From bigd.vi.guy at gmail.com  Thu Jul  1 18:38:06 2010
From: bigd.vi.guy at gmail.com (Derek Roberts)
Date: Thu, 1 Jul 2010 21:38:06 -0400
Subject: [RadioExam Sites] new technician pool
Message-ID: <AANLkTikZdUOEQSI5dQKPrWLJdRHWSg6M0KaITbYXQvSi@mail.gmail.com>

Hi,

Just to say the new technician pool goes in effect today, here's a
link to the text version:
http://www.ncvec.org/downloads/Revised%20Element%202.txt

Thanks.
PS: What all do you have to do to add a revised pool to the
radioexam.org software? Does it read the questions directly from the
question pool file? Or do you have to add them in manually?


From ikluft at thunder.sbay.org  Thu Jul  1 19:58:51 2010
From: ikluft at thunder.sbay.org (Ian Kluft)
Date: Thu, 1 Jul 2010 19:58:51 -0700
Subject: [RadioExam Sites] new technician pool
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTikZdUOEQSI5dQKPrWLJdRHWSg6M0KaITbYXQvSi@mail.gmail.com>
References: <AANLkTikZdUOEQSI5dQKPrWLJdRHWSg6M0KaITbYXQvSi@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <20100702025851.GA12102@thunder.sbay.org>

On Thu, Jul 01, 2010 at 09:38:06PM -0400, Derek Roberts wrote:
> Just to say the new technician pool goes in effect today, here's a
> link to the text version:
> http://www.ncvec.org/downloads/Revised%20Element%202.txt
> 
> Thanks.
> PS: What all do you have to do to add a revised pool to the
> radioexam.org software? Does it read the questions directly from the
> question pool file? Or do you have to add them in manually?

Thanks for the reminder.  Lots of things going on to distract me...

The RadioExam software tries to parse the question pool as provided by NCVEC.
The problem is that they don't make it to be machine readable and they change
the format a little every time.  The never-ending formatting changes mean
there are always either edits to clean up the text so it parses, or code
fixes for the parser to handle recurring formatting issues.  It's been the
same game annually since 1996.

Ian KO6YQ
on Twitter: @KO6YQ for radio/tech, @ikluft for aviation/space