This item is for system announcements (new computer equipment on Grex, 
system upgrades, Grex meetings, etc.).  Personal announcements should go 
back in item 2; Grex system *problems* belong in the next item (#4). 

43 responses total.

A runoff election is now underway to resolve the tie in the recent
Grex Board of Directors election.  To vote from a dialup or telnet
connection, type 'vote' at a Unix shell prompt or '!vote' at almost
any other prompt.  To vote on the web, point your browser to
http://cyberspace.org/cgi-bin/pw/voting-booth .  Voting ends at
midnight January 7, Eastern Standard Time.

why is telnet so hard?

Actually, it's rather soft, I think.

Results of the Board runoff election:  flem 21, bhelliom 18.
So flem is the winner.  Congratulations, and thanks to both of you
for running.

I still have not received scheduling preferences from Marcus or STeve 
(check your grex email guys, subj: Scheduling), but as it stands the days 
are ranked by preference as follows:

Wednesday        4
Tuesday  3
Thursday         1
Friday  -1
Monday  -2

with the following dates excluded: 

8 (Tue)
10 (Thu)
16 (Wed)
18 (Fri)
21-28 (Mon-Mon)

So, the optimal dates are tomorrow, the 9th, or Wednesday the 30th, with 
second rank choices being Thursdays either the 17th or 31st.
(Thursdays rank lower than Tuesdays but nobody marked Thursdays as 
unavailable, while one person did mark Tuesdays that way.)

well, tomorrow is out for me, as I have plans at this point.

Bhelliom, congratulations on winning the popular if not the electoral vote!

:)

Was it the Chad? :)

Installed a new Backtalk release.  Interesting changes are:
  * The "Item List" in pistachio includes author names.
  * Formatting of the /etc/motd file is better in all interfaces.
  * Abalone now displays motd.

There are some other internal fixes and improvements, some of which are 
to support Fronttalk.

The 'ft' program (a rough clone of Picospan) got a round of improvements 
too.  See the item:garage,30 for details.

Grex board officer election results:

        Chair:          other
        Secretary:      mooncat
        Treasurer:      aruba

(Somehow the last doesn't surprise me.  Wonder why ...)

Well, since STeve didn't show up, we would normally have elected him 
treasurer, but Mark is just SO good at it.  What's the fun of punitive 
election of you all suffer as a result?

Hi, I'm Twill!

yer mother.

@#$%!!

I upgraded backtalk to version 1.1.11.  Nothing new except a lot of bug fixes,
and the ability to change your conference name from the abalone interface.

Fronttalk has been upgraded to version 0.2.4.  This adds the commands 'find',
'fixseen' and 'participants', does faster browses, and makes a few other
performance improvements.

Is there an uptime command interface in backtalk?

You just want a web page that reports uptime?  That'd be easy enough to do.
No reason to make it part of backtalk.

Well, as long as it reports the rest of the information returned by uptime.

We now have Backtalk version 1.1.12, with some more bug fixes, and some
tiny enhancements to the abalone interface.

Coolness.  I can't wait.  When will it be implimented?

When will what be implemented?  The web 'uptime'?

Well, since more than one person seemed to want it, I set out to write
one.  Figured it wouldn't take me more than a couple minutes.

Actually, it didn't take me more than a couple seconds, because when
I did "vi /usr/local/libexec/cgi-bin/uptime" to start writing one, I
found it already there.  Looks like Steve Weiss wrote one three years
ago.

So, uptime fans, walk do not run to

  http://www.grex.org/cgi-bin/uptime

Your uptime is waiting for you. If you forget the URL, the link is on
Grex's home page, bottom right corner.  Presumably I put the link there,
but I forgot it existed.

Cool.  Now that's the height of efficiency; resolving the issue before it 
is even raised.  Thanks!

Happens to me way too often.  Someone asks about a potential bug, I agree that
it's potentially serious & that I'll fix it, & on looking at the code discover
that I thought about it when I wrote the thing in the first place.

Senior moments ...

There is even a link to the web uptime on Grex's home page under "also cool"
so it has not been hiding in a corner.

OK - I have solved another problem that may be of interest to our users from
Europe. A grexer asked if I would install timezone info for Estonia.
You see, very few people ask for time zone info to be installed. Back in 1998
I added info for India becasue we have so many Indian users, and it came up.
As a result of such a low interest level, Grex still mostly has only the zone
info that came with this ancient OS (1994). A lot of improvement has gone into
the data files of more modern unix OSes since then. I went to an OpenBSD box
(my own) and scarfed a data file for europe, and compiled it. THen I installed
the Europe subdirectory of time zone files, so not only do you get Estonian
time if you want, but nearly every other known time zone in Europe.

To see what European times zones we have, look in 
/usr/share/lib/zoneinfo/Europe

To set Estonian time specify the TZ environment variable
for csh/tcsh use 
setenv TZ Europe/Tallinn
for bash/ksh/sh use
TZ=Europe/Tallinn; export TZ

These can go in your dotfiles (.login or .profile) if you want it to be like
that all the time. Programs that are time-zone-enlightened will report all
times in YOUR time zone instead of Grexs. 

Users outside europe may find their time zone somewhere in
/usr/share/lib/zoneinfo

but if not, send mail to staff amd we'll try to get you what you need.

I continue to be amazed at all the work staff puts in behind the scenes.

I just got spam at my cyberspace.org address.  That's interesting, because
I never use the address for anything -- occasionally someone on Grex emails
me at it, but that's the extent of it.  It isn't on webpages or anything like
that.

You should forward it, with all headers, to uce@cyberspace.org.

re #26: "...time if you want, but nearly every other known time zone in 
Europe."

Are you implying there are time zones which have yet to be discovered?

Re #29:  Unfortunately, I deleted it.  I'll do that next time, thanks!

Re #30:  Yes, the twilight timezones.

Every once in a while, it seams that some spammer downloads
/etc/passwd and enters all addresses into the system.

Do you (or does Marcus) really want all spam I get through Grex?  I can send
a bunch of the more recent stuff.  I didn't know this before.

Yes, Marcus is the person who looks at the uce stuff.  I think he
wants all the data he can get his hands on.

(Don't send it to me, though.  Send it to uce.  Please.)

Understood.  I just forwarded the batch that was waiting for me this morning.

I will get a good laugh when spammers send e-mail to
uce@cyberspace.org

They apparently have; Marcus had occasion to mention that a few months back.
 :)

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss