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Principles, Assumptions, Constraints, Risks

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The export utility to move the PAWDOC files out of the Fish document management system and into files residing in Windows Explorer folders, has been completed by the Fish supplier, m-Hance. Broadly speaking, it will deliver files with a title which starts with the Reference Number; then has three spaces followed by the file description that I originally input to Fish (truncated after 64 characters); and ending with the date when the file was originally placed in Fish. I have already received the utility documentation which provides full instructions of how to install and run it and am confident I know what to do. So all that remains is for me to receive the utility (which I expect early next week) and to give it an initial test run on the PAWDOC collection in Fish.

I’ve already created a full draft of the Project Plan Description document and the Project Plan Chart, so the test run will inform me of any final changes that I need to make to the plan. After that, all that will be left to do is to fix an overall start date and then to insert the start and end dates for each task.

One part of the Project Plan Description that was of particular interest to construct was the section on Principles, Assumptions, Constraints and Risks. Since some of them really require expert digital preservation knowledge and experience – commodities which I don’t have – I’ve sent these out to my colleagues Matt Fox-Wilson, Jan Hutar, and Ross Spencer in the hope that they will let me know of any serious errors of judgement that I may have made. The text of the section I sent them is shown below:

Principles

The Principles below have been followed in the construction of this Project Plan, and will be applied throughout the performance of the project:

  • No action will be taken which will increase the cost or effort required to maintain the collection
  • Backup, disaster recovery and process continuity arrangements are considered to be significant factors in ensuring the longevity of a collection and will therefore be included as an integral part of this preservation project plan.
  • All Preservation actions on individual document files will be undertaken after the files have been transferred out of Fish into stand-alone files in Windows folders, so that a substantial number of transferred documents will be subjected to detailed scrutiny thereby improving the chances of identifying any generic errors that may have occurred in the transference process.

Assumptions

The Assumptions below have been followed in the course of constructing this Project Plan.

It is assumed that:

  • The analysis of the files remaining in Fish after the ‘Export and Delete’ utility has been run, will take no longer than three weeks elapsed time.
  • There is no publicly available mechanism to convert Microsoft Project (.mpp) files earlier than version 4.0.
  • There is no publicly available mechanism to convert Lotus ScreenCam (.scm) files produced earlier than mid 1998.
  • Application and configuration files that were included in the collection do not need to be able to run in the future as they do not contain content information. The mere presence of the files in the collection is sufficient.
  • The zipping of a website is currently the easiest and most effective way of storing it and providing subsequent easy access.
  • Versions of Microsoft Excel Word from 1997 onwards are not in immediate danger of being unreadable and therefore require no preservation work. Earlier versions are best converted to the latest version of Excel that is currently possessed – Excel 2007.
  • Versions of Microsoft Word for Windows from 6.0/1995 onwards are not in immediate danger of being unreadable and therefore require no preservation work. Earlier versions, including those for Macintosh, are best converted to the latest version of Word that is currently possessed – Word 2007.
  • Versions of Microsoft PowerPoint from 1997 onwards are not in immediate danger of being unreadable and therefore require no preservation work. Earlier versions, including those for Macintosh) are best converted to the latest version of PowerPoint that is currently possessed – PowerPoint 2007
  • None of the versions of HTML, including those pre-dating HTML 2.0, are in immediate danger of being unreadable; and therefore no preservation work is required on any of the Collection’s HTML files.

Constraints

This project may be limited by the following constraints:

  • Some of the disks and zipped files in the collection contain huge numbers of files of various types and organised in complex arrangements. To address the preservation requirements of these particular items could delay the project indefinitely. Therefore no attempt will be made to undertake preservation work on these items; but, instead, a note will be included in section 3 of the Preservation Maintenance Plan (Possible future preservation issues).
  • Disks that can’t be opened must remain in the Collection in physical form only.
  • No automated tools are available for undertaking conversions of large numbers of files; and the use of macros has been discounted as being too error-prone and risky. Therefore, all the Preservation work defined in this Project Plan has to be undertaken manually by a single individual.

Risks

There is a risk that:

  • The Zamzar service may be unable to convert some of the files submitted to it, despite tests having been completed successfully.
    Mitigation: record the need to take further actions on specified files in the future, in section 3 of the Preservation Maintenance Plan
  • The analysis of the files remaining undeleted after the Fish file export has taken place, may throw up unexpected issues and may take much longer than anticipated. Mitigation: After two and a half weeks work on this activity, the issues will be recorded in a document, and the need to address the issues in the future will be recorded in section 3 of the Preservation Maintenance Plan.

The slog of the blog book

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I’m pushing ahead with the book of the blog. Having established a cut-off date for the end of 2017, I made sure that I cleared away two of my long-standing journeys (OFC and Roundsheet) by the deadline, and ended up with about 350 pages of blog posts. That’s when the grind really started and I had to go through all of them, separating them into 16 page sections ready for bookbinding. As I went through I was ensuring that the background documents accessed from links in the blog were reproduced in full in an Appendix. This was a major exercise which eventually produced a further 465 pages – all of which in their turn had to be separated into 16 page sections.

I now have 52 separate sixteen page sections, and another final section which is growing as I edit each section one last time and assemble the index and the timeline (a list of post titles in date order). In this final edit I’m also ensuring that the cross-post links and the links to Appendix documents are all consistently formatted and include the correct page number to elsewhere in the book. I decided to do this because it is the effortless ability to jump between links, and the absence of any particular space constraints, that distinguishes electronic systems from paper books – and I have taken advantage of both features extensively in the blog. So, when I decided to reproduce the blog in book form, I was determined to try to match those capabilities to the greatest extent I could. Hence, ALL the background documents have been included; and every cross reference includes a page number that goes straight to the relevant content. The only links that don’t have a page number reference are those to material elsewhere in the net which is produced by other people – I rationalised that a blog book should only include material produced by the owner of the blog.

The inclusion of linking page numbers and the creation of the index and timeline are making the final edit a slow process which may take a couple of weeks. In the meantime, I’ve been thinking about the type of paper I should use to print the book. Having assembled all the text, I can see that, if I used the same paper as I used for the ‘Sounds for Alexa’ book, the text block would be 5.5 times the thickness of the Sounds book – some 8.25 cm – a huge tome. The Sounds book was printed on 125 gsm paper, so I tried looking on the net for some thinner bookbinding paper but had no success – specialist A4 bookbinding papers sold in packs as opposed to single sheets, seem to be few and far between and I didn’t come across any that were thinner than 125 gsm. I discussed this with George Davidson, my tutor on the Bookbinding course at the Bedford Arts and Crafts Centre, and he said he would investigate a 100 gsm paper with one his regular suppliers and suggested that it might be feasible to buy a paper in larger sheets and cut them down to A4. In the meantime, I will continue to plough through the final editing of the 50+ sections.

Keeping on the rails at Christmas

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If you have picture rails in your house, they can be used to hang Christmas cards on a line. However, picture hooks are designed to be pulled directly downwards, and a sideways force just pulls them along. What’s needed are some weighty Christmas-themed framed pictures which could be brought out each year with the other Christmas decorations and hung on the Xmas card line picture hooks to keep them in place. The pictures could be permanent or the frames could have slots for different things each year such as photos of last year’s Christmas party, or the best of last year’s cards.

A cursory tour of web archiving

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Web archiving isn’t a simple proposition because not only do web sites keep changing, but they also have links to other sites. So, I guess I should have expected that my search for web archiving tools would come up with a disparate array of answers. It seems that the gold-plated solution is to pay a service such as Smarsh or PageFreezer to periodically take a snapshot of a website and to store it in their cloud. The period is user-definable and can be anything from every few hours to every month or year. Smarsh was advertising its basic service at $129 a month at the time of writing.

A more basic, do-it-yourself facility, is the Unix WGET command line function for which a downloadable Windows version is available. This enables all sorts of functions to be specified including downloading parts or all of a site, the scheduling of downloads etc.. However, as you might expect with a Unix function, it requires the user to input programming-type commands and to be aware of a large number of specifiable options.

More limited services such as Archive.is are available to capture, save and download individual pages – and some of these are free to use.

Regarding formats in which web archives can be saved, the Library of Congress’ preferred format is the ISO WARC (Web ARChive) file format. However, I was unable to find any tools or services which purport to store files in this format: it sounds like WARC is being used in the background by large institutions who are trying to preserve large volumes of web content. Interestingly the web hosting service I use for the this blog actually offers backups in various forms of zip files; and indeed, it is zip files that I have used in the past to store web sites that are included in my document collection.

Based on this very quick and certainly incomplete tour of the topic of Web Archiving, I’ve decided I won’t be trying to do anything fancy or different in the way I use technology to archive my old web sites. The zip format has worked well up to now and I see no reason to change that approach. As for a non-technological solution to web archiving, the notion of creating and binding a physical book of the first five years of this OFC web site is becoming more and more attractive. There’s something very solid and immutable about a book on a bookshelf. I’m definitely going to do that, and have set the end of 2017 as the cut-off date for its contents – I’m busy trying to make sure that the Journeys are all at appropriate stages by the 31st December.

Final Planning underway

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Since about last April, I’ve been planning various aspects of the project to preserve my PAWDOC document collection.  This has included:

  • Deciding what to do with zip files
  • Analysing problem files identified by the DROID tool
  • Figuring out how to deal with files that won’t open
  • Investigating all the physical disks associated with the collection including backup disks

All of this work has now been completed, and a clear plan identified for each individual item that requires some preservation work.

In parallel, I have been exploring the possibility of moving the collection’s documents out of the Document Management System it currently resides in (Fish), to standard windows application files residing in Windows Explorer folders. This has included detailed planning of the structure of the target files, and of the process that would have to be undertaken to achieve the transformation. The Fish supplier has recently told me that a utility to undertake this move is now available, and I have confirmed that I want to go ahead with this approach. We are now entering a phase of detailed testing and further planning to verify that this is a viable and sensible way forward. Should no significant obstacles be identified, I anticipate being ready to undertake the move out of the Fish system sometime in January 2018.

Since the bulk of the planning work has now been completed, it has been possible to assemble a draft Preservation Project Plan CHART which itemises each piece of work that will be required. Using this is a base, and incorporating the outcome of the work on the utility with the Fish supplier, I shall start to assemble the overall Preservation Project Plan Description document, and to allocate timescales and effort to each task on the plan.

SPARDS

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It was the combination of my mother saying that she was finding it increasingly difficult to write legibly in over a hundred Christmas cards, and the presence of Alexa in our house, that made me think that we need SPARDS – spoken Christmas cards. They would have recording and playback capabilities so that you could just take one out of the pack you’ve just bought and start talking to the person that’s next on your Christmas Spard list. How nice for the person receiving it, to just make a cup of tea, put it on the mantelpiece, and sit back and relax to listen to your recorded missive and greetings for Christmas and the New Year.

Dealing with Disks

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One very specific aspect of digital Preservation is ensuring that the contents of physical disks can be accessed in the future. I found I had four types of challenges in this area: 1) old 5.25 and 3.5 disks that I no longer have the equipment to read; 2) a CD with a protected video on it that couldn’t be copied; 3) two CDs with protected data on them that couldn’t be copied; and 4) about 120 CDs and DVDs containing backups taken over a 20 year period. My experiences with each of these challenges are described below:

1)  Old 5.25 and 3.5 disks: I looked around the net for services that read old disks and I eventually decided to go with LuxSoft after making a quick phone call to reassure myself that this was a bona fide operation and the price would be acceptable. I duly followed the instructions on the website to number and wrap each disk, before dispatching a package of 17 disks in all (14 x 5.25, 2 x 3.5, 1 x CD). Within a week I’d received a zip file by email of the contents of those disks that had been read and an invoice for what I consider to be a very reasonable £51.50.  The two 3.5 disks and 1 CD presented no problems and I was provided with the contents. The 5.25 disks included eight which had been produced on Apple II computers in the mid 1980s and these LuxSoft had been unable to read. I was advised that there are services around that can deal with such disks but that they are very expensive; and that perhaps my best bet would be to ask the people at Bletchley Park (of Enigma fame) who apparently maintain lot of old machines and might be willing to help. However, since these disks were not part of my PAWDOC collection and I didn’t believe there was anything particularly special on them, I decided to do nothing further with them and consigned them to the loft with a note attached saying they could be used for displays etc. or destroyed. Of the six 5.25 disks that were read, most of the material was either in formats which could be read by Notepad or Excel, or in a format that LuxSoft had been able to convert to MS Word, and this was sufficient for me to establish that there was nothing of great import on them. However, one of 5.25 disks (dating from 1990), contained a ReadMe file explaining that the other three files were self-extracting zip files – one to run a communication package called TEAMterm; one to run a TEAMterm tutorial; and one to produce the TEAMterm manual. Since this particular disk was part of the PAWDOC collection (none of the other 5.25 disks were), I asked LuxSoft to do further work to actually run the self-extracting zips and to provide me with whatever contents and screen shots that could be obtained. I was duly provided with about 30 files which included the manual in Word format and several screen shots giving an idea of what the programme was like when it was running. LuxSoft charged a further £25 for this additional piece of work, and I was very pleased with the help I’d been given and the amount I’d been charged.

2) CD with Protected Video files: This CD contained files in VOB format and had been produced for me from the original VHS tape back in 2010. The inbuilt protection prevented me from copying them onto my laptop and converting them to an MP4 file. After searching the net, I found a company called Digital Converters based in the outbuildings of Newby Hall in North Yorkshire which charged a flat rate of £10.99 + postage to convert a VHS tape and to provide the resulting MP4 file in the cloud ready to be downloaded. It worked like a dream: I created the order online, paid the money, sent the tape off, and a few days later I downloaded my mp4 file.

3) CDs with protected data: I’d been advised that one way to preserve the contents of disks is to create an image of them – a sector-by-sector copy of the source medium stored in a single file in ISO image file format. This seemed to be the best way to preserve these two application installation disks which had resisted all my attempts to copy and zip their contents. After reading reviews on the net, I decided to use the AnyBurn software which is free and which is portable (i.e. it doesn’t need to be installed on your machine – you just double click it when you want to use it). This proved extremely easy to use and it duly produced image files of the two CDs in question in the space of a few minutes.

4) Backup CDs and DVDs: The files on these disks were all accessible, so I had a choice of either creating zip files or creating ISO image files. I chose to create zips for two reasons: first, I wanted to minimise the size of the resulting file and I believe that the ISO format is uncompressed; and, second, on some of the disks I only needed to preserve part of the contents and I wasn’t sure if that can be done when creating a disk image.

Having been through each of these 4 exercises, there are some general conclusions that can be drawn:

  • The way to preserve disks is to copy their contents onto other types of computer storage.
  • The file size capacities of old disk formats are much smaller than the capacities of contemporary computer storage formats. For example, none of the 5.25 disks contained files totalling more than 2 Mb; the CDs contain up to about 700 Mb; and even the DVDs contain no more than 4.7 Gb. In an era where 1Tb hard disks are commonplace, these file sizes aren’t a problem.
  • There are three stages in preserving disk contents; first, just getting the contents from the disk onto other storage technology; second, being able to read the files; and third, should the contents include executables, being able to actually run the programs.
  • The decision about whether you want to achieve stages 2 or 3 will depend on whether you think the contents and what they will be used for, merit the extra effort and cost involved. In the case of the 5.25 disk containing TEAMterm software described above, providing a capability to run the application would have involved finding an emulator to run on my current platform and getting the programme to work on it. I judged that to be not worth the effort for the purpose that the disk’s contents were being preserved for (to be a record of the artefacts received by an individual working through that stage of the development of computer technology).

Listening to New Stuff with Alexa

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Back in February, I reported on my attempts to get Alexa to play the albums in our music collection. I’d found the following:

Coverage: about 80% of our albums were present in the Amazon Music Unlimited library.

Specifying Discs and tracks: for albums consisting of more than one disc, there appears to be no way of specifying that Alexa should start playing Disc 2 as opposed to Disc 1; and, similarly, there’s no way of getting Alexa to play a particular track number.

Voice Recognition: Alexa couldn’t recognise about 10% of the Artist/Title combinations even though I had checked that they were actually available in Amazon’s Music Unlimited library.

Since then I’ve been using Alexa and Amazon Music Unlimited to listen to newly issued albums reviewed in the Guardian/Observer newspapers, and now have a further substantial set of experience to compare with my original findings. The first thing to say is that being able to listen to complete albums, as opposed to just samples of each track from Amazon on my laptop (as I have been doing previously), is, obviously, a far more rewarding experience; and to be able to listen to a range of new releases from start to finish, regardless of whether or not they suit one’s innate preferences, is a real luxury. Most I will never listen to again – and some I have cut short because I really didn’t like them; but there are a few which I’ve really liked and have made a note of at the back of our ‘Sounds for Alexa’ book. At least I now feel a bit more in touch with what sort of music is being produced these days.

Now, to get back to the topics I covered in my earlier findings; below are my further observations on each of the points:

Coverage: Since last February I’ve checked out eleven lots of review sections comprising write-ups of 121 albums. Fourteen of these albums were issued in CD format only, and all the other 107 albums were available in Amazon in MP3 format. All but nine of these 107 were advertised as being available for streaming or available to ‘Listen with your Echo’ (the latter being the Alexa device); and of these nine, six did actually play through the Echo device.  Of the three that didn’t, two would play only samples (Bob Dylan’s ‘Triplicate’, and The Unthanks’ ‘The songs and poems of Molly Drake’); and for the other one (Vecchi Requiem by Graindelavoix/Schmetzer) Alexa repeated “Vecchi Requiem” perfectly but said she was unable to find any album by that name. Given that only three items were actually unavailable, I conclude that a lot of the new albums that are being issued in digital format are available in the Amazon Music Unlimited service.

Specifying Discs and tracks: It still appears to be the case that it’s not possible to specify that Alexa play the 2nd disk in a two disk album, nor to play a particular track number. To get round the multiple disks problem, a number of people in the Reddit noticeboard suggest creating a playlist in which the two discs are listed separately. As for the track number, Alexa will step through the tracks if you keep saying ‘next track’; but, if you really do want a particular track played, the best way to achieve that is to use the name of the track when requesting it – both of the following worked for me:  ‘Play Kashmir by led Zeppelin’ and ‘Play Cromwell by Darren Hayman’.

Voice Recognition: Of the 121 albums I checked out, Amazon claimed that 98 of them were available to play through the Echo, whereas, in fact, I could only get 85 of them to play. For eleven of the other thirteen albums, Alexa just couldn’t understand what I was requesting; and in the remaining two cases, Alexa a) insisted on playing “Rock with the Hot 8 Brass Band” instead of “On the spot” by the Hot 8 Brass band, and b) played Mozart‘s Gran Partita by the London Philharmonic instead of by the London Symphony Orchestra. Turning to the 85 albums that did play through the Echo, it was significant that only 59 of them played at the first time of asking. For the other 26, I had to repeat the request at least twice and as many as six times (these details are included in this Recognition Analysis spreadsheet). Naturally I was trying out all sorts of combinations of all or part of the particular album title and artist. After much trial and error I have taken to first asking for both the album title and the artist (play me X by Y); then, if that doesn’t work, to ask for the album title on its own (or even just parts of the album title – for example, 1729 for the album title “Carnevale 1729”). Finally, as a last resort, to just ask for the Artist. This strategy proved successful in all but 3 of the 26 instances that didn’t play at the first time of asking. These figures indicate that Alexa’s voice recognition capabilities haven’t improved much since my last write-up in February. This view is reinforced by my (undocumented) experiences of trying to get Alexa to tell me about various golf, rugby and cricket events. Her responses have usually been either about a completely different event or just that she doesn’t know. Perhaps I’m not asking the questions in the right way….. at least Alexa is usually able to provide a weather forecast at the first time of asking. In her defence, I should mention that my son seems to have no trouble in adding all sorts of outlandish things to our Alexa shopping bag (which, I should add, we don’t use – Alexa just provides it if you want to put things into it).

From this summary of my recent experiences with Alexa, it seems that little has changed. Whilst Alexa’s voice recognition capabilities don’t seem to have improved much, the usefulness of the device compared with having stacks of CDs around, is undiminished. So much so, in fact, that we have replaced our last remaining CD player, which was in the conservatory, with  another Echo device; and we’ve upgraded to Amazon Music Unlimited for 10 devices at £9.99 a month.

There are undoubtedly many other uses that we could be putting Alexa to – the weekly email from Amazon always suggests several new things that one can ask her or get her to do. We haven’t really followed any of them up. Perhaps I’ll get to printing out the email each week and putting it next to the echo as a prompt. Or maybe I won’t  – we’ll see.  One thing’s for sure: what with all our CDs in the loft, and no stand-alone CD player, Alexa is going to be with us for the indefinite future.

Throwbacks

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The inspiration for this thread for Ideas came from a paper-based Ideas Book which I set up in 1972. It didn’t really get many entries and some of them were more reflection than specific ideas; and it’s lain dormant for many years. So, I’ve just scanned and destroyed the physical Ideas Book; however, for completeness, I’ve recorded below some of the items from it (suitably summarised where necessary).

Throwback 1 – 08Jan1972 – The idea of an ideas book

I guess the first idea to go into this Ideas Book must be the idea of having an Ideas Book. Basically, I think that, although thought is of paramount importance, thought without action is a great waste, both of time and – yes – ideas! So, in future, if, sorry – when, I get some crazy idea – something completely original and far out (like establishing a World Tune Library with a cataloguing system based on every possible combination of notes over, say, a two minute period; when a new tune is sent in to the library it is played into an analogue/digital computer, and this would then produce a ‘catalogue number’ – it would be most interesting to see just how many more tunes were available at any one time), then I will write it down and it will be on record to act upon, elaborate, or even just to read over and laugh! Something quite amusing about this Ideas Book is that maybe the only idea I ever put into it that ever gets acted on will be this first idea to have an Ideas Book….

Throwback 2 – 11Jan1972 – A light design

A light-come-ceiling decoration system could be constructed out of hollow cylinders made of stiff white paper of varying lengths – width 32cm with 2cm of that used for overlap and the varying height resulting in holes of about 10cm width at various different levels. A reflector could be made by covering a sheet of stiff card with bacon foil (to which the vertical cylinders could be secured) which could be fixed to the ceiling using aerofix)

Throwback 3 – 20May1972 – The soundproofing stubber

The vast quantities of cigarette stubs that are wasted could be used as sound proofing material by manufacturing attractive boxes which have a stubber through which the tip would be released into an inner, cheap and recyclable, container which could be removed and sent to a sound proofing company. Profits could be made from the sale of decorative external boxes and from the sale of sound proofing material made from used tips. Stubbing would be cleaner and more efficient; and there would be a reduction in cigarette tip pollution.

Throwback 4 – 21May1972 – Investigating the warping point

Our experience of the world tells us that there is a causal factor for everything. When I look at the stars I think about who or what put them there, because logic informs me that there must be an answer. As I think about this question I assimilate all the relevant information I have until there is maximum capacity thought but an inability to provide an answer. The result is a split second of total confusion. It would be interesting to see what electroencephalograph readings appear when this point – the warping point – is reached. I wonder if other people have the same experience, and, if so, would the measures vary depending on the level of comprehension that different  people have of the question? Would the measures change over time as people increase their comprehension of the question?

Throwback 5 – 01Jan1984 – Simultaneous phoning and computing

It would be useful to have a unit that would interface between a Type 96A jack plug and a home’s telephones/computers. The unit would enable, at the very least, the simultaneous use of the telephone and the use of the computer over the networks.

Throwback 6 – 01Jan1984 – Game designer CBT – and the potential for progs

A computer-based training program could help children design the logic of a computer game i.e. the design specification prior to programming. A program like that could sell for £1 a time. With the right kit at home and a link to the networks, you could design, build and test such a CBT program in the space of 24 hours at home and be selling it immediately over the networks. If it was a novel and good enough idea the mass network market would soon provide 25,000 purchasers; so you could have made £25,000 within 48 hours of first having had the idea.

Throwback 7 – 28Dec1996 – Crucial pursuits

There are five crucial pursuits for members of the human race:

  • Making other individual humans feel good through love, tenderness, intimacy, caring, understanding, and good deeds.
  • Creating the conditions for other humans to have better lives.
  • Learning and understanding about the world and universe about us and about our fellow humans and the way we live.
  • Learning and understanding the origins of humankind and the important findings, discoveries, secrets and developments that humankind has made and encountered.
  • Learning and understanding the origins, secrets, and meaning of the universe and its relevance to ourselves and humankind.

The Verdict

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Back in April, I asked 6 friends to pass rapid judgement on my latest attempt to define the Roundsheet application.  I asked them to give the document a quick scan and to provide answers to the questions below with either Yes or No, and to feel free to add comments or suggestions if they wished.

  1. Were you able to understand what was being described?
  2. Do the Roundsheet concepts make sense to you?
  3. Do you think a Roundsheet application would give users something they haven’t got already?
  4. Is it worth pursuing this idea any further?

I received 5 replies. Not everyone was able to answer either Yes or No to each question – some answers were ‘partly’ or ‘sort of’ or ‘don’t know’ or ‘possibly’; so, I’m going to classify all such in-between kind of responses as ‘not sure’. Applying this rule of thumb, the bare number results were:

Question Yes Not Sure No
Able to understand? 3 1 1
Concepts make sense? 3 1 1
Something user’s haven’t got? 2 3 0
Worth pursuing? 2 2 1

 Some of the comments were interesting:

“one would think that many spreadsheets have pie chart functionalities: your concept is really about how to use those functionalities”

“whether this could be a protected tool? I think you would have difficulty”

“still wondering why the roundsheet format is any better than the tabular format which apparently could be used instead?”

“may be of interest to those who get frustrated by the complexities of linking Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint applications – I have come across a few of those in my career!”

“I feel there is a core there that could be extremely useful”

However, overall, there’s no overwhelming consensus that this is a winning idea, and it’s probably unlikely that time spent trying to promote its development into a product would be rewarded; so I think this is the time to put this journey to bed. I have enjoyed the intellectual challenge it has given me; and have the satisfaction of knowing that I took the ideas as far as I could and finished the job. I could always bring the topic out of retirement should someone come along with a serious interest in taking it forward.

Thank you to all of you who, over the years, have taken the time to wade through and pass comment on the various specification documents.