When we are bored

BH was turning out a box of stuff from the garage this morning, when she came across this CD, which we have probably had for more than a decade, probably unused for all or nearly all of that time. The only thing that she is clear about is that she would not have bought such a thing. Must have been me, although I have no recollection of it. I don't suppose I would have paid more than a fiver for such a thing, so probably a charity shop on the Isle of Wight.

Our desktop is too new to have a disc reader so I popped it into the laptop, without reading the instructions inside the box. Poked around a bit and found something which installed, except that it finished with a registry error, inviting me to go into the registry editor to fix things. With my being only dimly aware of such things, and certainly not up for playing with them. A dim awareness also that the registry is a thing of the past, a dim awareness not confirmed by Bing, which turns up lots of stuff about it, including stuff from Microsoft Support.

I tried firing up the program which had appeared on the desktop to find that it was complicated enough to need instructions. In fact a viewer, rather than a packaged product about the Isle of Wight. I find something called an ECW file which seems to be the data to be viewed, all 22Mb of it. Then everything seemed to go wrong, and the program vanished from the desktop. But the registry error was still there, glaring at me.

Restarted the laptop, which took rather a long time, but at the end of which the program appeared to have more or less vanished, the only trace being an empty folder by name of C:\Program Files (x86)\ER Mapper. Now deleted. Perhaps Windows was clever enough to work out that there was a half installed program on its disc and got rid of it.

A reminder that it is probably not a good idea to load big old programs about which one knows nothing, particularly when one does not bother to read the instructions that come with them.

And I now wonder whether is anything is known against 'Plugins Development Group, Earth Resource Mapping Pty Ltd, Level 2, 87 Colin St, West Perth. Western Australia 6005', whose address is at the bottom of the not very helpful readme file, which I did read. According to gmaps, a wide, tree lined street, mixed residential and commercial, rather like something from California.

PS: a little later: Wikipedia to the rescue, with a page about ECW files, a page which confirms the Perth connection. But I had better not waste any more time finding out what a discrete wavelet transform is. Despite it having been an important breakthrough in its day.

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECW_(file_format).