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.

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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.
 
 
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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).
 
 
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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.

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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.
 
 
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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.


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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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)
 
