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Chaos Corner v02 n10
Chaos Corner V02 N10 24Nov92
Thanks to all who have written asking what has happened to
Chaos Corner... shall we just say that the past couple of
months have been hmmmm "interesting" (you remember the old
Chinese curse, right?).
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Correction of error on Address Resolver in N09
If you can still remember last issue, we managed to make an
error in entering the name of the address resolver available
on the Internet. The correct address is:
resolve@cs.widener.edu
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Review/mention of pbm and sox
Paul Joslin suggests we mention the two utilities "pbm" -
the "swiss army knife" of Unix graphic utilities, and "sox"
- a similar program but for audio files (pun not intended,
but we'll let it stand). Of course, to find the latest
version of these programs ... check with your local archie-
server. If you think you don't have a archie server, ask us
for the Internet Services List at chaos-
request@pelican.cit.cornell.edu.
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On detecting VGA monitor type
Joe Ahlgren has the following to say about how a program
detects the type of monitor attached to the system on which
it is running (PC):
There is a shareware program called "VGAKIT" which
scans for the videocard type, and provides low level
services such as read and write pixel in 640x480x256
and higher video modes. There is a sophisticated
bankswitch routine included, which can be used to
write higher level graphics functions in a card-
independent manner. Your inquirer can get a copy of
VGAKIT50.ZIP from my BBS (703-241-7980) and many
other sources, or contact the author directly (John
Bridges, CompuServe 75300,2137) [From the Internet
you would use the address 75300.2137@compuserve.com
(note the use of "." rather than "," in the Internet
address)].
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Accessing the Mac software archive at U. Mich
Bob Blackmun had two comments on the item about accessing
the Macintosh software archive at the University of
Michigan.
1) the *very best way* to access this wonderful mac archive
is via AFS; if you don't have AFS, you should! 2) I *did*
experience some strange problems retrieving the directory
(that arrives in about 14 sub-sections) via my mac e-mail
'client' (Eudora); the problems appear to be with the client
rather than with the archive's mail-server.
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Any Lawyers out there?
Joe Morris was pleased when I told him of the popularity of
his cheete sheete ... and offers the following alternative
(addition) to Dr. Chaos:
Speaking of Dr. Chaos, there's a similarly breeze column you
might want to read which covers the personal computer
world...from the viewpoint of the *user*, in a *law office*.
It's "Technology Update", which appears in
_Law_Office_Practice_, a publication of the American Bar
Association. The author is Burgess Allison, who is one of
the engineers here at MITRE(!). You can get an idea of his
attitude by noting that many of his internal memos here are
signed "Surly Ol' Burge (SOB)". While it isn't as technical
in nature as Dr. Chaos' column, it's a fun read with a
healthy dose of cynicism about the stupidities of the
desktop system vendors.
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PostScript program to plot Sierpinski's gasket
Have you ever wanted to plot Sierpinski's gasket on your
local laserprinter (we certainly wouldn't recommend that you
unleash this on someone else's laser printer)? Sierpinski's
gasket, by the way, is the fractal pattern built up out of
successively smaller triangles, ...maybe we will use it as
the cover for this year's hardcopy version of Chaos Corner
... in any case, we have a PostScript program that will
print the gasket on a PostScript (tm)-capable printer. Let
us know at chaos-request@pelican.cit.cornell.edu if you
would like a copy.
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PostScript printing of a Digital World
Patrick Dockhorn in Karlsruhe, Germany has contributed to
the public domain his C program to convert map files (MP1
format) from John Allisons "The World Digitized" package
into EPSF 2.0 PostScript files. "The Digital World" data is
evidently available from several servers (check with archie
for "worldmap") and the format of the data is described in
the header of the wmap2ps.c program. Note, the program is
freeware (ask for it at chaos-
request@pelican.cit.cornell.edu) but the data (if you find
it valuable) is not ... but the shareware fee is $20 so it
won't hurt you to repay someone for a lot of work.
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Keeping your Unix system intruder-free
The program Tripwire provides a framework to allow Unix
Sysadmins the ability to monitor changes to critical files
and directories. The program was developed at Purdue
University by Gene Kim as part of the COAST Project
(directed by Gene Spafford). Copies of the program may be
found at ftp.cs.purdue.edu in the pub/spaf/COAST/Tripwire
directory.
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Looking for more TrueType fonts to add you your collection?
If you are looking for more TrueType fonts to add to your
machine, look no further than ftp.cica.indiana.edu ... in
the directory with the path of pub/pc/win3/fonts/truetype
you will find fonts with such names as GoodBadUgly, Barcode,
Hebrew, Mapmaker, and many more. Microsoft loves this
because it helps to make TrueType fonts more popular.
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Interested in the Windows API for Sockets?
A lot of information about Microsoft products is available
on CompuServe. For those of you without CompuServe access,
an alternative for some of the information is to ftp to
ftp.uu.net and look in the vendor/microsoft directory for
interesting information (for instance, the compuserve-libs
directory). Another directory contains a Word for Windows
document that describes the programming interface that has
been worked out to allow multiple Windows applications to
use the same TCP/IP stack. Dr. Chaos is eagerly awaiting
software that actually USES the interface and TCP/IP stacks
that IMPLEMENT the calls.
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Running multiple Unix sessions over one telephone line
There is a server you can run on a Unix system that allows
you to run a program on a Macintosh, or DOS, or Windows
systems to run multiple Unix sessions at the same time.
Rather than re-enter all the information, Dr. Chaos
recommends that we just republish the information posted by
Ted Richards:
Unix Windows consists of two programs. One is a
server that runs on a Unix system that you dial
into, and the other is a front end that runs on
your home computer. The combination lets you run
up to seven separate shell sessions (on the Unix
machine) with each session being displayed in a
separate window on your home computer. The
programs take care of multiplexing the separate
communications streams through a single modem
connection.
There are at least four different front ends, all
of which talk to the same Unix server. One is for
the Mac, one is for the Amiga (neither of which I
know anything about, but check your standard FTP
sites), one is for Windows, and one for DOS.
The Unix server supports many nice features, such
as background downloads in a window while other
things are being done in other windows, automatic
resizing of windows, displaying of strings in the
title bars of the windows, etc. The different
front ends support these features to varying
degrees. The Mac version was written by the
person who wrote the Unix server, and so probably
supports all of the features.
UW-WIN is available as uwwin103.zip in
pub/pc/win3/util on ftp.cica.indiana.edu. You
need to run a server on the Unix machine, see
uwserver.zip in the same directory. As far as I
know, it is the same server as used for the Mac,
and presumably Atari versions. UW-WIN is the
shareware Windows version (but only $15, I think).
Unfortunately, it does not support file transfers.
It displays each shell session in a separate
Windows window. You can move and resize each
window independently (but if you try to change the
window width, it crashes - you can change the
height OK).
It runs quite well under WIN-OS2, with one
exception (besides the window width change
problem) - it hangs my entire WIN-OS2 session if I
try to reinitialize the modem, but I also have
similar (or worse) problems with other Windows
comm programs that others have used without
problems, so I may have some strange hardware or
configuration problems.
UW-PC is available on SIMTEL20 as UWPC201.ZIP in
PD1:<MSDOS.MODEM>, or equivalently as uwpc201.zip
in /pub/msdos/modem on oak.oakland.edu. This is
the released DOS version (freeware). It is
somewhat more complete than UW-WIN, but can only
display one window at a time (a key switches
between windows). It does supports file transfers
in one window while you are doing other things in
a different window. Again, you need the
uwserver.zip file. I think it's in the same
directory.
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Need some clues for the Minesweeper game under Windows?
If, before you click on any squares, you enter "xyzzy"
<enter><shift-enter> then it is reported that the pixel in
the upper left corner will change whenever you are over a
"safe" square. Depending on your monitor, it may be hard
enough to see that you can ignore the pixel until you get
into one of those situations where you have to guess which
square the mine is under -- Dr. Chaos claims an easier way
to a high score is just to edit the high score that the game
keeps in its INIfile.
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Want to have a REALLY big Windows Desktop?
A utility called bigdesk allows you to create a desktop that
is nine times the size of your screen. The icon for the
program give a very reduced picture of the desktop, and
clicking on a part of that view will shift the focus of the
screen to the part that you clicked on. It's really nice to
work with, very intuitive, and it reportedly even works with
seamless Windows under OS/2! That particular utility
happens to be mixed in with one or two other utilities in a
ZIP file called 'menudesk.zip' .... you can either look for
it using archie, or get it from puffin.cit.cornell.edu
(don't forget to used 'binary' when you transfer the file).
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Problems with transferring files from Puffin
We have been using the 2.x version of QVTNET software on
puffin.cit.cornell.edu and it is clear that a number of you
have been encountering problems when attempting to do file
transfers ... it appears that that particular version gets
confused about ftp portnumbers ... so Dr. Chaos has to
restart it every once in a while when he notices that there
have been problems. In the mail file that Dr. Chaos sends
to new subscribers, he has started recommending that they
get back issues from pelican.cit.cornell.edu rather than
puffin.cit.cornell.edu because of exactly those stability
issues. However, since a number of you still seem to be
using puffin, you might be glad to know that over the
Thanksgiving break, we will be switching to the newer
version of QVTNET (version 3.03) in hopes of getting more
stability. Wish us luck!
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Free software for AIX on RS/6000 that is already patched for
AIX 3.x
While Dr. Chaos assumes that you already know about the AIX
3.x software archived at aixpdslib.seas.ucla.edu, you may
not know about the additional or more recently updated
packages at such less well-known sites as
straylight.acs.ncsu.edu (look in pub/rs6000) and also
(across the pond) at iacrs1.unibe.ch (University of Berne).
These archives take a lot of work to maintain, so if you
find something useful or that saves you some time, spend
just a little bit of that time to drop a note to Marin
Schuetz (schuetz@iacrs2.unibe.edu) or David Joyner
(david_joyner@ncsu.edu) ... it means so much to know that
someone is out there (especially when your boss asks why you
spend so much time doing this stuff, instead of your REAL
job).
------------------------------------------------------------
It's now officially available - C-Kermit 5A
C-Kermit 5A is now available for Unix, VMS, OS/2, Amiga,
Atari, and others. Lots of new features ... Dr. Chaos
thinks that it basically brings C-Kermit up to approximately
the same feature set as PC-Kermit. (It even works on
OpenVMS running on the DEC Alpha chip.) If you don't want
to mess with compiling it yourself (some do, some don't),
the Unix binaries for many systems are available from
watsun.cc.columbia.edu in the kermit/binary directory --
look for file names of the form wermit.<system-name> (e.g.
wermit.next) [This has now been changed to ckuker.<system-
name>]. The OS/2 version can be found in the same place,
with a name of ckoker32.exe for the 32-bit version requiring
OS/2 2.0, and ckoker16.exe for the 16-bit version that will
run on all releases of OS/2. Dr. Chaos did point out to me
that it might be a good idea just to mention that kermit is
the nearly "universal" terminal emulator / file transfer
package because (1) the price is right and (2) it has
implementations for almost every type of computer (see(1)).
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Interesting X-Windows packages updated or recently available
Generally speaking, the packages mentioned below are
available on export.lcs.mit.edu in the contrib directory.
xtpanel
xtpanel provides a quick and easy way of producing a panel
containing interactive objects such as buttons, sliders, and
text fields, either from the command line or from an xtpanel
script file. Each panel object maintains a string
representation of its value. When the object is modified it
updates its value and it can also perform an action such as
printing its value or calling a system command. Object scan
make use of the values of other objects in constructing
their actions, and they can set the values of other objects
as the result of an action. The result is an interactive X
windows program, without the need for conventional
programming.
Xloadimage version 3.03 containing the following
fixes/enhancements:
* JFIF-style JPEG images are now supported.
* Color PCX files are now supported.
* -zoom now works with 24-bit images.
* -rotate now works on all systems at all multiples of 90
degrees.
* A bug in root window handling for DEC and NCD servers has
been fixed.
* A bug in -normalize has been fixed.
* Several bugs in -smooth have been fixed.
* Several bugs in -merge have been fixed.
* The man page now gives correct information on slide shows.
xfishtank has lots or pretty fish swim around on the
background of your screen (it's not just a screensaver --
there are bubbles and swimming fish all the time -- a total
of 29!).
A Motif-based ftp client named nxftp -- look for it on
osl.csc.ncsu.edu in the pub/ncsu_motif directory under the
file name of nxftp.1.0.tar.Z.
Last but not least is the Pie Window Manager. PieWM is
built around the fact that menus are much easier to use if
they appear as "pies" that pop-up around the cursor rather
than dropping down -- each item corresponds to a large slice
shaped target area and the farther you move the cursor, the
larger target you have to hit. Several study papers are
referenced. All features of tvtwm are supported. Get it
from the machine bongo.garnet.cs.cmu.edu in the pub
directory stored as the file piewm.tar.Z.
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From the Bookshelf
We recently completed reading _The Fifth Discipline_ (The
Art and Practice of The Learning Organization) by Peter M.
Senge -- highly recommended. A two-page summary of the book
was written by Dr. Chaos, he liked it so much (if anyone
would like to fund the lecture series...). Another book you
might find likeable is: _The Best of The Journal of
Irreproducible Results_ edited by Dr. George H. Scherr (it
covers issues from 1955 to 1983). As a part of another
project, we have been looking for sources of cartoon-type
line art having to do with computers. Dr. Chaos finds it
amazing that search as he might, he cannot find any such
books on the topic in the USA but managed to find many such
books in Germany (many of the pictures are good enough that
it's not necessary to translate the caption). Any
speculations about what that says about German sense of
humor (or sense of the absurd) as opposed to Americans?
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Needed: Single (inexpensive) console for multiple servers
Does anyone have a solution for the problem of how to have a
single ascii console (say, a VT-100) shared between a bunch
of servers (say, RS/6000s) so that the single console can be
used for sysadmin tasks on all the servers? We have seen a
configuration from BlackBox, that almost allows such a
configuration ... except that it is too smart and
"interprets" some of the VT-100 control codes which means
that it is impossible to run SMIT (the system management
tool) through that interface. Anyone know of another
vendor/solution?
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Product of the month IBM ThinkPad 700C
Looks like a wonderful laptop; 486, 10.5 inch active matrix
COLOR display; reasonable sized disk. Now, if it only cost
half as much...
To subscribe ... drop a note to chaos-
request@pelican.cit.cornell.edu
Dr. Chaos (I have a Master's Degree .... )
