[GreenKeys] RTTY Pictures and tapes

[John Foust]

At 11:30 AM 3/24/2002 -0500, you wrote:
>I see that we have a discussion going on about RTTY picture tapes!!!
>Well, as some of you may know I have a collection of
>about 1350 tapes which Don Royer, WA6PIR, now a
>silent key, and I collected together.
>   When you get a collection this large the major problem
>becomes one of how to catalog them all. 

This is an interesting software problem.  Assuming you could
convert each tape to a disk file, you couldn't simply compare
the data as-is because I would assume that there are differences
due to errors in duplication as well as differences due to 
addition of headers and trailers ("BROUGHT TO YOU BY WA6PIR"),
or in line-ending and overstrike conventions.

However, there are text comparison tools out there that might
help solve the problem.  You'd want some way to produce an
index of similarity between any two tapes.  This would help
eliminate the dupes.  Universities have been developing 
text-similarity tools to help find plagiarism, and this is
a remarkably similar problem.

On the other hand, sometimes the most elementary methods work 
fine - even with a dozen Snoopy, I would guess that file size 
alone would help differentiate between distinct Snoopy as well 
as show which were quite similar.

I've always wanted to get around to improving the ASCII art
tools on my http://www.threedee.com/jcm/aaa/index.html site,
but my "to do" list grows longer by the day, and now I'm
starting a new business.  :-)  

- John