SmartAss V1.3 AMIGA by Håvard "Howard" Pedersen © 1994-95 Mental Diseases A program for the handling of fortunes upon startup. DISCLAIMER I take no responsibility for what this program may to do you, your belongings, your family, your hometown, your (beloved/not beloved) pets or your mental state. Use entirely at your own risk. You may copy this program to any schmuck wanting it. Please note that most of the quotes used by SmartAss does not include author information. It's hard to obtain this information on everything, so I've mostly let it out. The fortunes presented here may be offensive to some. If you feel offended by any fortune, please notify me, and I will have it removed from the next distribution of SmartAss if I find it reasonable. Please keep in mind though, that no fortunes are ment to offend anyone, but rather to amuse and entertain. Not all fortunes herein represent my personal views. (Though most do! =) INTRODUCTION SmartAss was originally written in annoyment over another fortune-program I found, WiseCrack. The program was written in C and both its random-number generator and speed was terrible. It wasn't meant to be the project it has become today. WiseCrack had originally 2393 fortunes, and to tell you the truth it sort of came out of control. SmartAss possessed me, and when my datafile counted over 19000 fortunes I realised I had made a MONSTER! (Spooky orchestral music here!) SmartAss offers you the following features: * The largest fortunecollection known to man. (19758!) * Compatibility with SmartAss for Unix, DOS and Windows, written by Sveinar Rasmussen. * Really fast fortune-fetching due to hash-tables. * Does NOT read entire datafile into memory. * Has a continously updating fortunefile. (Available on AmiNet!) * Is able to print fortunes to standard output. Insert SmartAss in your shell-startup or redirect to printer! * Very random picking of fortunes! HOW TO USE Starting SmartAss from WB is a breeze. Put it in your WBStartup-drawer or simply doubleclick on its icon. You should immediately (well, nearly) get an intuition-requester with the fortune selected. Unfortunately, current version does not support any arguments from icon. If this is important to you, you have to use IconX for now. Starting it from CLI is as easy as from WB. Typing its name and pressing return will bring up the earlier mentioned requester. To make SmartAss type its output in the CLI window you need to write "SmartAss STDIO" and voila! The keyword PATH may be used to specify where to search for the datafiles. For example to fetch datafiles from "Text:" and print out the fortune to a printer you would type "SmartAss STDIO PATH Text: >PRT:" and consider it done. Normally, SmartAss searches for it's datafiles in the S: directory. You must make sure that the file is a version 2 datafile. This should be mentioned a small textfile accompanying the datafile. PROGRAM HISTORY V1.0 Initial release. Written in annoyment of the lousy random-calculation of WiseCrack. 2,467 fortunes, whereof 2,393 origins from WiseCrack. Limitations: 4,294,967,295 fortunes. - COUNT keyword cause output of total number of fortunes in datafile. - STDOUT keyword cause fortunes to be output to standard output. (Console window or via redirection to whatever...) V1.1 Speed raise attempt. Limitations: 65,535 files with maximum 65,535 fortunes each, resulting in a maximum of 4,294,836,225 fortunes. Distributed datafile consists of 2,612 fortunes. - Multiple datafiles now supported. Gains MUCH speed! - Changed FILE/FROM keyword to PATH to simplify loading of multiple datafiles. - Count keyword removed. Will be released in separate command soon. - Started using BSS hunk for smaller objects. - Drew me a nice icon for MagicWB. - Fixed bug causing last fortune in a file to be displayed in requester with a empty line at the bottom. - If attempting to display fortunes larger than 4K with intuition requester, SmartAss would most likely crash. Will now report error. V1.2 Still not random enough. Error reports sucked! Distributed datafiles consists of 6,036 fortunes. At this time, Sveinar Rasmussen Made MS-DOS, Windows and Unix versions of SmartAss. - DisplayBeep() when displaying error messages, to distinguish error-requesters from fortunes. - Made random-calculation even more random. - Potential bug-fix: SmartAss _could_ crash if an error occured and intuition-library V36 or higher couldn't be opened. - Removed some fortunes which actually told you that OS/2 was a good OS! 8) - Changed fortune introducer from "@" to a "~" on a separate line. - Created compiled fileformat with index for a massive speed gain. - Several different errorreports upon memory shortage, to make bughunting easier. - Due to my incredible slow routine for selecting the fortune, I've set the fortune-limit to 65535. V1.3! Whoa! Major furtune update! Distributed datafiles consists of 19,758 fortunes! And I'm announcing this release as the exclamation-mark release! A library-version is coming up! - Encoded datafile to make it impossible to read from a text-viewer! Version of file-format was set to 2 due to this! - Wrote documentation! (Finally!) THINGS TO COME IN FUTURE RELEASES * Make stdout-parser translating linefeeds into double linefeeds (PC-style). This will cause SmartAss to work far better with terminals in mind. * Improve random-calculations even more. * BUGFIX! After a lot of fortune-reading, a "datafile corrupt" error appeared? * Read WB tooltypes. (When I figure out how!) :( * Environment variable to specify prefered settings. * Write DOS-command to write statistics on the fortunefiles. * Write AmigaGuide documentation. * Public screen argument. * Expand fortune-file. * Build the friggin' window on my own, so I don't have to think about proportional fonts anymore. * Remove usage of utility-library for random seeding. * Use fixed huffman for fortune storage. (Smaller datafile!) * Don't read more than necessary of index file. * Make smartass-library to improve versatility and make it possible to write custom fortune-displayers. With this release I will simultaneously release: - MUI fortune display. - Intuition fortune display. - DOS fortune display. - Bootscreen utility with fortune display. * Check fileformat better when reading index file. * Homepage! It's there, but I can't remember the address. HOW TO GET THE NEWEST VERSION OF SMARTASS OR NEW DATAFILES The newest Amiga version is always on AmiNet. The only server I remember right now is ftp.netnet.net, but there are a lot of mirrors. The executable and the datafiles are in separate archives for poor sods who only want new version of the program. :) New datafiles are continously uploaded here in LHA archives. Another way to get a new version, read uninteresting stuff about SmartAss or find out what's coming up is checking out the SmartAss homepage! It's located at: http://www.cs.uit.no/~sveinarr The link doesn't take you all the way, but there should be a SmartAss button somewhere. Click it! The SmartAss files on this page is actually located in USA. Europeans should therefore use AmiNet when possible, while Americans might find this quite a relief. CONTACTING THE AMIGA AUTHOR I'm maintaining the Amiga version and does some work concerning fileformat and new fortunes. There is an italian guy who's working on a BIIIG expansion to the fortune file and checking the file for double storage of fortunes. Unfortunately I don't know his name nor any way to contact him. (Sveinar do!) Contact me if you've got ANYTHING to say about SmartAss: E-Mail: (Preferably) havardp@mail.stud.ingok.hitos.no IRC: (Nice alternative!) Nick: Howard, Howard_, Howard__ Channels: #amiga, #amigascne, #norge Snail-mail: (If all else fails) Håvard Pedersen Kvartsveien 175 N-9022 KROKELVDALEN Norway CONTACTING THE UNIX/MSDOS/WINDOWS AUTHOR Sveinar Rasmussen has made SmartAss for Windows, DOS and Unix. If you want this program you can either mail him or get it through the SmartAss home page. I'm sure he would also appreciate comments and other types of feedback on his efforts. E-Mail: sveinarr@stud.cs.uit.no LAST WORDS Thanks to Frank Simonsen, who collected the imense amount of 50 fortunes and insisted on getting credits for the work! Thanks pal! ;)