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Chaos Corner v04 n01
Chaos Corner V04 N01 24 February 1994
Copyright 1994 by Robert D. Cowles; Ithaca, NY 14850. Permission is
hereby granted to republish complete issues in unaltered form.
Republication of partial issues must reference the source and state that
subscriptions to Chaos Corner are available (free) by sending electronic
mail to chaos-request@pelican.cit.cornell.edu.
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Mailbag - Out-of-this World PILOT Software
Tax Dollars at work ... this information is provided by John Fwu:
October 1993, The first UNIX workstation went to space with Space
Shuttle Columbia for NASA's STS-58 mission. On board Columbia, two
astronauts conducted the first tests of the Portable Inflight Landing
Operations Trainer (PILOT) which measures the effects of space flight on
pilot proficiency. Using a work-station class laptop computer
(Panasonic 2100 running SUN OS 4.X) and a hand controller, PILOT
replicates the orbiter's response to inputs from the pilot "flying" it.
With the shuttle engineering simulator software loaded in the computer
PILOT closely mimics the orbiter's handling characteristics.
PILOT was developed in record time. From General Pearson's approval of
the project, through design and procurement, to production of a working
flight model, took only nine months. Team members included Justiz and
Engle; Al Strahan and Bill Overton; Pat Wilson, Dirk Johnson, John Fwu,
Bob Hinson, Rocky Smith, Jim Brock, Dave Jossi, and Don Hannsz.
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Mailbag - Subscribers in Norway can switch to fa.chaos-corner
Nicolai Langfeldt asks Dr. Chaos to include a note letting people know
that some people may want to drop their direct Chaos Corner subscription
and instead read Chaos Corner in the newsgroup fa.chaos-corner. (If you
haven't heard of it don't worry, the fa.* news hierarchy is limited to
Norway and consists entirely of mailing lists.)
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Mailbag - PC Upgrade Tales
Loren Stafford describes his experience with taking the 'easy' path for
upgrading his PC-AT. He was going to increase disk space of his newer
Dell system and donate the PC-AT to charity. When he tried to install
the new disk drive, he discovered that the BIOS did not support a disk
drive as large as the new one. The good news is that Dell was willing
to ship him a new BIOS that DID support the disk; the upgrade was just a
bit more complicated than he thought it was going to be. By the way, he
found the following programs to be useful for printing out the disk
sizes supported by your BIOS (so you can carry the list to the store
when you go shopping).
ftp://oak.oakland.edu/pub/msdos/diskutil/typenum.zip
../types.zip
The experience the Dr. Chaos has had with the PC-AT upgrade has good
news and bad news. Good news: the motherboard finally worked OK in the
machine; bad news: to get it to work he had to buy one megabyte of
memory at the then outrageous prices; good news; DOS worked OK and by
switching around the cables he was able to make the high density 3.5
inch diskette the A: drive; bad news: Windows would not even install
with 1 megabyte of memory; good news: Dr. Chaos found 'Ski Bum' at
Kansas State University who was willing to sell 4 MB at a good price;
bad news: Doom requires a VGA video adapter to run; good news: VGA
adapters are real cheap these days and applications look so much better
than they do with EGA that it is worth the expense; bad news: finding a
VGA monitor. The saga continues. (We haven't even mentioned what a
squeeze it is to fit DOS/Windows and Word on a 30 MB disk drive and
still have much space left over).
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Review of *Das Internet* from Chaos Corner V03 N09
Peter Shipton writes with the following review of *Das Internet*:
My first impression is that it is a good basic guide to what the
Internet is, with fairly clear descriptions of how things work: mail,
FTP, Archie, Gopher, WAIS, News, etc. There is also good advice on
Netiquette. There is some good source information in the "Internet
Gold" section, although a lot of important stuff is missing.
As stated in the first chapter, the book is intended as a basic guide
for beginners (like me). I think it does its job fairly well. However,
there is very little information on how to go about getting a connection
to the Internet, and virtually no advice on selecting software. These
two points are what have caused me personally the most difficulty.
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Mailbag - Gophering the Internet via Mail
Glee Willis send the collection of gophermail servers that he has been
able to find on the Internet. If you are interested in trying one of
these out, just send a mail file containing the word 'help' to the
address indicated below:
Gophermail servers (as of 1/12/94):
gopher@dsv.su.se
gopher@ftp.technion.ac.il
gopher@nig.ac.jp
gopher@solaris.ims.ac.jp
gopher@nips.ac.jp
gopher@join.ad.jp
gophermail@ncc.go.jp
gophermail@calvin.edu
gopher@earn.net
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What is that strange notation you used for a file location?
Careful readers will note that in one of the above articles we used a
new (for Chaos Corner) notation to give the location of a file that is
available by anonymous FTP. There is a draft standard for specifying
objects on the Internet (files, newsgroups, etc.) and it describes the
use and format of a Uniform Resource Locator (URL). Examples of URLs
for objects available by anonymous ftp are:
file://pelican.cit.cornell.edu/pub/ccv04n01.txt or
ftp://pelican.cit.cornell.edu/pub/ccv04n01.txt
Other resources may be indicated by URLs like:
http://info.cern.ch:80/default.html
http://rs560.cl.msu.edu/weather
telnet://dra.com
file:///c|/ (files on local C: drive)
gopher://ux3.cso.uiuc.edu:70/00/Welcome
The URLs that may look least familiar are those starting with 'http'.
These indicate files to be accessed through the Hypertext Transfer
Protocol, and typically they reference files written in Hypertext Markup
Language (html is related to the SGML standard). Hypertext files can
contain pointers to other files and there exist browsers that present a
nice interface for traversing the linked files. Some browsers implement
a form of Hypermedia that includes not only text, but also includes
images, sounds, or animations.
The major impetus for URLs has been a project initiated by CERN (the
particle physics research facility near Geneva, Switzerland) called
World Wide Web (WWW or W3) and it is also strongly supported by the
High-Energy Physics (HEP) community. Other institutions are now joining
in by creating home pages that point not only to local information but
also to links across the Internet.
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Browsing the Internet for browsers via telnet
WWW browsers are generally able to provide access to a superset of the
information available via gopher or WAIS. The availability of high
quality browsers for different platforms is growing, so there is a
dramatic increase in usage of the Web.
If you are interested in obtaining exploring the Internet through the
Web, a good place to start is by using one of the browsers accessible
through telnet. The official list of telnet servers on WWW is
http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/FAQ/Bootstrap.html
but some initial suggestions are to use telnet to access info.cern.ch
(no id or password required). Dr. Chaos, in his concern for not
overtaxing the links across the Atlantic Ocean, suggests that others in
the Americas may want to try out a full screen browser at our alma
mater, just telnet to ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu and login as www (no password
required). Those of you across the Pacific Ocean will probably need to
access one of these servers to find out if there is a server that is
closer ... things change very quickly on the net, so you never know when
some may appear.
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Browsing the Internet with your own browser - Mac and PC
Browsers named Mosaic are available for both the Macintosh and Windows
environment from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications
(NCSA). In particular, the current version for Windows is available in:
file://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/PC/Mosaic
Both the Windows and Macintosh versions assume that your computer is
either directly connected to the Internet or that you have a SLIP
connection to provide TCP/IP connectivity and in the Windows environment
you are expected to have a correctly configured WINSOCK interface to the
TCP/IP code. (Don't worry if you don't understand this ... a lot of
people don't; just be sure to ask when you have problems.) Another
browser is available for Windows from Cornell Law LII named Cello.
While I have heard very positive things about Cello, Dr. Chaos has been
unable to get it to work under OS/2 (due to a bug in the IBM WINSOCK
code), so we haven't actually had it in operation here. To try out
Cello, you can get it via anonymous ftp from fatty.law.cornell.edu in
the /pub/LII/cello directory. (Version 1.0 was recently released after
extensive testing.)
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Browsing the Internet with your own browser - Unix
The browsers either of us have seen or had recommended to us are xmosaic
available from NCSA (ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu) in the Mosaic directory (note
that pre-compiled binaries exist for a large number of systems if you
don't feel like going through the process yourself) and midasWWW,
available from:
ftp://info.cern.ch/pub/www/src
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Want Clipper to clip your wings?
While we try to avoid politics, it doesn't seem to be the case that
politics always avoids us. The current administration seems to be
embarked on a foolish path of supporting a data encryption scheme that
allows encrypted data to be decrypted. The encryption keys are to be
held (in two different pieces) by as yet undetermined agents who would
only provide those keys when legally authorized to do so by the order of
a US court. Now comes the hard part: (1) name two US public or private
agencies that you would trust with the keys; (2) explain how US
corporations can compete in a global marketplace when encryption
software is treated as munitions in terms of US export regulations
(hint: don't forget that encryption is not only a way of hiding data
from prying eyes, it also provides a measure of trust that faulty
hardware and software are much less likely to make undetected errors
during data transmission.)
Dr. Chaos encourages subscribers in the US to become more informed on
the issue by following the debates currently in progress on newsgroups
such as comp.org.eff.news and comp.security.
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What's a good WWW page to start with?
A new WWW page that shows a lot of promise is to be found at:
http://galaxy.einet.net/galaxy.html
High level topics exist in broad subject areas and it appears to be the
net-surfer's dream. Weather freaks will want to know about the URL
mentioned earlier:
http://rs560.cl.msu.edu/weather
since it contains pointers to current weather information and images all
across the globe ... from a number of satellites and using radar, IR and
visible light spectrums. Files available include the weather animations
(like you see on the evening news) and really remarkable images showing
the composite world weather map that is pieced together from all the
different satellite images.
Dr. Chaos is still grumbling about the need for a good MPEG viewer (used
for the animations) under OS/2.
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Closing for now ... back soon
We here at Chaos Corner want to thank you all for the support and
feedback over the past years. As Chaos Corner starts with volume 4 it
seems remarkable that we're experiencing greater than 10-20% growth in
the subscription list month (for 380 subscribers, this is their first
issue). This is an unusual issue because I haven't told you about all
the wonderful files I have tucked away just waiting for you to ask for
them. Don't worry, they will be there again ... we just felt that the
increasing number of file references in URLs meant that an explanation
was required. Of course, the other reason is that I ran out of time
because I have two machines and Mosaic runs on one and not on the other
... and Dr. Chaos can't figure out what the difference is. See you in a
short while ...
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Don't delay ---- act now!
Dr. Chaos
.
