I don't know what your target platform is but here is a solution that is for VB.NET. It uses the Office libraries which Office in itself isn't free but if your users are all internal and have Office then you could leverage these libs. There is a zip file with the example source code you can download as well.
Check spelling and grammar
There is what appears to be a half-decent dictionary available for free here on CodeProject.com (registration required unfortunately).

Reading a COBOL DAT file

I have been given a set of COBOL DAT, IDX and KEY files and I need to read the data in them and export it into Access, XLS, CSV, etc. I do not know the version, vendor of the COBOL code as I only have the windows executable that created the files.
I have tried Easysoft and Parkway ODBC drivers but I have not been successful in reading the data from the files.
I do not have access to the source code as the company that was distributing this product shut down.
I have successfully read some of the dat files using http://www.cobolproducts.com/datafile just now which I came to know through another forum. Most probably I will work with them to help me read the rest of the files that I am having an issue with.
A few possibilities.
1/ See if you can find the names of the people that worked for the company. They may be helpful.
2/ Open the DAT file in a text editor. The data may be decodable from that. If the basic format can be discerned, quick'n'dirty code can be written to extract it.
3/ Open up the executable in an editor, there may be strings in there that indicate which compiler was used, then you can search for info on its file formats. If it's a DOS application, there's a good chance it was either Microsoft or Fujitsu COBOL.
4/ Consider placing job requests on work sites like elance or rentacoder; I don't think there's a cost if the work can't be done successfully.
5/ Hire someone to examine it and advise on the likelihood of recovery.
6/ Get a screen dump of the record contents for every active record and re-construct it from that.
Some of these are pretty hard so your mileage may vary.
Good luck.
I have read COBOL DAT files only with FD, when I do not have the FD, I open the file in a Text Editor, and try to guess the columns, and try again, until I have this working, the big problem with this approach is when the DAT file have COMP columns, that can be any kind of COMP type, but with a litthe patience I cold get this done.
I had tryed Parkway ODBC, but without success.
for anyone going through this journey, I found this in sourceforge: Cobol and RPG data reader and converter
http://sourceforge.net/projects/cobol2j/
Im about to try it, sounds kind of promising

Is Wiki Content Portable?

I'm thinking of starting a wiki, probably on a low cost LAMP hosting account. I'd like the option of exporting my content later in case I want to run it on IIS/ASP.NET down the line. I know in the weblog world, there's an open standard called BlogML which will let you export your blog content to an XML based format on one site and import it into another. Is there something similar with wikis?
The correct answer is ... "it depends".
It depends on which wiki you're using or planning to use. I've used various over the years MoinMoin was ok, used files rather than database, Ubuntu seem to like it. MediaWiki, everyone knows about and JAMWiki is a java clone(ish) of MediaWiki with the aim to be markup compatible with MediaWiki, both use databases and you can generally connect whichever database you want, JAMWiki is pre-configured to use an internal HSQLDB instance.
I recently converted about 80 pages from a MoinMoin wiki into JAMWiki pages and this was probably 90% handled by a tiny perl script I found somewhere (I'll provide a link if I can find it again). The other 10% was unfortunately a by-hand experience (they were of the utmost importance with them being recipies for the missus) ;-)
I also recently setup a Mediawiki instance for work and that took all of about 8 minutes to do. So that'd be my choice.
To answer your question I don't believe that there's such a standard as WikiML as Till called it.
As strange as it sounds, I've investigated screen scraping a wiki for a co-worker to help him port it to another wiki engine. It turned out that screen scraping would have been easier, quicker and more efficient to write to move this particular file based wiki to another one or a CMS.
Given the context that you wrote the question in I would bite the bullet now and pay the little extra for a windows hosted account and put Screwturn wiki on it. You're got the option of using file based or SQL Server based back end for it but because one of your requirements is low cost I'm guessing that you would use file based now for a cheaper hosted account and then you can always upscale the back end to SQL Server.
I haven't heard of WikiML.
I think your biggest obstacle is gonna be converting one wiki markup to another. For example, some wikis use markdown (which is what Stack Overflow uses), others use another markup syntax (e.g. BBCode, ...), etc.. The bottom line is - assuming the contents are databased it's not impossible to export and parse it to make it "fit" in another system. It might just be a pain in the ass.
And if the contents are not databased, it's gonna be a royal pain in the ass. :D
Another solution would be to stay with the same system. I am not sure what the reason is for changing the technology later on. It's not like a growing project requires IIS/ASP.NET all of the sudden. (It might just be the other way around.) But for example, if you could stick with PHP for a while, you could also run that on IIS.

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