In early 1998, in preparation for a February 24 presentation of the WinChip microprocessor by Mike Bruzzone, I installed one of his motherboards in my main development machine, and not only did it not work well, it began slowly destroying my SCSI hard disk. I quickly bought an IDE HD, and installed it as well, and was able to get most of the data off the SCSI before it failed completely, but I went through two other motherboards supplied by WinChip, and still did not have an operational main development computer. I had to rely on TCS's Luggable to do my daily work, and by that time we had gone to Win95B, which would not support DOS and Win 3.1 in a separate boot partition, so I was restricted to doing everything in Win95. I don't know how many noticed it, but that was the time I ceased posting the HTML version of the I/O Port on our web site before the printed copy got back from the printer. What was a less than a one day job at the most in Dos / DesqView / SuperKey / SideKick took me several days to do in Win95 with tools like Notepad.
It has been this way for almost a year, but I finally discovered UltraEdit, a shareware program (registration fee $30.00) available for download from http://www.ultraedit.com/ and it is Text Editor, HTML Editor, HEX Editor, and Programmer's Editor all in one.
This product is fantastic. When I have to download a web page from a Unix Server, where it frequently has more than one carriage returns followed by one or more line feeds, I could take care of it by using the DOS List program in Hex mode to see what was there, and then using SideKick where I would use CtrlP CtrlM for Carriage Return, an CtrlP CtrlJ for line feed, to change it to what it should be, because if I edited it with Notepad, and did a save file, notepad screwed up the file and removed all line breaks. But UltraEdit has a File Convert Unix/Mac to DOS which does the cleanup automatically, and UltraEdit can also do Dos->Unix, Dos->Mac, EBCDIC to ASCII, ASCII to EBCDIC, OEM to ANSI, and ANSI to OEM conversions (whatever they are).
UltraEdit has a very good macro capability. I can highlight a URL and press Alt L and it runs a macro I created which turns it into a hot link. I can highlight an email address and press Alt M, and it runs another macro I created which turns it into a "mailto" hotlink. I have several other macros that I have created which I use to convert text files to HTML web page files, and using that capability we now have the I/O Port issues from June 98 through Feb 99 now on the web page, and if I can ever recover the source files for March through May, they will be up as well.
Notepad has a file size limit which sometimes made it difficult to update large web pages; UltraEdit has no such file size limit. I can have many different web page files open at the same time, in fact when I am converting an issue of the I/O Port I open each article in its own file, plus a pattern file, mark a block like the code at the top of the page, or the bottom of the page, and go down one by one pasting that text into each web page, making the necessary changes as I go.
UltraEdit has the ability to automatically insert a date/time, do a spell check, word count, convert CR/LF to word wrap, convert word wrap to CR/LF, and I can even go into column mode, mark a particular block n characters wide in the same place on every line in the file, and then do something like convert it to all lower case, which I must do when I use the DOS GREP program to go through all of the files in a directory and extract the "<TITLE>" line, to build the table of contents section for the online I/O Port issue, and as I was preparing this article, I just ran across a menu entry called Find in Files, which it appears will do the same job that GREP does, so I may never even have to leave UltraEdit when converting an issue to HTML.
On February 20 the Internet Sig has a program scheduled on Building a Web Page, and I plan on demonstrating the use of UltraEdit in that meeting.
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