From: Aron Roberts (aron@socrates.berkeley.edu)
Date: Thu Jun 26 2003 - 12:25:15 PDT
Hi Holly,
There are a plethora of filename extension lists on the 'Net. You
can find these by searching in major search engines, such as Google.
One of these lists, WhatIs.com's "Every File Format in the World,"
<http://whatis.techtarget.com/fileFormatA/0,289933,sid9,00.html>,
identifies the ".bdb" and ".ncf" extensions as *possibly* belonging,
respectively, to Microsoft Works and Lotus Notes, and ".gen" as
*possibly* belonging either to Ventura Publisher or dBase. (This
gives a strong hint that these might be DOS or Windows files.)
In addition to the above, two other extensive lists you might start
with, which are representative of the resources of this type
available, are:
Society for Technical Communications
"Filename Extensions"
http://www.stcsig.org/lw/extensio01.htm
"Joz's Extensions Base"
http://www.jozy.nl/
You can likely find more such lists through diligent searching.
While you might not find every extension in your list below
identified through these sites, perhaps you can at least reduce the
number of this donor's files whose origins or formats are completely
unknown. Note that these lists generally are confined to the
filename extensions used by popular commercial and freeware/shareware
applications; less popular or discipline-specific products won't
typically appear in such lists.
Another tactic is to explicitly search on the search engines -- and
don't forget Usenet newsgroup searches, such as Google Groups, as
well -- using search phrases such as
"spe extension"
or
"qua extension"
(On Google, searching for phrases requires enclosing them in double
quotes; other search engines' techniques may vary. Also different
search engines may or may not recognize a leading period in a
filename extension used as a search term, or may do so only if these
terms are prepared in a certain way, so you may need to do some
experimentation.)
If such searches yield many irrelevant 'hits', you might further
restrict your searches by adding the word 'files', as in:
"qua extension" files
A search on the above suggests several programs that might have
been used to create the files with the ".qua" extension, including
"early ICRF quantification programs", some of whose files can
apparently be generated by the xdd2qua tool
<http://www.molgen.mpg.de/~xdigitise/xddtools/man/xdd2qua.html>, part
of "Xdigitise ... a visualization software system for evaluation of
hybridisation experiments" <http://www.molgen.mpg.de/~xdigitise/>.
In addition, this extension may also have been used for "a wood
quality file (a tab-delimited text file) generated by the ORGANON
stand simulator" <http://www.cof.orst.edu/cof/fr/research/organon/>.
Those are both pretty obscure programs, but could actually be
relevant for slides of cactus samples. (ORGANON appears to have been
created c. 1999, however ...)
Good luck!
Aron Roberts
Workstation Software Support Group
P.S. I take it that the donor of these 3-1/2" diskettes isn't
available to tell you or your students the names of the programs they
used to create these files? :-)
In the message "[MAGNet] mystery ?data base? files", dated
2003-06-26, Holly Forbes wrote:
>Dear All,
>
>We received a large photographic slide collection of mostly cacti
>(ca. 15,000), accompanied by the donor's 3 1/2 inch PC-formatted
>floppy disks of what are reported to be the inventory/catalogues of
>these slides. Whether the source was from a PC or a Mac isn't
>certain. Most of the files are small, ca. 38 KB.
>
>We have tried, some talented students have tried, but no luck
>finding a way to use them.
>
>The files have the following types of names (and date to 1992 and 1993):
>cact-n-a.gen
>cact-n-a.num
>cact-n-a.qua
>
>and others that appear to be related:
>coryph.num
>coryph.qua
>coryph.spe
>
>and other apparent groupings:
>opuntia.bes
>opuntia.num
>opuntia.spe
>
>agavemex.nam
>agavemex.num
>agavemex.qua
>
>There are also some files that end with ".bdb", ".nam", ".bst",
>".tot", ".ncf", ".wor"
>Some configuration files are labeled "macros" or "works"
>
>Suggestions for how to proceed would be most welcome.
>
>Thank you,
>
>Holly Forbes
>
>
>*****************************************************************************
>Holly Forbes, Curator
>University of California
>Botanical Garden
>200 Centennial Drive, #5045
>Berkeley, CA 94720-5045
>
>http://www.mip.berkeley.edu/garden/
>
>Phone: 510-643-8040
>FAX: 510-642-5045
>hforbes@uclink4.berkeley.edu
>*****************************************************************************
>
>
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