Just an off-chance question, but I thought I’d throw it out to you.
There was (is) an occasionally invaluable BeOS app “BeConverter”, that would convert units in almost any category (length, mass, capacitance, money, power…). I’ve never used it all that often, but just sometimes it has come in very handy.
Unfortunately in Haiku it crashes on startup. I’d be happy if we could revive it for Haiku, but I can’t find anyway of locating the author, Ramshankar (a.k.a. Teknomancer, I gather).
I’m wondering if anyone here has any knowledge of/link to him…
do you think it is a bug in Haiku or in BeConverter?
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I don’t really know at the moment. The debugger shows it’s crashing in a delete operation (as I remember), and I couldn’t see anything in the traceback that was identifiable as part of BeConverter. It seems to be very early on after the “Run()”. As it seems perfectly stable in BeOS, I guess we can definitely call it an “incompatibility”(:-/) I didn’t pursue it, because without source code that’s a pain.
While you’re waiting on a stand-alone app, there are many online tools for conversions. I like Unit Converter, it probably has more specialized converters than BeConverter will ever support.
I checked my archives, unfortunately no source of BeConverter here. I own a PKG.ZIP (~782kB size) from 2002*. Maybe the sc is included, but afair Ramshankar gave sources not away the PKG-way. He had a homepage for that back in the days iirc.
[ off-topic: ]
i managed to sort my BeOS applications archives finally. Files are still stored on a linux server. I managed not yet a way to distribute them, because it’s actual 11,5 GB just for files to share legally…
[ back on-topic: ]
I hope we will find a way to contact him.
searching with duckduckgo and with any attributes ;-)[/quote]
Hah! Thanks! Either you’re better at searching than me (:-)), or Google failed to show its own pages! (I just tried again and only his geocities.ws site – without a contact – shows up.)
Thanks, but that is not nearly as versatile – or as cute (:-)) – as BeConverter – with its 34 categories! It also uses the attribute system, so you can easily change things like exchange rates.
(Wonder where that name came from? Doesn’t seem to be very apt.)
So, I’ve managed to find an archive of the sources, which I think should be the latest version. However, I need to also check if the attribute files are intact and if they work in Haiku. I no longer have a BeOS system or managed to get it working in a VM, so I guess I’ll have to start by just unpacking it in a Haiku VM and see what happens.
After that I’ll have to convert the BeIDE project to a straightforward makefile project - which shouldn’t be that much work really, since it’s relatively small. The main issue I have atm is finding time to get this going though… I want to eventually get this done anyway. Hopefully, it works fine under Haiku without too much hassle.
Sounds great! Thanks! If for any reason you don’t have to original attribute files, I of course have the original BeOS package with them all. And I just checked – they’re fine in Haiku. The Units folders open with the ‘Unit’, ‘Symbol’, and ‘Value’ attributes shown and editable, as they should be.
[quote=clasqm]I had to change line 124 from templateFileName.SetTo("/boot/develop/etc/makefile");
to templateFileName.SetTo("/boot/develop/etc/Makefile");
[/quote]
Well that was naughty of them… (:-/)
It’s been “makefile” ever since the BeOS days, and in PM they switched it to “Makefile”!
(I happened to try it in a pre-PM Haiku, so it worked fine for me.)
I guess for most circumstances it’s irrelevant, but still…
7 years later…! I’d pretty much forgotten this thread – even though I started it! – but I keep finding I miss the app, so I dug it up. My memory was that Ramshankar was long gone, but a web search just found his website [ramshankar.org] (https://ramshankar.org)(where he lists BeConverter!). @Teknomancer – if you see this – is there any chance you could get back to it? I suspect it would be trivial, but without the source it’s hard to tell. @Humdinger I saw your link to UnitConverter, which looks about as comprehensive as you could get, but I often prefer a local app.
The source for BeConverter is on github but I haven’t tried to build it. He occasionally boots Haiku to do some work with me on Beezer, but not in the past year or so.
you can used this to convert your proj file to a make file