UPDATE#19-AB1624: PROGRAMMERS! START YOUR ENGINES! (sample legis data)

[Jim Warren <jwarren@well.sf.ca.us>]

July 20, 1993

Okay, all you programmers who volunteered to create readers, indexers, 
print utilities, etc., for California's legislative data -- 
HERE'S YOUR FIRST CHANCE.

GAIN FAME AND GLORY (if not wealth :-) !  Be the FIRST to create 
legislative data-handling utilites and share the source-code with 
the world.  Do it fast, and you/it can amaze and impress legislators 
at the Aug. 18th Senate Rules Committee hearing on AB1624.

The Legislative Data Center (LDC) has provided bill-author Bowen's office 
with six diskettes full of sample legislative data in the various forms in 
which it exists internally, at the LDC and/or the Office of State Printing 
(OSP).

They also provided documentation-files in electronic form.

With some kindly Sacramento assistance, Tim Pozar now has all of these 
files available across the Internet in the anonymous ftp directory 
(file transfer protocol) on   kumr.lns.com.

To obtain copies of the files, use the command  "ftp kumr.lns.com".
Login as  "anonymous"  and use your mailing address as a password.

Be sure to use the command  "binary"  to tranfer the files intact.
Use the command  "cd pub/ldc"  to change to the proper directory.
Then the command  "mget *"  to get all of the files.
After all of the files are retrived, type the command  "quit"  to end 
the ftp session and log out of kumr.kns.com.

If you have ftp problems, contact Tim:
Internet: pozar@kumr.lns.com     FidoNet: Tim Pozar @ 1:125/555
Snail: Tim Pozar, KKSF, 77 Maiden Lane, San Francisco CA 94108
POTS: +1 415 788 2022      Radio: KC6GNJ / KAE6247


According to LCD notes that accompanied the diskettes, the files include:
cgml.sou - California Generic Markup Language (CGML) parser table
codes.fmt - documentation of CGML (the LDC formatting language, that does 
  *not* give the page- or line-numbers by which amendments are defined)
measures.fmt - documentation of Page II (the OSP typesetting input, which is
  the only source of the page- and line-numbers of printed bills)
*cg.ina - introduced bill, in the Assembly, coded in CGML
*cg.ams - amended bill, in the Senate, coded in CGML
*.cg - Constitution part, state code or uncodified statute, coded in CGML
ab????.ina - bill introduced in the Assembly, coded in Page II
ab????.ams - Assembly bill amended in the Senate, coded in Page II
*.pg2 - Page II tables for introduced, amended, enrolled and chaptered bills
*ca - committee analysis
*fa - floor analysis
*cf - committee vote
*fv - floor vote
*s - bill status
*h - bill history
*ve - Governor's veto message
063093.boo files apparently concern the Assembly and Senate Daily Files.
  If you have questions AFTER you have diligently diddled these files and 
become totally frustrated, send specific questions to me and I'll try to 
scrounge up some answers.  [No guarantees, though.  :-)  ]


Let me know if/when you think you have some code working, and we'll figure 
out how best to gloriously - and *timely* - flaunt it in Sacramento.  :-)
[Note:  I will be at the Telluride Tele-Community conference and mostly offline
7/22-7/26.]
- --jim
Jim Warren, columnist for MicroTimes, Government Technology & BoardWatch
jwarren@well.sf.ca.us  -or-  jwarren@autodesk.com
345 Swett Rd., Woodside CA 94062; voice/415-851-7075; fax/415-851-2814
[organizer & Chair, First Conference on Computers, Freedom & Privacy (1991); 
InfoWorld founder (1978); Autodesk Board of Directors member; etc. blah blah]
< just a citizen/volunteer/advocate re AB1624; no business interest therein >

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