When I was working as a pilot in the 58th Special Operations Group, one way the crewmembers kept current on their professional knowledge was by studying various regulations, rulebooks, and manuals. Periodically, we were tested on this by a series of multiple-choice questions from the "Master Question File", or MQF. The MQF was available to all aircrew provided no answers were given; the aircrew simply had to look up all the answers.
It occurred to me that the Palm devices available at the time represented a great value for the aircrew member if a quiz program could be written; if a database could be made which stored the MQF, and allowed the crewmember to set values for the "correct" answer, the program could interactively quiz the crewmember in a fast-drill format, asking only the questions that the user had failed to answer correctly in the last round.
The program, once conceived, was actually quite simple, consisting
of a single form event handler. The problem lay in creating the
databases. This was done by writing a ruby script which would
manipulate PalmOS databases (pdbtools.rb
) and making another
script (make_mqf_pdb
) which would take data from the existing MQF
and convert it into an uploadable PalmOS PDB database.
The resulting application was a great success for all those who used
it--a number which unfortunately could be counted on one hand.
Still, it was the first practical use of ePalm and thus deserves a
place in the samples
directory. While the MQF questions for our
aircrew are not mine to share, a simple example quiz of two
questions is provided in test_quiz.txt
and thus converted to
test_quiz.pdb
for your amusement.