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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Get your Free Subscription Here!

Just send a message to Dr. Chaos - chaos-request@pelican.cit.cornell.edu 
and ask to be put on the subscription list.  From CompuServe, use the 
address INTERNET:chaos-request@pelican.cit.cornell.edu.  It's that easy.  
Don't delay ---- act now!

Dr. Chaos
