The CSAUC Image files are gone

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pottsbr
Kobold
Posts: 7
Joined: Sat Jul 31, 2010 11:19 am

The CSAUC Image files are gone

Post by pottsbr »

Hi guys. I'm a new user and was just starting to download the the CSAUC images from the link on the tutorials page when the page was taken down. They have the following notification on the page...

"I have found that I just don't have the time and other resources to maintain two active sites (especially the download bandwidth) so since the Recordings Site is my bread and butter, I'm going to be removing the Gaming side for now. I'll be backing it up in the event anything happens later down the road to where I can dedicate the the time and money that the site requires but until then, I need to focus on the Music side. I will continue to be around - I'll just be participating in sites such as Battlegrounds, Dundjinni, Fantasy Flight Games and others. :)

Expect everything to be taken down sometime during the weekend of 7/31 - 8/1."


Anyone know where else they can be found?

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Azhrei
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Posts: 12086
Joined: Mon Jun 12, 2006 1:20 pm
Location: Tampa, FL

Re: The CSAUC Image files are gone

Post by Azhrei »

If someone has them and can post a link, I'll copy them to the RPTools main site and put a link to it from somewhere on the main site...

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brad
Great Wyrm
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Joined: Fri Apr 27, 2007 10:27 pm
Location: NY
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Re: The CSAUC Image files are gone

Post by brad »

There is a user agreement in the CSUAC. When you download it you are agreeing not to redistribute. I have the collection as downloaded from the site. I have even emailed Cecil about posting it on the tutorial site, but have never received a response. I would love to be able to post it somewhere that MapTool users could always get a hold of it, as the collection has been taken down more then once. Cecil put a ton of work into that collection though, so I don't think he is going to let it go.
View MapTool video tutorials at RPToolsTutorials.net

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Azhrei
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Location: Tampa, FL

Re: The CSAUC Image files are gone

Post by Azhrei »

Perhaps he'd license it under a Creative Commons license that include attributions? Obviously, I'd be perfectly happy to give credit where credit is due! If you have an email address for him, I'll try sending him a note if you'll PM me with it. Thanks.

Edit: It also appears that the Internet Archive doesn't have either GM's Parlor or GM's Apprentice archived in a way that the file is available; probably due to the registration requirement. :( I haven't checked Google's cache yet, but I'll bet it's the same...

Edit2: Okay, I found an email address for him and sent him a note. And no, no luck with the Google cache either.

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Azhrei
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Re: The CSAUC Image files are gone

Post by Azhrei »

Here's an idea I had for recreating the CSUAC involving an automated approach for scanning the Dunjinni forums and creating categories with images. I had typed this up as a response to brad, but thought we might have someone adventurous that would want to take a look at this...

I can see how in my mind's eye how the code would look: go one post at a time and pick out all strings of text, break them up into words by using spaces as delimiters (among other characters, like punctuation), and eliminate digits. A string that contains underscores is broken into two words and strings that contain mixed case are also broken into separate words. Also eliminate terminals ("a", "the", "an", etc). Then all of these words are put into a database (I'd use a hash table and keep it in memory most likely) and used to track which words came from which posts and which images were attached to those posts.

After doing all of the posts, do an analysis on the words and count how many times each appears, producing a list that the user can scan and mark each word as IS or IS NOT a category name. Once that step is done, all posts containing that word put the images into that category. (The same image could appear in multiple categories.)

The last step is for a human (or humans) to verify that the images were grouped properly.

The result should be created on a Unix system where hard links can be used to put the same image into multiple different directories (as only Win7 has support for links this step should not be done on WinXP or Vista) and then use the TAR format to archive the files. (TAR preserves links while ZIP doesn't, for example.) When unpacked on a system without links the file appears multiple times taking up more space, but when unpacked on OSX or Linux the image is extracted once and all directories have references to the single one taking up much less space.

Oh, and perhaps put the category names and image names into a database or CSV file or something so that searches can be done against it. (Very easy to search for things on OSX via Cmd-Spacebar but it's not so easy on other operating systems.)

Whew. More detail than anyone wanted probably. ;) Anyone with a few spare hours who wants to tackle this? I'd use Perl most likely, or maybe PHP (since accessing web server content is easier). But any language that works...

Spindizzy
Kobold
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Joined: Sat Mar 26, 2016 12:20 pm

Re: The CSAUC Image files are gone

Post by Spindizzy »


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