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Chaos Corner V01 N10 09Dec91
This will be the last issue of Chaos Corner for the year of 1991 and the
end of volume 01 (order your bound copy of volume 01 by December 6 to
receive it in time for Christmas). We expect to return with volume 2 in
mid-January.
Mailbag
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Chaos Corner Feedback
We have received a number of suggestions about the long headers on the
front of Chaos Corner. Nick Gimbrone of CIT suggested that we use the
bcc (blind carbon copy) feature of the Ricemail package so that the list
of recipients is hidden. The solution we picked was to create an alias
list on pelican. Thanks go to Gary Buhrmaster for listening to our
whining about undocumented restrictions in the 'newaliases' command as
we set things up. If you have received this, then it either worked (at
least for your address) or it failed so miserably that I sent it out
again the old way.
Kate Mink of Cornell's Engineering College and Joan Winters at the
Stanford Linear Accelerator facility believe that not all the topics on
Chaos Corner are of the same level of riveting interest. They actually
want to be able to SKIP topics that Dr. Chaos thinks are interesting!
Hrumph! In any case, Dr. Chaos has asked me to separate topics with the
name of the file folder containing the item (impose order on chaos?
REALLY!).
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Metafile found!
Keith Boncek reports that his request for information, that was in the
last issue of Chaos Corner, was successful and he had the information he
needed in less than one half a working day after the issue was
distributed. Thanks to you all!
Chaotic bits and bytes from various sources ...
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Good sources for various Unix packages
Ever wonder where the "definitive sources" are for the free Unix
software is that is floating around on the net? Brendan Kehoe at
Widener is the "source" of the following list:
akcl rascal.ics.utexas.edu
AMX TeX e-math.ams.com
archie ftp.cs.widener.edu ( ;-) )
cnews ftp.cs.toronto.edu
dig & doc venera.isi.edu
emacs lisp stuff archive.cis.ohio-state.edu
elm dsinc.dsi.com
gnu stuff prep.ai.mit.edu
ida sendmail uxc.cso.uiuc.edu
microemacs midas.mgmt.purdue.edu
mit scheme altdorf.ai.mit.edu
perl & patch devvax.jpl.nasa.gov
rc archone.tamu.edu
rn & nntp lib.tmc.edu
tcsh tesla.ee.cornell.edu
telnet ucbarpa.berkeley.edu
tvtwm mojo.eng.umd.edu
x export.lcs.mit.edu
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Faster access for PC software sources
If you would like faster access to the msdos archives than can be
obtained from Simtel20 (in New Mexico) or wuarchive.wustl.edu (in Saint
Louis, Missouri), you might try accessing another one of the Simtel20
mirror sites, like oak.oakland.edu (near Detroit, Michigan). The campus
at Oakland has a T1 (1.54 Mbps) connection to the Internet, and Dr.
Chaos tells me that based on some simpleminded tests he performed,
access to oak.oakland.edu was 2-3 times faster from Cornell, than access
to wuarchive.wustl.edu. Of course, your results may vary depending on
your location.
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Help on Anonymous FTP
In the sick humor department, Dr. Chaos notes that help is available for
those who are confused or a little uncertain about anonymous FTP. There
are "how-to-use-anonymous-ftp instructions" available by anonymous ftp
from ftp.cs.toronto.edu; look for file doc/ftp.help.
--------------------------------------------------
Discovering e-mail addresses
One frequent question that arises in this time of chaos is how to get
the e-mail address of someone else on the Internet. There is a periodic
posting in several of the NetNews newsgroups on various techniques to
use. If you would like a copy, send electronic mail to:
chaos-request@pelican.cit.cornell.edu
Be sure you have a valid return address and that you specify in the
subject or body of the message the type of information requested.
Donations of cash, hardware, and software gratefully accepted.
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More archie
If you like the facilities offered by archie at McGill University
(database lookup of files available across the Internet via anonymous
FTP), but you don't like to logon to the system at McGill, try using one
of the flavors of archie clients that are available. If you can deal
with X, perl, or C, there is an archie client interface for you at
archie.mcgill.ca in the archie/clients directory. If running archie on
the currently overloaded McGill system is too slow for you, note that
the following archie servers now exist:
telnet archie.mcgill.ca or 132.206.2.3 (Can./USA)
telnet archie.funet.fi or 128.214.6.100 (Finland)
telnet archie.au or 128.184.1.4 (Aussie/NZ)
telnet archie.sura.net or 128.167.254.179
(login as user archie)
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US Federal Income tax information
As the end of the year approaches, it is still not too late to find out
the latest network wisdom on US Federal Income Taxes. Subscribe to
FedTax-L by sending a MAIL message to:
LISTSERV@SHSU.BITNET (BITNET users)
- or to -
LISTSERV@SHSU.edu (Internet users)
with the one-line message:
SUBSCRIBE FedTax-L
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Sexual Purity tests available (from alt.sex)
Last but not least, the 500 and 1000 question sexual purity tests are
available at acm.rpi.edu in the pub/aragon directory. Don't allow
yourself to suffer any doubts! Find out the REAL truth about yourself
that you've been hiding all along.
--------------------------------------------------
CD-ROMs
A Canadian company, Photon Press, has announced Dr. Tomorrow's Eclectic
Bookstore, that the company claims is the first CD-ROM package to offer
individual works of literature for sale directly to the end user. The
disk contains a certain amount of material available for the $79
purchase price, and with the payment of additional money you are given
the decryption keys to access a number of other title that are available
on the same CD-ROM. Titles are stored in a number of formats to insure
compatibility with a number of systems. (A CD-ROM can hold the text of
about 6,000 books, so this distribution method has a lot of potential).
--------------------------------------------------
OS/2
The Fernwood collection of OS/2 programs is in the process of being
loaded to novell.com (don't try to access this site between the hours of
8 am to 5:30 pm PST). The descriptions of the programs from the
Fernwood collection that are currently available are in the os2/fernwood
directory in file FERNWOS2.ZIP. As the moderator has time, he plans to
move these programs to the appropriate subdirectory of the os2
directory.
--------------------------------------------------
Guide to the OS/2 2.0 Workplace Shell
Courtesy of Charlie Hill, IBM SE Extrodinaire, Dr. Chaos has received a
"Guide to the OS/2 2.0 Workplace Shell," explaining what paradigm shift
you must make to be comfortable with the current OS/2 2.0 beta. For
your copy, request it from chaos-request@pelican.cit.cornell.edu.
--------------------------------------------------
Pictures
Many questions have arisen on the network about how to deal with the
image files being posted with the .jpg extension (JPEG format). While
the reason for posting pictures in that format is ostensibly to reduce
the network traffic, Dr. Chaos claims there is a balance between the
reduced bandwidth from the highly compressed pictures and the increased
bandwidth of people asking how to get a program to view/convert the JPEG
files. The standard converter between JPEG and GIF on the PC can be
gotten from wuarchive.wustl.edu in the mirrors/msdos/graphics directory,
and it is named gif2jpg5.zip (don't forget to specify 'binary' for the
file transfer). For the Macintosh, the recommended software seems to be
Picture Decompress 2.0.1, also from wuarchive in /mirrors/info-mac/apps
and stored in file picture-decompress-201.hqx. Dr. Chaos would love to
hear reviews of this software from any readers that have tried them out.
--------------------------------------------------
Pictures -- JPEG viewers
The standard JPEG viewers, already compiled and ready-to-go for a number
of Unix platforms can be found at procyon.cis.ksu.edu in the pub/JPEG
directory. IBM PC '.exe' files are also there along with the other
popular viewer on the PC platform -- Alchemy. Dr. Chaos reminds me that
Unix users will also want to have a copy of the pbmplus package close at
hand.
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Pictures in GIF format
If you are wondering where to look for GIF images, Dr. Chaos reports
that you merely have to get the file /archie/doc/giflist.Z from
archie.mcgill.ca -- it will tell you the same information that you would
get from archie if you had asked it where in the world all the GIF files
were stored (you can count on the X-rated GIFs being pretty much hidden
away and not in the list).
Misc (why? because many things here defy categorization)
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Answering Machine messages
Do you think you have run out of creative ways to coax people to leave
messages on your answering machine rather than just hanging up? Dr.
Chaos has a greater than 1000-line file filled many sample messages, and
he feels sure they will excite your creativity -- get a copy of the file
by sending electronic mail to chaos-request@pelican.cit.cornell.edu (be
sure to specify the file you are requesting).
--------------------------------------------------
CompuServe available on the Internet
Ever wish you could login to CompuServe or Dow Jones services right from
a machine on the Internet? Try issuing the telnet command to get to
hermes.merit.edu and entering 'compuserve' at the 'which host?' prompt,
and a carriage return after the "call connected' message. Dr. Chaos
does point out that it is really only useful if you have a CompuServe
account, and that it appears the connection is being made through
Tymnet, so network surcharges in addition to CompuServe charges will be
in effect.
--------------------------------------------------
Santa Claus, and time
In a discussion of electronic mail to Santa Claus, Claus Tondering from
Denmark pointed out that Santa's schedule allows him approximately 96
microseconds at each stop. Dr. Chaos points out that that includes
travel time.
--------------------------------------------------
US Postal ZIP codes, and PC lookup program
Chris Landers at Purdue University has put together a database of US
Postal ZIP codes. The data can be ftp'ed from zeus.mgmt.purdue.edu
after 5PM EST. In directory /pub, the file zipscodes.zip contains: US
ZIP codes; a PC zip code lookup program (lookup.exe) database, and dbase
source.
--------------------------------------------------
Scanning currency
One poster on NetNews checked with the Secret Service to find out if it
was legal to post scanned images of paper currency. It appears that
there is no problem so long as you never make a hardcopy. Under certain
conditions, it is acceptable to make a black/white hardcopy, but no
color copies are legal. This particular poster would like to post a
scanned image of a $10,000 bill, so if anyone has one to contribute to
the cause, Dr. Chaos would be happy to ...
TILT! Stop that before we get into trouble! That's all for now. See
you next year with volume 2 of Chaos Corner. Send electronic mail to
chaos-request@pelican.cit.cornell.edu if you would like to be added to
the chaos corner electronic mail list.
Read Dr. Chaos! (I have a Masters Degree)