Austen UNIX team discussion

Oops. Somehow the old P&P board logo gif file got set as the wallpaper for the conference index. Well, I thought I'd figured out how to let anyone create a new topic in the austentest conf. But it didn't work. Curious feeling. Now I understand what you were saying, Joan. It lets you go through the process as if you did have the power to create the topic, but it doesn't show up, not even as a topic file in the shell. Hmmm. Back to the manual.

Oops. Somehow the old P&P board logo gif file got set as the wallpaper for the conference index. Oops, indeed. I must have done it. But how?

I can't see this because I'm shelling it tonight.

Looks like it is back to normal now, Terry. Myretta, did you put it back? Terry how do you allow topic creation in a new conference? Can't make it work with 0 and public in the config file. Also, coudl you mail the cfadm password?

Since you're root, go ahead and set it to what you like and let me know what it is.

Looks like it is back to normal now, Terry. Myretta, did you put it back? I restored the former rc file.

Put on the list for sometime down the road. A would-be-nice thing really: From chat From: Amy at 1/9/97 9:38 AM The www.spring.com machine is not set up right for mail. We need to do something to let you invoke pine. Bernie: Yes please. At least I'm vaguely familiar with Pine. I finally manager to get into Spring. At least I'm not the only one who has problems with a shell account.

Amy : We need to do something to let you invoke pine. Huh? I am using pine. (Though I hate it!) You just type pine (lower case) at the $ prompt, or !pine from within bbs. Or do you mean from the web interface? I thought that mail only worked if you had a shell account. (I do not think there is a POP3 mail server here. If so, people could use Netscape mail or Eudora or whatever.)

] I am using pine. ----- It is a terminal emulation thing. I use either the telnet program that comes with windows or Smartcom. - Can invoke Pine in Smartcom when telnetting to www.spring.com. - Can invoke Pine in my telnet window when telnetting to bluemarble.net, othello.indiana.edu, even access.spring.com and barton.spring.com -- but not www.spring.com

It is a terminal emulation thing. Does your software not permit choice of Terminal emulation? It can be set locally in the .profile (or is it .login?) file...

Joan, it's all VT100, but some Telnet programs are better than others, and able to adapt to small variations in the host's idea of what a VT100 is. Apparently the default Telnet program that comes with Windows 95 is not a very heavy duty or industrial strength one...

But Bernie works on a Mac and can't run it either. Also the fact that the other Spring machines will let me run pine in the same crumby ap leades me to believe there must be some way to configure the thing from within Spring.

If you want a good terminal program get crt or one of the other ones Stroud reviews on his site and that we discuss in the apps conference.

"If you want a good terminal program' This is not the issue - the issue is that people ought to be able to use what they have as long as it supports VT100. They should not have to go out and get different software every time they visit a different server. There must be a way to configure things so that Pine will work on all servers.

Lousy VT100 emulation from either or both the host side and the microcomputer side is an issue...

I've had pretty good success using crt. What specific probelms with VT100 emulation need fixing. Do we need to issue new .profile and .cshrc files Henry?

Myretta, Terry, anybody: Has anybody learned much about the www user set-up? We have two users: Carl Goss and Janet Aylmer, who can't seem to get in no matter what they try. I was going to wipe out their previous attempts to register in hopes that a clean slate might make things... I don't know... cleaner. But I don't have a good understanding of how the thing works. If I could find the script it might tell me more, provided it is in perl and not the Yapp command language.

Oh, and speaking of perl, this is not the right topic for it, but when I was trying to make that email form script work Thursday night, I could not discover where the cgi-bin is. I notice Yapp CGI scripts need an alias directory so they can be found by the seb server. Terry, is it possible there are no other CGI scripts here besides the ones used by Yapp. If so, do you you have any philosophical, practical or any other kinds of worries about allowing cgi in any directory on the system? There are pros and cons.

re Janet Aylmer's login info It may be a browser/cookie problem. I have messed up my own cookies by trying to log in as Janet, inadvertently leaving the "Save password" box checked in the form that pops up from my system.

I wiped out Janet's various www accounts so she can start fresh. I think I should advise her to dump the old password files on her system, too. But I can't even see where MSIE or windows keeps mine. There is a "cookies" subdir under the windows dir in Win95, but I don't see Spring or Yapp password files in there. Anybody know where these files are kept in windows, mac, MSIE, netscape?

Amy, go in and set up unix shell accounts for these folks with 'adduser' and then run Dave's webuser program to synch them up on the web. And let them know that they have shell access.

Where is the webuser program?

It should be in /usr/bbs/bin I believe.

The webuser executable is in /usr/local/bin. Would you like me to do this, Amy? You know how I am.

I already emailed Janet after wiping out her accounts. I don't know that she and Carl want or need shell accounts. What is everyone's feeling about this?

Once your account has been webified, you can no longer come in except through the shell?

Sure you can, you can come into the shell or in to the web with the same username and password on both. I do this every day without any problems and very few "old as new incidents".

Joan, do you have an index.html file in your public_html directory?

If Janet A. et al can still come in via their web browsers, then I can't see that it would matter to them whether or not their account were technically a shell account. They would not need to deal with that unless they chose to, right? Terry: Joan, do you have an index.html file in your public_html directory? Not yet, but I have been thinking of making one - I have to do a presentation at a conference on technology for the disabled on "Demystifying the WWW" and I thought that I might try to construct some stuff for that.

That would be of a lot of interest around Austin to some of our sight impaired users like Buddy, Hugo, George, and Gary who have been asking me about ways to get on the web. I'll pass on your findings to them. I ran into an interesting program over the weekend called 'DragonDictate' which will take dictation at 110 wpm and includes a screen reader. And these guys have mentioned a program to me called Telesensory that they say is the most popular Windows 95 screen reader among sight disabled folks.

Getting VH people access to graphical interfaces is a whole other issue - and not what I will be dealing with in my presentation - mine will be more of what it is and how it works and what all those wierd terms mean. At the conference, though, every major vendor of such stuff as Dragon Dictate and Telesensory and Power Secretary and multitudes of other hardware and software tools to give access to people with all kinds of disabilites will be there demonstrating their products and giving presentati ns on them. there are 2 major conferences with like this each year - "Closing the Gap" which is in Minneapolis in November and the CSUN conference in Los Angeles in March. - at which just about everyopne who is a vendor makes an appearance - and if they don't, talk is that they are going under, and they ususually do.

What are some good websites on this topic? Are there ways to make our websitefriendlier to sight disabled folks?

Terry, I have something partly on this topic at http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~churchh/htnimglt.html Spring already conforms to most of the guidelines there...

You may have already seen this in the yapp conference, but it is worth repeating in deeper: Topic 44 of 45: 'Austen conference at Spring' Response 3 of 4: Henry (churchyh@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu) Tue, Jan 28, 1997 (11:39) 5 lines A lot of the e-mail addresses for web users at our site are bogus, because the default choice that's presented to them is the concatenation of: The user name they're choosing to be known as here + "@" + the result of running reverse DNS lookup on the IP address they're coming in from There probably isn't any better way to construct such a default, but unfortunately an e-mail address constructed according to this procedure will be bogus in many cases, and a lot of people don't bother to edit the default... So the result is that there's a lot of bogus pseudo-addresses of the general type "MickJagger@dial-in-ppp42-9.custmax.ms.uu.net", or whatever... Topic 44 of 45: 'Austen conference at Spring' Response 4 of 4: Dave Thaler (thaler@armidale.ann-arbor.mi.us) Tue, Jan 28, 1997 (19:20) 18 lines This is the purpose of the "Participants" button which should be at the top of the page of the list of topics in the conference. By default, this shows the login, last time on, and full name (but not email address) of the participant. A host can change this by putting a command in the conference rc file which redefines the "partmsg" variable to look like anything you want. For example, def partmsg '%10v %o %20u %{email}' will show the login, last time on, full name, and email address. If you just want a list of email addresses of conference members yourself, you could generate this in Unix and save it to a file from in Yapp with: def partmsg '%{email}' participants > filename -Dave