NGSort  -  Internet NewsGroup Sorter

by Alan Wrigley

NGSort was first published on the RISC User 8:6 disc. It is a small application designed to make it easier for you to maintain an up-to-date list of Internet newsgroups. This new version has been rewritten to take advantage of Simtec's Hydra multiprocessor board, allowing you to sort newsgroup files in the background while you get on with other tasks (although you don't need a Hydra to use NGSort). This possibly makes NGSort the first Hydraware application to be released commercially.

Newsgroup lists can be downloaded from the Internet, and you can receive updates each time you log on, but eventually you get a whole lot of files, each containing newsgroups in no particular order and with many duplicate listings. You can merge these files every now and then to make a definitive list, but the groups will not then be ordered alphabetically, and there may be duplicates.

This is where NGSort comes in. Dragging a text file full of newsgroups to NGSort will arrange the list in alphabetical order and weed out any duplicates. In fact, the program will do this for any text file containing text strings, so it could be useful in other circumstances as well.

Running the program from the RISC User menu system or by double-clicking on its icon in a Filer window installs an icon on the icon bar. The icon bar menu has just two options: Info and Quit. Clicking Select on the icon bar icon opens the main program window.

Dragging a text file to the main window or to the icon bar icon starts the sorting process. If you have a Hydra card which is currently active, a message will appear in the window which reads "Hydra active". In this case, the sort routine will be performed on one of the slave processors and you should be able to use the desktop while the file is being sorted. If you don't have a Hydra, the sort routine will take over the machine until it is finished. The text in the status icon in the window will show "Sorting..." while the sort is in progress, regardless of whether it is using Hydra or not.

Once the sort is finished, the status icon will change to "Finished", and icons will appear in the window to enable you to save the sorted file. The lower section of the window will now look and behave exactly like a standard RISC OS save box.

If your newsgroup files are very long, and if the items in the file are in no particular order, it can take quite a while to sort, even on a Risc PC (e.g. 20-30 minutes for a file containing 10000 items). You should only need to sort your newsgroups occasionally, and if you don't have a Hydra it's probably a good idea to go off and have a few cups of tea while the program gets on with its work.

 Copyright RISC User Magazine 1995, 1996