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Chaos Corner v01 n07
Chaos Corner V01N07 30Oct91
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Chaos Corner thoughts
Chaos Corner returns! Back from California, newly married, and having
gotten a passing grade on the first exam in German, we are going to try
changing the format a little bit. Dr. Chaos was having trouble getting
together the "perfect newsletter" (especially one that was 4-6 pages
long), and we learned that readers were also having trouble digesting
information in that large a chunk. Therefore, we will experiment with
producing the information in smaller chunks and in a bit more timely
fashion than we have been in recent weeks.
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German - Samstag and Sonnabend
The results of the great German survey are now in (thank you Walter)...
the word used for "Saturday" is "Sonnabend" in the North and "Samstag"
in the South. Unless you happen to go very far south (and east) and end
up in Vienna. We guess that Saturday being considered as "Sunday Eve"
in German goes a long way towards explaining why in English (which has a
great deal in common with German) Christmas Eve is December 24th and not
the evening of December 25th (the same thing applies to "All Hallows
Eve"that is coming up on October 31 ... just before All Saints Day on
November 1).
Seemingly Random and Similar Things
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Macintosh stuff
Let's get the Macintosh stuff out of the way first. The archive at the
University of Michigan continues to grow. You can signup as a frequent
FTPer, and while you don't get credited with miles, you do get put on
the mailing list for recent additions to the archives. Send mail to
mac-recent-request@mac.archive.umich.edu
to get added to the list. Recent additions include a number of After
Dark screensavers (including one that powers your Mac off after a
certain interval); also, an application that creates yellow PostIt notes
on your screen and allows you to cut and paste from them.
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Macintosh and MacAstro
Dr. Chaos has heard of a shareware program for the Mac that allows the
display of the sky, even on cloudy nights. Included are the planets,
Sun, Moon, and 2500 brightest objects (not on the display all at once).
Has anyone tried this program? It is available (shareware) from sumex-
aim.stanford.edu in /info-mac/app/mac-astro-15.hqx and we would be
interested in any reactions people have about it.
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Shoebox (for storing notes)
An interesting textual database management program has come to the
attention of Dr. Chaos -- in the linguistics subdirectory of the
wuarchive of the simtel20 mirror (that means it's in
/mirrors/msdos/linguistics on the machine named wuarchive.wustl.edu) is
file named sh12a.zip that when decompressed yields the program SHOEBOX.
SHOEBOX has various features and we quote:
+ A text editor for the entry and editing of data,
+ The ability to conduct very rapid searches; any data record can be
accessed nearly instantaneously for editing or review,
+ A rigorous select option that allows the user to view only those
records that conform to certain criteria,
+ The ability to specify a special sort ordering, taking into account
groupings of digraphs and characters from the IMB extended
character set,
+ A flash card function to aid in language learning,
+ Functions to number and interlinearize text.
Sounds like it may not be fancy but it may be useful for dealing with
textual information (better than putting index cards into a shoebox,
right?). Dr. Chaos hopes to use the flashcard feature to learn the
strong and irregular verbs in German.
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Frequently Asked Questions -- where to get the answers
If you have read any of the Usenet newsgroups for any length of time,
you know there are certain questions that come up over and over again.
Some of the newsgroups organize a list of Frequently Asked Questions
(FAQs) and their answers and post them to the network on some regular
basis. These FAQs are also collected and available via anonymous FTP
from pit-manager.mit.edu in the usenet directory. Look for postings
either under the name of the newsgroup you are interested in, or under
news.answers.
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Word for Windows (W4W) upgrade to 2.0
Microsoft is currently taking telephone orders for the Word for Windows
2.0 upgrade that is expected to ship just before the end of November.
Once you get an operator, the process is pretty painless. Dr. Chaos
found that the regular 800 number was always busy, but the educational
800 number allowed you to eventually get to the same people (if only the
Cornell telephones had a re-dial feature like the telephone we got from
Radio Shack). Version 2.0 is supposed to really take advantage of
Windows 3.0 (the previous version had to run with older Windows
versions).
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comp.unix.aix available in digest form via mail
The comp.unix.aix newsgroup is now available in digest form over BITNET.
About twice a day, collected articles from comp.unix.aix are
redistributed in digest form. To subscribe: send mail to
listserv@pucc.princeton.edu and in the body of the file place the line:
sub aixnews your-firstname your-lastname
While you can t post items directly to AIXNEWS, you can send items to
comp.unix.aix@cc.ysu.edu for forwarding to the usenet group.
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Hockey discussion List
Now that the World Series is over, and the morning temperature is below
0 (C), it is time to turn attention to the next season s sport Hockey!
If you have considered joining the college hockey discussion list but
considered that it would be too many mail files, consider subscribing to
the newly created list HOCKEY-D. It contains all the information in
HOCKEY-L but clumped together in digest form. To subscribe, send mail
to listserv@maine.maine.edu with the following line in the body of the
file:
sub hockey-d your-firstname your-lastname
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PC software for dealing with images (GIF and other formats)
Getting around to pictures and images, Cornell s own Homer Smith has
recommended the GIF (and other format) viewer Graphic WorkShop (GWS).
The program is on wuarchive.wustl.edu in /mirrors/msdos/graphics in a
file named grafwk60.zip. It allows on to zoom in on a particular part
of a picture, a feature that Homer finds very desireable.
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JPEG information
There are discussions flaming in a number of the picture-oriented
newsgroups about the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) algorithm
for compressing images. There have been several informative postings
and a lot of uninformed panic. The summary seems to be that JPEG is
"lossy" (meaning that some information is lost in the compression
process). The JPEG compression of gray-scale or full-color images is
usually much smaller than many currently popular forms of compression.
However, JPEG does not perform well when the image contains many sharp
boundaries (e. g., scanned images of text). JPEG is only a compression
standard, not a file format standard. The file format that seems to be
gaining some popularity is called JFIF (JPEG File Interchange Format).
A standard for JPEG in a TIFF format file is being worked on, but Dr.
Chaos thinks it will be some time before anything results from that
effort. DOS users can experiment with JPEG files (they usually have a
file extension of .jpe) if they get a program called alchemy -- get
alchmy14.zip from the /mirrors/msdos/graphics directory on
wuarchive.wustl.edu. Unix users should get jpegsrc.v1.tar.Z from the
/graphics/jpeg directory on uunet.uu.net. By the way, Apple is using a
slightly modified (of course) version of JFIF for their recently
announced QuickTime software.
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GIF image of Oakland fire area available (and other things)
A few more pictures that are available: a GIF image of the map of the
area damaged by the file in Oakland is available from
cs.sequoia.berkeley.edu in /pub/firemap.gif; two CDROMs of pictures
taken by the Magellan space probe are mounted at ames.arc.nasa.gov and
are accessible in /pub/SPACE/CDROM and /pub/SPACE/CDROM2. There are a
total of 6 volumes that are rotated onto the two drives on some basis;
an image of hurricane Grace made last Sunday is named oct27_01.gif in
directory fna101.195 on machine uriacc.uri.edu.
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Aurora
If you weren't outside looking to the north on the evening of October
28/29 before moonrise, then you missed the most visible aurora display
in the last while. Brian T. Carcich, at Cornell, reported on the WX-
TALK list that he was able to observe the aurora from his home in Groton
at about 2200 hours EST. Dr Chaos is more than a little annoyed that I
didn't take him to see the display. Just when we thought about trying
to catch the display this past evening, the storm ended and the auroral
activity warning was downgraded to a watch. Maybe next time we'll be
better prepared. Dr. Chaos really enjoys the aurora information that
has recently been added to the WX-TALK list.
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Kermit
For those interested in Kermit (not the frog), the current version of C-
Kermit 5A can be found as the obviously named file cku173.tar.Z in the
/kermit/sw directory on watsun.cc.columbia.edu. There are LOTS of very
nice new features in this version of Kermit so if you haven't picked up
a recent distribution of Kermit for your Unix system, you might want to
take a look at it.
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ELM mailer on RS/6000
Lou Montulli at the University of Kansas has been having trouble bring
up the ELM mailer on his RS/6000; but now reports that if one adds the
-U_STR_ and -lcur switches and get rid of -ltermcap, then ELM will not
only work, it will use the more complete Terminfo library (rather than
Termcap). He also points out that if you do use Termcap, you can get an
updated, expanded version of the file from the wuarchive in the unix
directory.
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OS/2 beta testing continues
Dr. Chaos now has the 6.605 level distribution of OS/2 Release 2.0.
Since the old version was level 6.147 and the discussion groups are
talking about level 6.169 just becoming available; we're very confused
about IBM's numbering systems. (IBM SE Extraordinaire Charlie Hill is
working on the problem.) In any case, anyone at Cornell who has a 386
(or better) system and would like to test drive OS/2 2.0 should give Dr.
Chaos' OS/2 tester a call at 5-7572. Only 8 more copies allowed and
they are going fast. Before you get your hopes up, the Workplace Shell
is not available yet.
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Fixes 4, 5, and 6 for X11R5
Last but not least, fixes number 4, 5, and 6 to the X11R5 distribution
are now available from your favorite X11R5 distribution point. Dr.
Chaos seems to recall that 6 fixes was the magic number before Scott
Brim was interested in looking at the new code ... is that right Scott?
Well it didn't get all that much shorter this time ... it would help if
Dr Chaos would stop shoving interesting items under my nose, but it
never seems to stop.
Read! Dr. Chaos (I have a masters degree) rdc@cornella.cit.cornell.edu
