NavList:

Jacquelin Hardy, you wrote:
"they were saying that he spent 20 years of his life for the astrolabe. What you write about the guy confirms my thoughts : he went banana about it (this is English, isn't it ? ). He wrote a whole book about the subject. Still on sale on Amazon for $475. a relic for 'connaisseurs'."

Just to clarify... I did not back then —and do not today— object to his fascination with astrolabes as a topic, nor do I find any fault with the book he wrote. But his software (or app) was a disaster. He became obsessed with aspects of coding that were already on the verge of extinction in 1996. He coded himself into a corner in terms of the overall design of the app and in terms of the implementation of the design in code. I repeat: it was a disaster.

Of course, this does not mean that your creation is a disaster. And again, you're welcome to tell us more about it. You could also, if you wish, email me a copy of the software/app, and I will put in a zip, upload it to the NavList archives, and you will then have a permanent, secure, public download link which you can send to anyone interested in acquiring your app. :)

And let's talk about Morrison's book. It has some dated chapters on software development which are antique, and there are long sections on computational minutiae --which will be like candy for fans of computational minutiae! For its likely audience, it's an excellent resource. The pricing on used copies, which you mentioned, is "one of those internet things". It's hard to be sure how this came about. Some people blame "algorithms", implying some mysterious bot, probably under the control of Amazon, that is controlling the prices of exotic used books. Or it could just as easily be a product of the maturity of the online used book market (sellers can easily check other listings, for example). At abebooks.com, there are presently two copies available at elevated prices from sellers in the UK, and another at a crazy price on ebay from a seller in France. But the prices are meaningless. Sellers may "hope" that someone with money to burn will hit on these crazy offer prices, but it may be a long wait... especially since you can get digital copies of the book for free.

Want it? I'm attaching a PDF of Morrison's book The Astrolable, self-published by him as Janus twenty years ago. This is also available at archive.org (same file).

Frank Reed

PS: Sidebar 1: You asked: "What is the -0700 ?" That's just a standard internet timestamp element. It indicates an offset of seven hours from UT. The NavList.net website is hosted in California. I don't bother changing the timestamps on individual messages, but in the main list of new messages, these are translated to UT and thus all posts are listed in their proper temporal order.
Sidebar 2: You also asked in another message about the "inside joke" that I included in a post last year by signing with my initials "FER" instead of "Frank Reed". It was nothing... Just a little communication to an old friend who had been recently reading my NavList messages. :)

File: