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Chaos Corner, V01, N05, 21 August 1991
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News from the Soviet Union
As this is being written, our news watcher has informed Dr. Chaos that the coup
in the Soviet Union has collapsed, and Gorby is coming back to Moscow. If you
are interested in tracking current events on the follow-up, the newsgroups below
are recommended (but not necessarily endorsed) by Dr. Chaos:
soc.culture.soviet
misc.headlines
talk.politics.soviet
Other lists like soc.culture.german and soc.culture.polish may also have
opinions expressed (Dr. Chaos urges me not to leave out alt.conspiracy as a
source of opinion but not necessarily information).
--------------------------------------------------
Internet directory of services
Scott Yanoff at the University of Wisconsin has posted a very interesting guide
to "special" services that are available across the Internet. Because these
services appeal so much to Dr. Chaos, we have decided to quote from Scott's
list:
-Cleveland Freenet telnet freenet-in-a.cwru.edu
offers: USA Today Headline News
-Geographic Name Server telnet martini.eecs.umich.edu 3000
offers: Info by city or area code (Pop, Lat./Long., Elevation, etc)
-IRC Telnet Client telnet 128.2.54.2
offers: Internet Relay Chat access
-Library of Congress telnet dra.com
offers: Online catalog (you can even look up musicians work!)
-Lyric Server ftp vacs.uwp.edu
offers: Lyrics in text file format for anonymous ftp downloading
-NASA SpaceLink telnet spacelink.msfc.nasa.gov
offers: NASA news, including shuttle launches and satellite updates
-NLS telnet nls.adp.wisc.edu
offers: Network Library System
-UNC BBS telnet 128.109.157.30 (login: bbs)
offers: Access to Library of Congress and nationwide libraries.
-Weather Service telnet 141.212.196.79 3000
offers: Forecast for any city, current weather for any state, etc.
-Webster telnet decoy.uoregon.edu 2627
offers: Dictionary, Thesaurus, Spell checker. Type 'HELP' when online!
- NOTE: No login names or passwords required unless stated *
Dr. Chaos would like to take a little bit of space to thank the maintainers of
the newsgroup comp.archives. They scan a number of the other newsgroups looking
for articles that announce interesting software or information being available
for FTP access and publish that information in comp.archives. The newsgroup was
not active during the month of July and it has certainly made Dr. Chaos' job
much easier to have it back again. Thanks guys!
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Inside CIt drops Chaos Corner from circulation!
Chaos Corner is no longer being carried in the internal CIT newsletter Inside
CIT. Their publication dates were too irregular to match any reasonably chaotic
flow of information. If you enjoy this service, consider passing it along to a
friend. Requests to be added to the direct distribution should go to
rdc@cornella.cit.cornell.edu.
Mailbag (Send cards and letters to rdc@cornella.cit.cornell.edu)
--------------------------------------------------
Bits, bauds, and bps
Gary Buhrmaster of Systems Programming Services in CIT is quite concerned that
Dr. Chaos may have mislead you gentle readers in the last issue. Since he has
been very concerned that your inquiring minds get the correct information, I
will quote from the text of his letter to Dr. Chaos:
I am sure you know the difference between bps (bits per second)
and baud (the signal change rate per second). Your fingers must
have been trembling after your RT encounter. In case it has
become fuzzy, and because I know you want to provide correct
information to your followers, perhaps you owe them a
clarification. In fact, most of the 9600 bps modems actually
transmit at 2400 baud. At each signal transition, four bits are
represented in the new state. Four bits per transition at 2400
transitions per second and you get 9600 bps. I am sure you also
know that V.32bis is a standard for transmission at 14,400 bps
(not 9600 bps as you implied).
My recollection from my days as an engineer was that 14,400 bps
transmission was to use trellis encoding to reduce the number of
errors in transmission (and actually transmits 5 bits per
transition, resulting in a theoretical 19,200 bps, however the
'extra' bits are used by the correction scheme). I expect that is
what V32bis eventually ended up 'standardizing'.
For those of you with a thirst for what V.32/V.32bis/V.42/V.42bis really mean
... here is a summary of a summary written by Toby Nixon, a engineer for Hayes
(the modem people) and a frequent contributor to the comp.dcom.modems newsgroup
on Usenet:
V.32 is the international standard for 4800 and 9600 bps
modulation on dial-up and leased two-wire voice-grade circuits,
both asynchronous and synchronous. It was first standardized in
1984.
V.32bis was adopted in February of 1991. It is an upwardly-
compatible extension of V.32 that supports 4800, 7200, 9600,
12000, and 14400 bps transmission on two-wire voice-grade
circuits. It also supports fast rate renegotiation, so that the
modems can shift speeds rapidly in response to changing line
conditions (whereas V.32 modems must go through a lengthy complete
retrain cycle).
V.42 is the international standard for error control in modems.
It defines two protocols: a primary protocol known as LAPM which
is defined in the main body of the standard and is based on other
internationally standardized protocols; and an alternative
protocol defined in an Annex to the standard which provides for
backward compatibility with MNP2-4 modems. V.42 was adopted in
November, 1988.
V.42bis is the international standard for data compression in
modems. It uses Lempel-Ziv techniques to achieve up to 4-to-1
compression on text and other compressible files.
Relationships: V.32bis is an upwardly compatible extension of
V.32; they both define only a modulation scheme. V.42 error
control can be used with either V.32 or V.32bis. V.42bis data
compression is an extension of V.42 LAPM; support for V.42bis
implies support for V.42.
If that isn't more than you ever wanted to know about modems in a single
sitting, then you'll do well on the mid-term exam (but Dr. Chaos claims you will
have a real case of burn-out by the time of the final).
--------------------------------------------------
X-Windows under DOS
Dan Bartholomew of CIT's Research and Analysis Systems (aka SEX@CORNELLC) asks
about packages for running X-Windows under DOS. Dr. Chaos points out that the
August 12, 1991 issue of PC Week carried a review of just those products.
Although you may have heard rumors that they are slow, the testers found the
performance of the leading products to be acceptable on a 33Mhz machine. Dr
Chaos has used only one of the products reviewed, and was relieved to see that
the people at PC Week also had trouble getting it configured.
--------------------------------------------------
boustrophedon
Melinda Varian of Princeton provided the following REXX Exec from her CMS
Pipelines presentation that is further proof of the value (?) of the
boustrophedon:
/* BOUSTRO REXX: Filter that writes records boustrophedon */
Signal On Error
Do recno = 1 by 1 /* Do until EOF */
'readto record' /* Read from pipe */
If recno // 2 = 0 /* If even-numbered */
Then record = Reverse(record) /* line, reverse */
'output' record /* Write to pipe */
End
Error: Exit RC*(RC<>12) /* RC = 0 if EOF */
--------------------------------------------------
Correction for Unix tar example
Paul Zarnowski of Systems Programming Services in CIT gets the award for being
awake (a cup of decaffinated coffee). The rest of you need to sit on a tack for
a while ... not having seen the example in issue number 3 giving the example for
un-tar-ing a file with the command "tar -xvt glarch.tar" when it clearly should
be "tar -xvf glarch.tar". Congratulations to Paul (he just got back from
vacation); and deepest regrets to the rest of you. Dr Chaos claims that the
Unix programmer corollary to the injunction "Have fun!" is "A misleading error
message is more fun than no error message at all!"
Random and Self-Similar Things
--------------------------------------------------
USGS Maps available on CD-ROM
If you like maps, you must know that the U. S. Geological Survey is distributing
their 1:2,000,000 scale maps on a CD-ROM. The last reported price was $20 for
data on all 50 states organized into 21 regions. You need to have a PC with an
EGA display and 512KB. For more information contact:
Earth Science Information Center
U.S. Geological Survey
507 National Center
Reston, VA 22092
Telephone: 703+648-6045 or 1+800+USA-MAPS (872-6277)
--------------------------------------------------
CD-ROM on Novell networks
Micro Design International has announced that they have the first CD-ROM drive
certified for Novell networks. If you are interested. try contacting:
Micro Design International, Inc.
6985 University Boulevard
Winter Park, FL 32792
Phone: (407) 677-8333
Fax: (407) 677-8365
--------------------------------------------------
More Pi than you can possibly eat
Do any of you have a passion for sweets? If so, you can satisfy them at site
ftp.pitt.edu where in the info/general directory they have the file pi.dat
containing more than 1.25 MILLION digits of pi. Dr Chaos suggests that you try
plotting them to determine if you can discern a pattern. Good luck!
--------------------------------------------------
Kaos (the real thing)
On the local front, Dr. Chaos reports on a program called Kaos (for sunview)
written by Swan Kim and John Guckenheimer at Cornell to investigate dynamical
systems. Look for the files kaos_4.1.tar.Z and kaos_users_manual on
marcy.tn.cornell.edu in the /pub directory. Dr. Chaos has a report that an X-
windows version of the program will be available soon in the same place. Does
anyone have more detailed (or accurate) information?
--------------------------------------------------
Scientist's WorkBench
The Scientist's WorkBench project at the Cornell Theory Center is winding up
their -pre-beta testing (is that like alpha-plus?) and plan to have the beta
version available on September 15, 1991. If you haven't heard of SWB, it is an
X-based application combining "tools to enhance the development, testing, and
execution of scientific codes." Binaries are available for IBM RS/6000 and
SPARC workstations on eagle.tc.cornell.edu in the pub/swb directory. Dr. Chaos
suggests reading the file README.TOP for more information.
--------------------------------------------------
ISIS
For those of you interested in the ISIS distributed system developed in the
Cornell Computer Science Department, it is still available on ftp.cs.cornell.edu
(look for ISISV21.TAR.Z). There are some patches/bug reports that are also
available in that location. Ken Birman reports that version is no longer
supported at Cornell because they are all using the commercial version (ISIS
V3.0.2) from ISIS Distributed Systems Inc. There may be another free version
(V2.2) but it will take 6-8 weeks of time and as yet there is no estimated
release date.
--------------------------------------------------
Security and good passwords
For those Systems Administrators that want to keep up on security by making sure
your users have not chosen easy-to-guess passwords, crack 3.1 is currently
available from wuarchive.wustl.edu in the /packages directory under the name
crack3.1.tar.Z. Dr. Chaos claims that a newer version "that can take apart
systems in just a few minutes" is being worked on and will be available "real
soon now."
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Programming contest
Once again this fall, Duke University will be sponsoring a Internet Programming
Contest and is soliciting problems to use in the contest. The problems should
be solvable in C or Pascal in less than 4 hours and the preference is for the
"algorithmically challenging" type (as opposed to coding long tables, etc.).
Send potential problems to ola@cs.duke.edu. More information about the contest
itself will be available at a later date.
--------------------------------------------------
Startrek
For those Startrek fans among you, Dr. Chaos reports the availability of the
Lists of Lists for both versions of the show are available at ftp.cs.widener.edu
in the pub/strek directory -- look for tos_lists and tng_lists. A summery of
each show is included along with original air dates, episodes in which Picard
violated the Prime Directive, and mistakes/inconsistencies that people have
caught. Similar information is available for the Simpson's in the pub/simpsons
directory.
--------------------------------------------------
Weather GIFs
Dr. Chaos was excited to see a posting on19Aug claiming that there were some
nice gif images from the weather satellite showing hurricane Bob. The bad news
is that they are stored on a computer at the University of Rhode Island -- and
they haven't been on the network since some time on that day (attempts to reach
uriacc.uri.edu still get the "network is unreachable" message). All is not
lost, Dr. Chaos manages to get a satellite image from vmd.cso.uiuc.edu (in the
phil.515 directory) that shows Hurricane Bob approximately centered over Rhode
Island. Look on pelican.cit.cornell.edu (our Unix home-away-from-home) in the
/pub/gif directory for the file ts-bob.gif.
--------------------------------------------------
PC Fractal software
On the PC front, the popular fractal generating program FRACTINT is now at
version 16.11 and is available at wuarchive.wustl.edu in the
/mirrors/msdos/graphics directory under the name of frai1611.zip (fras1611.zip
for the source).
--------------------------------------------------
PC computers and keeping the right date
If you have noticed that leaving your PC on overnight means that the date
doesn't get updated at midnight, here is just the program for you. On a
periodic basis, CLOCKDEV reads the battery-backed clock chip to verify that the
DOS date/time agree with it. Dr. Chaos has installed this program on puffin and
found it worked like a charm ... the date is now correct when he arrives in the
morning. Look for file clkdev14.zip on wuarchive.wustl.edu in the
/mirrors/msdos/sysutl directory.
--------------------------------------------------
OS/2 beta test
Since Dr. Chaos has received an early evaluation copy of OS/2 2.0, he has gotten
interested in archives of OS/2 software. The most promising appears to be mims-
iris.waterloo.edu (in the os2/* directories). He promises more info later after
he has a chance to investigate further.
--------------------------------------------------
Hex, octal, ascii comversion tables
Tired of looking up the hex/octal/decimal values for various ascii characters?
Xascii is a small application that displays those values for the whole ascii
character set and is available from ftp.eng.auburn.edu. Get the file
xascii.tar.Z from the /pub directory. For Windows 3.0 users, Dr. Chaos
recommends ACHART from wuarchive.wustl.edu in the mirrors/msdos/windows3
directory stored as achart12.zip.
--------------------------------------------------
CPU utilization under Windows
Speaking of Windows 3.0 software... there is an updated version of the
Performance Meter utility (it shows a moving graph of you CPU utilization) that
uses the keep-in-front option. Look for perfm202.zip on cica.cica.indiana.edu
in the /pub/pc/win3/util directory.
--------------------------------------------------
Windows and win32
At a Windows 3 conference last week, Microsoft distributed a white paper
detailing the Windows 32-bit API and products that would contain it. A
compressed PostScript file containing the paper is on uunet.uu.net in the
/vendor/microsoft/isv-communications directory. Look for file ntwn32.zip (or
ntwn32.txt for text-only). Dr. Chaos reports that he also found in the same
directory the file win31be.zip which appears to be a compressed form of an
application to beta-test Microsoft Windows 3.1. (I can hear the keys clicking
away even as I write this.)
--------------------------------------------------
Jargon and TLA
Confused by all the jargon in this business? Do you find that the person next
door to you speaks a different set of TLAs than you do? A new, updated version
of the Jargon File is available from mc.lcs.mit.edu in the pub/jargon directory
(look for jargon296.ascii or, for the compressed version, jargon296.ascii.Z).
Out of space and mostly out of time for this issue. Please keep those
electronic cards and letters coming in ... remember! Dr. Chaos (rdc)
at cornella.cit.cornell.edu -- we all thank you!
Dr. Chaos (I have a Masters Degree)