Re: Anybody home?

["Dale E. Boyce" <dale@radpro.uchicago.edu>]

What they said [8>.  When I said I was in the process of porting my system
to a newer version of the software, I am not just doing it for kicks.
The seven year old version had bugs and was no longer 100% functional
under my updated operating system.  We hope to do away with many of the
patches and kludges used to get around bugs.  Never the less someone
would need to understand the program to tailor it to their own needs.

Data entry programs might be fairly portable.  Report programs such
as output for inventories, exposure reports, cost recovery, etc.  Are
probably going to need to be written for your specific case, home brew
or commercial either way.  Prices for commercial apps are $10k+.  Sounds
expensive, but I would bet the total cost to write a fairly complete
program is closer to $100k if professional health physicist and programmers
are used.

Rewriting my system is going much faster than the original.  I think
this may be where some savings might occur for someone wanting to
homebrew who has some programming experience by borrowing code from
someone who has been through the learning curve.  I also agree with the
comments about interpretting someone else's code.  It can be extremely
difficult, but stuff written in a good database language can be read
by someone familiar with the language.

Dale
dale@radpro.uchicago.edu