Text of TeleFinder Chat from Tuesday, April 21, 1998 11 AM
PDT.
In attendance:
From Spider Island: Rusty Tucker
Sysops: Jim Smith, Bob Nunn, Michael Davidson, mikael
fredriksson, Daniel O'Leary, Ken Sutherland, Jim Leary, Rick Palmer
Rusty Tucker hola!
Bob Nunn It really isn't very user friendly that way it takes
a long while for each message to load from the conference though
Michael Davidson Glad you could join us Rusty Tucker! (more
greeting stuff goes here).
Rusty Tucker :) - hi bot!
Michael Davidson Huh Bob
Michael Davidson TidBITS should be in conference format on a
local BBS, not a huge list of files
Bob Nunn TidBITS as a conference. It takes a while to read
through them because of the size of each file. Best in a text library
in some ways
Bob Nunn Mine is fouled right now but I have it that way most
of the time along with MacWay and others.
Michael Davidson I suppose so, in some ways you are right
Michael Davidson that way meaning in conference or meaning in
file format
Bob Nunn Try it out off of my system. Even with my ISDN
connects on both ends I am not patient enough.
Michael Davidson :)
Rusty Tucker Might work better to split the issue into
separate articles?
Michael Davidson Are you saying 32K files take to long to load
in a conference? :)
Bob Nunn Yup. Splitting it would be okay but you end up with a
lot of info. Almost not useful. MacWay updates sometimes several
times a day.
Michael Davidson Rusty, what is the limit of a conference
message (32K) ??
Rusty Tucker yes
Bob Nunn Could use some push technology I guess. Only tell me
what I am interested in.
Michael Davidson I know...
Michael Davidson Maybe, on topics like TidBITS, you could
extract the header (table of contents) and then just have the whole
file as an attachment
Bob Nunn Might as well make them a text library instead of a
conference then.
Michael Davidson TidBITS would be easy for this because of its
Easy View format, others might not be so easy
Michael Davidson Have both Bob, the conference for the TOC,
and then have a library for the actual files
Bob Nunn Maybe eventually they will send them in HTML and when
Rusty add this to TF Client we can use the indexing to link to the
articles we are interested in.
Bob Nunn Complete with graphics, multimedia etc.
Michael Davidson Probably can do by May 1st
Bob Nunn Now that he has the Mozilla source ;-)
Michael Davidson Jim, what were you getting at when you said
you had to move the folder for my BBS user to read
Rusty Tucker Welcome to the Chat Room chat Jim!
Michael Davidson Greetings Jim Leary! (more greeting stuff
goes here).
Michael Davidson Can somebody type Michael Davidson or Michael
(testing)
Michael Davidson or MD
Bob Nunn Michael
Michael Davidson My notify worked!! Thanks Bob N.
Michael Davidson it notifies if certain words are typed by
other users
Bob Nunn does it over work md MD Michael Davidson Michael
:-)
Michael Davidson yes....good bot BN...it sounded 3 times
Bob Nunn It is in my nature to think of how things will be
abused
Michael Davidson LOL
Michael Davidson Guess, I need to get only the first
occurrence for abusers
Bob Nunn 13 years of running a BBS in some shape or fashion
has taught me to think that way.
Rusty Tucker Welcome to the Chat Room chat Daniel!
Michael Davidson What’s happening Daniel O'Leary? (more
greeting stuff goes here).
Jim Leary Dan, every folder had the exact same number of items
but the total was 6 less. Explain that Mr. Mac
Daniel O'Leary Sorry I am late.
Daniel O'Leary Argh I hate Bots!
Daniel O'Leary You have missed something Jim. Probably ICON
files.
Michael Davidson The last thing I need to do is get the
commands to work...such as changing the "more greeting stuff goes
here)" on the fly...by on the fly I mean, from the chat room input
text area
Michael Davidson Hi Daniel! :)
Daniel O'Leary Poor Bill. Doesn''t he know that Demos are
supposed to work and that crashes are for AFTER the windows sale!
Daniel O'Leary Should have used Firewire rather than
USB...
Bob Nunn Betcha some heads rolled after that.
Michael Davidson He doesn't need to worry....the "Bots" will
buy 98 no matter how bad it is.
Daniel O'Leary I loved it... "... And this is a std
operation...".... "Uh Oh" and then the blue screen o death.
Jim Smith I think was on purpose so others will not take it so
bad when they crash...:-)
Daniel O'Leary Some think it is to get the DOJ to lighten up
on him...
Daniel O'Leary I think it is just standard windows
behavior.
Jim Leary Lets see Dan, how many of the 5 million that were
about to upgrade to Win98 changed their minds after that? There must
be at least 2 or 3 somewhere.
Michael Davidson Those in the know, know what it was
really
Rusty Tucker c-ya
Daniel O'Leary They could not figure out how to uninstall it
Jim.
Rusty Tucker Welcome to the Chat Room chat Bob!
Michael Davidson Glad to see you Bob Nunn! (more greeting
stuff goes here).
Daniel O'Leary Bill never revealed that secret, and they did
not want to reformat and reinstall all that crap.
Jim Smith Just get another PC :-)
Michael Davidson What's on your agenda Rusty?
Michael Davidson Windows version of user! :)
Bob Nunn I've about decided our MIS group has changed our
firewall config just to irritate me and make me hang up during the
conferences.
Daniel O'Leary (Yeah, like bill did...) Did you guys see the
clarification from Intuit?
Jim Leary Yea what's on the agenda. I'd hate to think you Mac
boys have something better to chat about than the 5o billion dollar
man
Michael Davidson no DO
Jim Leary zzzzzzz
Daniel O'Leary MD Intuit is not dropping the Mac version of
Quicken, but they are watching their sales to see if future Mac
releases are in their best interest.
Daniel O'Leary They are not doing any Mac-Specific
releases.
Michael Davidson good to here Daniel ...(and btw, my bot
notified me that you typed Michael Davidson in your statement)
Bob Nunn Perhaps if their releases weren't so buggy the users
would upgrade instead of staying with the older versions.
Michael Davidson MD that is
Jim Leary All is working well over here Bob. Thanks again
Daniel O'Leary So we can look fwd to 2nd rate pulp that
windows users came to expect long ago.
Jim Leary Mac picking up "2nd rate pulp" years after Windows
had it. Could it really be???
Daniel O'Leary RT I have seen no evidence of file corruption
here.
Rusty Tucker good, me either
Daniel O'Leary JL, it *IS* when we get crappie windows
ports.
Bob Nunn U bet. Glad to help. Been playing with templates. I
have a 4 image across table using the JPG PI with comments set up.
Hope eventually to set up my image archive totally that way working
off of a modified dir SPML.
Jim Leary OK enough. I'll see you in Mac vs. Win Dan. Anybody
got something constructive to chat about
Daniel O'Leary BN, I have not been able to get more than one
template going.
Jim Leary There was something I had asked about in the past
that you just reminded me about Bob...
Daniel O'Leary I always get an error for file not found.
Daniel O'Leary What is the secret to getting more than one
template to work.
Jim Leary We use Iron Mike caption plug-in for Photoshop. We
are required to insert about 8 fields of info for a service we use
but...
Rusty Tucker which template?
Daniel O'Leary RT, Dir.spml.
Bob Nunn Put the templates in another folder and make a new
path. Make sure you keep the original folder name on the templates
folder.
Jim Leary for our BBS we'd rather just display the first four.
Is there any way of doing that?
Bob Nunn That's what fooled me but it expects to find a folder
named template.
Rusty Tucker the trick is to point to the folder holding the
template templates folder.
Daniel O'Leary BN I tried that and set the directories config
entry to use the new folder, but it does not work
Daniel O'Leary Ah, not the templates folder itself~!
Rusty Tucker right
Daniel O'Leary That is confusing RT.
Bob Nunn I have my images set up with a folder named
pictemplates and inside is templates
Rusty Tucker I know
Daniel O'Leary It should not be indirect.
Bob Nunn Just one of them deals. Hair is now growing back.
Rusty Tucker :)
Rusty Tucker If I change it now....
Bob Nunn Undocumented feature :-)
Rusty Tucker I'd really throw everybody!
Daniel O'Leary It should really point to the path of the
templates folder.
Rusty Tucker I thought it was documented pretty good!
Michael Davidson bob's hair would fall out again
Daniel O'Leary I wonder how many like me have NOT figured it
out.
Bob Nunn Probably but we never read the docs. We're
typical.
Rusty Tucker you're definitely not alone
Bob Nunn I think most of us have only begun to see how
powerful dir.spml can be.
Daniel O'Leary RT, I did look for it, but I would have to
really dig to find it. I keep every related note I have ever
received.
Rusty Tucker it should be direct anyway
Daniel O'Leary I got a note say 5.6 is shipping : )
Bob Nunn I just wish most of the html software didn't monkey
with the code.
Rusty Tucker cool - more to come
Daniel O'Leary Have you seen "mod.pearl" for Apache? We need
something similar...
Daniel O'Leary perl... not Pearl.
Bob Nunn nope. Been using Claris Homepage because of the
FileMaker Pro linking.
Rusty Tucker JL - TeleFinder displays the "TEXT" field as a
description. Iron Mike is putting all the items in that description.
I don't know if you can get it to be selective
Rusty Tucker what does the perl mod do?
Daniel O'Leary it allows for perl src to be imbedded like
SPML, then interpreted on the fly by the server.
Daniel O'Leary was typing that b4 you asked... grin.
Rusty Tucker make a plug-in out of it
Rusty Tucker any apache mod can be transformed into a
plug-in
Jim Leary I thought maybe there was a way to tell it to grab
just a limited number of fields. Like the photo preview grabs a spot
of a designated size
Daniel O'Leary JL and RT, I was thinking about that and
grabbing a number of chars...
Rusty Tucker No, because it doesn't look at the fields, it
looks at the TEXT that the PNOT says is the description.
Bob Nunn Is there a way to make it parse to a given field
length?
Daniel O'Leary just pass the no of chars to return to it as an
additional parameter..
Daniel O'Leary Just a thought.
Daniel O'Leary would have toe less than 32K of course.
Rusty Tucker it wouldn't quite work that way, they are all
very variable in length
Michael Davidson how bout hiding the other fields somehow? Not
clear of what is going on though
Michael Davidson hiding the display of the other fields I
mean
Daniel O'Leary Right, but many "previews" do this also, and
leave the rest of the description out of the listing anyway.
Rusty Tucker U really need to understand the IPTC caption
info, its a whole other deal
Jim Leary How about something in the code that looked for a
certain character to STOP at like a***
Rusty Tucker You could embed a null, that might stop it
Daniel O'Leary JL that is a ctrl @....
Daniel O'Leary I think.
Jim Leary What then would you code to tell it to look for the
null and where?
Michael Davidson But he needs all 6 fields for other stuff
Jim Leary But if TF read the null then the other stuff would
stay for the news service. Only TF would be looking for a STOP
sign
Jim Leary If this is possible, how would it be done?
Rusty Tucker Its risky, I don't know what the service is
looking for
Daniel O'Leary A user selectable preference for "short" or
"Full" display, set via a form and held as an SPML var. would be
cool.
Jim Leary can anyone look into this when time is
available?
Michael Davidson And the null may stop the news service
too.
Rusty Tucker right
Jim Leary Can always experiment with one file to see.
Daniel O'Leary RT, right???
Jim Leary Why would it have to be null. Couldn't you tell TF
to stop at a * where the news service just reads it as another
character
Michael Davidson Can't Jim just insert a null in the TEXT
resource of an example file and see if it works with TF and news
service
Rusty Tucker a fixed length option would be OK, but it would
not solve Jim's problem
Jim Leary right, because every one is different
Rusty Tucker He needs a very specific solution of pulling
specific fields out of the IPTC caption
Michael Davidson is it the first 4 fields you need Jim?
Jim Leary I never use an asterisk in any captions. Why can't
that be used to tell TF to STOP
Jim Leary Yes
Michael Davidson or discontiguous fields
Daniel O'Leary What is the field separator?
Daniel O'Leary key on it.
Rusty Tucker I've been talking to a few people about doing a
set of Web Server plug-ins to do online photo databases with.
Jim Leary I'd be happy to set up a TEMP TEMP name and password
for you to take a look
Daniel O'Leary count and stop when you reach the count
specified in the users' var.
Michael Davidson Since only first four, maybe a null will stop
TF but not the news service, then all is solved
Jim Leary how is that done? Just insert or does code have to
be placed somewhere?
Daniel O'Leary What is this "news service"?
Jim Leary Presslink
Daniel O'Leary How does it interface to your system?
Jim Leary Its a BBS for newspapers around the US
Jim Leary I upload using Fetch
Daniel O'Leary Why would fetch look at the data in a res?
Daniel O'Leary would think that would get encoded so that it
was safe.
Rusty Tucker Fetch doesn't the database at Presslink looks at
the caption
Jim Leary They have a set folder for me to send files to them
FTP. They do whatever processing and post in about a minute
Michael Davidson What's the status of your talks about the PI
Rusty
Rusty Tucker Welcome to the Chat Room chat Rick!
Michael Davidson Salutations Rick Palmer, glad you could join
us! (more greeting stuff goes here).
Daniel O'Leary OK RT, now I see the problem.
Rick Palmer uugg
Rusty Tucker It will be a number of PI's actually. Will also
include a database for keyword searches, and specialized download
handling.
Daniel O'Leary Are the "fields" /r separated, or do they use
something else?
Daniel O'Leary or /n... etc.?
Jim Leary ?
Jim Leary I think I saw the last 2 fly about 20 feet over my
head
Michael Davidson That sounds promising for TF, how promising
are your discussions so far?
Daniel O'Leary I have not taken a close look at the pics to
see how these "fields" are marked... carriage return, newline,
special char sequence, etc...
Rick Palmer sorry for being late... in one word what kinda
DB...PI?
Michael Davidson Rick P., Rusty said "I've been talking to a
few people about doing a set of Web Server plug-ins to do online
photo databases with."
Rusty Tucker Good, I'm just working on a prototype now. It
will work with any Mac server.
Daniel O'Leary I just saw lines of stuff in the get info
box.
Rusty Tucker Welcome to the Chat Room chat Ken!
Michael Davidson Hey Ken Sutherland, how are you? (more
greeting stuff goes here).
Rusty Tucker c-ya
Rusty Tucker Welcome to the Chat Room chat Ken!
Michael Davidson Hey hey Ken Sutherland, nice that you could
join us! (more greeting stuff goes here).
Daniel O'Leary Argh, Bots!!!!
Rick Palmer you don't know whether to be polite to them or
ignore them!
Daniel O'Leary they decrease the S/N ratio...
Rick Palmer :)
Ken Sutherland help, help, help, help, help, help, help,
Daniel O'Leary Signal to Noise, for Jim L.
Michael Davidson so do some people! :)
Ken Sutherland ms5.7b7 wont launch, has it timed out
Rusty Tucker I'm looking at the DB side right now. Apple has
an interesting technology ( V-Twin ), but its buggy and not well
supported.
Bob Nunn FileMaker
Rusty Tucker File Maker doesn't seem to perform well
enough
Daniel O'Leary My MS is running Ken.
Rusty Tucker Its not multiuser..
Ken Sutherland mine comes on and just quits
Michael Davidson All image based right Rusty, the database I
mean
Rusty Tucker 4D seems to be the closest so far, either that or
do one myself in C++.
Michael Davidson I'll be right back.
Daniel O'Leary RT, Mail server needs a "hi water mark".
Rusty Tucker for what?
Daniel O'Leary needs to stop importing and start trimming when
space is almost full on conference drives..
Ken Sutherland good idea
Daniel O'Leary I hate zero k MSG's...
Rusty Tucker yes, it could be much better about dealing with
no disk space.
Ken Sutherland Rusty, when does the ms5.7b7 time out?
Rusty Tucker You can always check the about screen for time
outs.
Daniel O'Leary I do not see one listed for ms...
Ken Sutherland only if the app stays up 8-)
Ken Sutherland mine quits
Michael Davidson somebody running b7 look for Ken
Daniel O'Leary I did!
Ken Sutherland ta
Daniel O'Leary It is running fine here.
Rusty Tucker There's something wrong then.
Rusty Tucker :)
Ken Sutherland all I did was a restart
Rusty Tucker tsk tsk!
Daniel O'Leary Hell I just defragmented everything this
morning and it is fine.
Rusty Tucker I gotta run
Daniel O'Leary RT my system has been very stable too, more
than the power around here.
Ken Sutherland I wish I could
Bob Nunn trashed prefs file, just a guess. send me logs
Ken Sutherland catch you all later
Daniel O'Leary KS come here.
Ken Sutherland bye bye
Bob Nunn Next time! Bye
Rusty Tucker will see you all Friday
Rusty Tucker c-ya
Rick Palmer I'm running b7 ok
Rusty Tucker c-ya
Rusty Tucker KS - lemme know if you need some help. Its
probably a bad settings prefs or app file
Rusty Tucker c-ya
Rusty Tucker c-ya
April 21, 1998 -- ©Copyright 1998, Spider Island Software