Hi Canie,

There is an interesting project which might be appropriate for this bulletin board. And I thought that I would run the idea past you and see what comments you might have.

I am constantly talking by E-mail with other forecasters around the world. And it would be helpful if they had a bulletin board such as this one where they could post notes regarding how well they did with detecting the approach of significant earthquakes. I myself am not concerned about people saying that they did a great job when they did not. It is simply important that a site be available where people can compare results, honest or not.

When there was a significant earthquake I could post a note about it and then contact everyone and ask them to submit short reports stating how well they did with spotting its approach. Those reports could then be posted in response to my original post. That might happen once a month or so. It would not be possible to keep track of every earthquake out there which people think is important. But occasionally we have one such as the recent one in Taiwan which reportedly claimed several lives and seriously disrupted Internet traffic in the Taiwan - Indonesia area.

Most of the forecasters could register with you. People who could not or who did not want to could send me or someone else a report which I or some other person could post.

Sound interesting?

Hi Roger,

I just discovered how to use a very powerful computer programming routine with Perl. And I am wondering if it can be done with True Basic. I would expect that it might not be possible.

When I run my Perl language earthquake location determination program it does a lot of calculations etc. and then waits for me to tell it how to display the data. In the past if I wanted to change something about the display or how the program was doing the calculation I would have to stop it, make the change, and then restart it and wait for it to do all of the calculations again.

What I found that I can do is use “Do” commands to get around that problem. When I want to change the program in some way I have it jump to a routine that executes a “Do” command that calls a secondary Perl program. I can then change what I want in the original program and save it. When told to do so the secondary program uses another “Do” command to recall the original program. Perl then recompiles the original program and jumps back to any location in it that I want. All of the calculations and variable values etc. are still in the memory. And they don’t have to be redone. So the transition takes just a few seconds.

Also, like most people I make mistakes while programming. And if the changes to the original program had any errors in them the compiler will stop running and generate an error message. However if a “Do” command was used to recall the original program from the secondary one then program control will simply go back to the secondary one. None of the data stored in memory is lost. And the necessary corrections can be made and the original program called back again.

I wish that I knew that this was possible several years ago as it would have saved a lot of time.