FAQ
These are a combination of real questions that people have asked and questions I guessed that people might ask. Hopefully they answer the bulk of questions that people might have in their mind.
Why should I use Parsemania?
A few reasons:
- Parsemania provides the best historical analysis of data of any parser out there at the moment.
- Parsemania provides excellent multi-language support, or at least will when I get some log files.
- Parsemania is accurate in its figures - something I pay the highest attention to
- Parsemania is open source and will never be a commercial product, unlike the other parsers available which do not provide source code nor generous redistribution rights
Why shouldn’t I use Parsemania?
Parsemania isn’t meant to be a realtime parser, at least not yet. The other parsers out there (see the links on the right) do an excellent job of providing that data onto the clipboard and I didn’t see a need to reproduce something that was already there. I wanted to do something the others didn’t provide - detailed historical analysis.
Why open source?
Because I have no intention of ever selling this and open source is the best way to get it out there and get input from all the other skilled developers out there who may just have been looking for a starting point. At the very least, I just felt like giving something to the community rather than keeping it for myself.
Why .NET 2.0?
I needed some sort of justification to work on this and learning all the new stuff in .NET 2.0 seemed like a good enough side reason to work it. Of course, being open source there’s nothing that stops someone porting it to whatever platform they want - after all the core of it is just the regular expressions.
Who are you?
An Aussie Software Developer working in the US. Or an Inquisitor on the Blackburrow server. Depends on what you were really asking doesn’t it?
How can I help?
First - offer suggestions for improvements. That’s the biggest thing - I can go so far but I really need to know what would make this better for you.
Second - grab the source and start building it and tinkering.
Third - get others to try it and do the above two things!
I love this tool - where can I send you cash / beer / women / computers for your time?
You can’t. Thanks for the offer, but no. I wrote this because I needed a parser with more functionality than others out there and I’m just sharing my work because it’s senseless to keep it to myself. If you really want to give money away, find a worth charity because I sure am not one of those.