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 -------------------------------------------------- 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!). -------------------------------------------------- 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 ... -------------------------------------------------- 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 -------------------------------------------------- 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. -------------------------------------------------- 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. -------------------------------------------------- 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) -------------------------------------------------- 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 -------------------------------------------------- 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. -------------------------------------------------- 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) -------------------------------------------------- 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)