64 new of 156 responses total.
Maxwell posited those daemons to explain why they can't exist. Computers have no such luck.
This response has been erased.
HURRAY!!! Thanks Jan & STeve!!!
We verified that the new sun-4/690 CPU card was working, and took 64M off it and gave it to Grex, hence our 192M of memory. The 'new' 6/90 card wasn't booting in its normal (as opposed to diagnostic) mode, so we took two of the little SBUS daughterboard cards off it, and lo and behold it came up. We couldn't boot anything off it, as it seems to have last been used with IPI disks (IPI being another now dead type of disk interface like IDE and SCSI), so we're going to have to either boot from CD rom or clone Grex's boot disk for it. Neither will be hard to do, but we're out of time for today. All in all, I'm happy. Grex has needed extra memory for a while now, and todays addition will help out a lot. The extra CPU card that we installed, giving us 4 CPUs that run Grex will be an interesting thing to watch. There are some theories that with SunOS (as opposed to the newer SOlaris) having four CPUs will degrade overall performance because of contention between the four of them waiting to do things in the kernel, but I'm not sure about that. I have heard arguments on both sides, but Grex doesn't seem to use a computer in any normal way so our results will be different. If we need to back out a CPU card its easy enough to take it out again. Next step: more disk for Grex.
We have two new 690 motherboards. Did you try both of them, or just one?
Just the newest one. To test the other one we'll need to do a CPU transplant. I was kinda tempted to do that today, but decided to be more focused.
Doing a CPU transplant would be easy. But I think we'd also have to put some memory on it, which is not so easy. I think we should concentrate on the other one for now. Anyway, for a vastly more detailed discussion of all this, see item:garage, 86 (That's item 86 in the garage conference for those of you not reading this with Backtalk). That's probably also a better discussion place for techie details.
Carol and I made some spiffy mailing labels with our new color printer. They have Grex's logo and return address on them. I'll use them to mail auction items to people.
The Grex Board of Directors will meet Tuesday, Feb 23, 6:30pm upstairs at Zingerman's Next Door, 422 Detroit Street, Ann Arbor. The public is invited. See item 75 in coop (item:coop,75) for the agenda.
I worked on getting more memory on Grex today, and didn't succeed. The expansion card we have has 64M in it, and I was going to increase that to 128M for a total of 256M in Grex. Unforunately, there is a problem with some of the sockets for the SIMM memory parts and Grex wouldn't boot with the added memory. Going into the diagnostics mode it nearly instantly found a particular SIMM as being bad. After trying various things, I took out the new (2nd) 64M ram bank and found that the card was still damaged. There are two sockets which appear to be be damaged. It definitely looks to me like we have some bad sockets, possibly (probably?) due to problems with the previous owners of the card. However, not all is lost. I've straightened out the little finger of SIMM sockets before, and that may be all that is needed. Right now we're back to 128M, which while not as good as having 192M, is still fairly decent.
REMINDER: Grex Board of Directors meeting Tuesday, Feb. 23, 6:30pm upstairs at Zingerman's Next Door, 422 Detroit St., Ann Arbor. The public is invited. See Item 75 in the Coop conference (item:coop,75) for the agenda.
Grex is now running with its memory card again, thanks to the efforts of Charles (arthurp). He fixed the mangled simm sockets and after some fighting with it, Grex was able to boot up with this card. It now has 128M, making for a total of 256M of ram here. Several of us have been here in the Pumpkin for the last hour, waiting to see if any errors would develop. We've been here for a little more than an hour now, and all is well. Thanks Charles for your efforts.
Thanks Charles and STeve! I'd like to announce that Kiwanis, through keesan and jdeigert, has donated a photocopyier to Grex. It's in my office, on top of the file cabinet they donated, and it seems to work fine.
Wow. Thats cool.
Grex seems to be running along pretty zippily on 256M. Thanks to arthurp and steve for their efforts! Thanks also to keesan and jdeigert for the photocopier.
See the coop item on tax deductability of dues, this copier will allow grex to keep better tax records as a nonprofit.
The interesting part about that memoey is that we really are using it. Watching the 'vmstat' program is fun; you can see when lots of sendmails fire off, with the pool of available memory going down. We're doing a lot less swapping right now, which is a good thing. I'm still on the lookout for more ram, and once we have the alternate Sun-4/670 populated with 64M ram, I'd like to get more memory here. ...I shall continue to beg for ram. ;-)
A test version of Backtalk 0.9.6 is now available on Grex. To try it go to
http://www.cyberspace.org/cgi-bin/pw/bt.new/pistachio/confhome?conf=backt
alk
IMPORTANT NOTE:
This has been deliberately broken so that you can only join the
"backtalk" and "backtalk2" conferences. It will claim all other
conferences do not exist if you try to join them. It does some
different things with item files, and we want to make sure it isn't
going to drive Picospan crazy before we allow it into any of the
regular conferences.
If you want to go back to reading the other conferences, change the
"bt.new" in the URL back to "bt".
WHAT'S NEW:
- HTML responses. You now have the option of using HTML tags in
your response and item text. This means pictures, tables, links,
font changes, and so forth can be done in responses.
Sanity checking is done on the HTML to make sure you don't use
any tags that would mess up the page, and to close any tags
you left open.
Backtalk automatically generates a (much less pretty) plaintext
version of all HTML responses so that Picospan users don't have
to look at HTML tags.
- Preview button. Lets you see what your response would look like if
posted, both to other Backtalk users and to Picospan users. Very
useful for composing HTML responses.
- Forget works better. Fixed some bugs here.
- A few more button color options.
- Updates to help files.
- More aggressive item indexing. Item indexing makes Backtalk faster,
but it used to be so timid about it that it wasn't being done in
most conferences.
- Several minor bug fixes.
And various other features not relevant to Grex: support for password
protected conferences, lastlog maintainance, better user list functions
(turned off here because we have too many users), and better Yapp
compatibility.
wow. sounds like te html parsing required a lot of work and will make conferencing a whole new range of fun stuff! thanks, jan!!
just tried it, but communicator 4.05 crashed twice at the same spot (scrolling through responses). running a powerbook 190cs (68lc040) with os 8.0.
YAPP compatibility is a good thing? I used YAPP on M-Nut for a few days, and it drove me crazy. (this was back in Nov.) Backtalk seemed like a much more sophisticated interface. Maybe things have changed
Not that fast. You might want to keep tabs on what people do with html, becuase it's possible for that to be misused.
The current YAPP interface for the WWW is buggy to the point where I can't stand using it. I've used Backtalk about every day for a year and a half, and I'm very pleased with it. I hope M-Net will adopt Backtalk if it's compatible with the YAPP text system.
YAPP compatability refers to Backtalk working with YAPP the way it does with Picospan. Backtalk itself doesn't seem any different, either way.
Grex has been running for 96 hours now with the new ram and repaired memory card, so I think that can be called a success. If either the card or individual SIMMs were to have failed we'd have experienced it. Thanks to Charles for some nimble repair work on that card!
Uh-oh. I'm not sure I like what this represents, Jan. The strength of Grex (and M-Net, once) was what the users brought to it. When the conferences become more of an impromptu web page where most of the content is links, Grex will become a poor cousin of SlashDot. The inaccessibility of the graphical content to many computers is another negative to this change. Up to now, anybody with a dumb terminal and a modem could be a full participant. When large parts of the conferences' content is only accessible using much more advanced (and expensive) hardware, what becomes of that part of the user base? I fear this will be like the file read feature in party: most often used to dazzle rather than illuminate.
Put me down in the Luddite column, too.. I think the addition of HTML extensions is unlikely to add much (beyond annoyance) to responses. I hope there's a way to turn it off and still enjoy the other benefits of the new Backtalk version..
Russ, Mike: the technology is changing, and *fast*. All three of us are old-timers; what we know and have used is not what the masses use. The web is the net. Not a component of it, but the backbone as seen by an ever increasing number of people. Probably we should move this discussion to another item, however.
I'd have no huge objection to turning it off (there isn't a way right now, but it isn't hard to add - eventually I plan to make it a setting that fairwitnesses can fiddle with on a per-conference basis). Frankly, I don't believe it will be a problem. Simple HTML gets translated to plaintext just fine. Doing things like images and tables well is enough extra work that few people will bother, and you won't mind missing responses where people do them badly. And I do agree with STeve - Grex has to keep exploring current technology. We don't have to try everything that comes along, but we have to be adverturous in trying things.
I would appreciate if people would not put anything in their responses that cannot be easily accessed by dial-in users. If there is a link, make sure that we can read the URL if we want to go look at it with lynx.
One thing I want to see is something that does that automatically. If I enter an HTML response like: Visit my <A HREF=http://www.wwnet.net/~janc>home page</A>. It should generate a plain text response for Picospan that looks something like: Visit my [http://www.wwnet.net/~janc] home page. Of course, even now any picospan user can see the HTML version of any response by doing, for example: !extract -h agora 3 123 This will print response 123 of item 3 of the agora conference, prefering the HTML version, if there is one (there isn't). Without the -h flag it gets the plain-text version.
I think what Backtalk is doing is perfectly reasonable. It takes the html stuff and makes plaintext out of it, which is the proper thing to do.
And above all, disable the blink command. Not everyone is as stable minded as me. ;)
What he said. No blinking!
I'd like to announce that Grex had a great month, financially, in February. See the treasurer's report for details (item:coop,80).
I agree. No blinking.
I've been to other conf systems, like Electric Mind, that allow HTML tags, and things seem to work out fine, for the most part. One thing that could help, is to set up a conf. for those who want to try out HTML. This will give people a place to get use to it before taking it into the regular confs. Granted, not everybody will be so accomidating, but I think the majority would. Oh, and I agree with the others: <blink>NO BLINKING!</blink> (Yes, I know it won't work.)
When the new Backtalk goes live, it will have a feature in it that allows fairwitnesses to disable HTML posting in their conference if they so please. There are definately some conferences where HTML posting would be very nice - web, auction, enigma and test come to mind. The BLINK tag has been on our banned list since day zero. However, animated GIFs are still possible.
As soon as it's up, i think we should have a contest for the worst animated gif. :)
There's already a test conference, which could be used for trying out HTML and whatnot.
Finally someone who bans blinking tags.
Now if only we could ban MIDIs entirely ...
Re HTML responses in Backtalk: I agree with STeve in resp:120 that this should have its own discussion item. HTML conferencing would represent a major change to the user interface, and like other major changes to Grex - the internet connection, outgoing internet access policy, anonymous web reading, etc. - there should be user discussion and input prior to making a decision on installing it. Coop would be the appropriate conference. I will say that I tried out the 'backtalk' conference using the new version of backtalk, and it really does do HTML.
I've installed a much newer version of Apache on Grex. You shouldn't notice any difference. If you do, let me know.
Re resp:123 - I notice that Backtalk doesn't process the first URL correctly. It should treat the ">" as a terminator, but doesn't. Jan has entered an item in Coop to discuss HTML in Backtalk postings. It's item 82 (item:coop,82).
Unless Grex has plans to ban all non-HTML access, web pages should be the only place it is allowed. While it is possible to read past the rubbish when using telnet, I don't usually waste my time on it. HTML popping up is a fairly swift way to chase me off a system.
Backtalk produces a plain-text version of each HTML response entered. Picospan will always show you the plain-text version, so normally there shouldn't be rubbish to read past. I think there are some issues regarding HTML posting that warrant discussion. As noted earlier, the discussion is happening in Item 82 of the Coop conference (item:coop,82).
I don't know how anyone "bans" a blink tag... Meanwhile, please note that many animated .gif files regularly crash various versions of Netscape, especially if used in combination with Javascript.
Backtalk apparently (according to Jan) will be doing things like making sure tags are closed, etc. Certainly if the HTML is submitted thru the Backtalk interface it is possible to remove any blink tags before putting the stuff into the file.
Yup. Javascript in responses is also not going to work if the response is submitted through Backtalk.
what will happen if lazily tagged html is entered through picospan? will backtalk fix that in showing it, even though it won't be able to edit the text for picospan readers to clean it up?
Jan's version (heck, maybe I should let Jan answer questions about his own software ;) ) will be putting the HTML in a different place than the Picospan text.
i mean if somone is running picospan and enters an html response, say, without proper close tags...
I would guess the same thing that happens now... Backtalk doesn't actually *do* anything, so you see the tags as is.
I'd like to announce that I have closed the last auction item with bids on it,
so the auction is over unless someone bids on something which has thusfar been
overlooked.
Thanks to everyone who donated things to the auction:
arthurp, aruba, atticus, beccap, beeswing, bhaalu, cmcgee, coyote, danr,
headdoc, hematite, janc, jep, jh, jiffer, keesan, mary, mary's sister Pat,
misha, mta, omni, aruba's roommate Paul, remmers, Carol's brother Rick,
srw's co-worker Rick, tpryan, valerie, wolfg676, and zook.
And thanks to everyone who bought something (and paid for it :)):
andyb, aruba, atticus, beeswing, bkwdbuny, brighn, bruin, cmcgee, coyote,
dea, desolato, devnull, fungster, gypsi, happyboy, janc, jep, jiffer,
jshafer, kami, katie, kentn, krj, misha, mooncat, mta, n8nxf, n8rxs, omni,
orinoco, otaking, otter, phenix, roadtrip, robh, rosie0, rtg, scott, snow,
toking, tpryan, and valerie.
Here are the current totals:
Status Count Total
------ ----- -----
Open items 11
Closed but unpaid items 39 479.00
Paid but undelivered items 28 336.01
Delivered items 171 1033.75
--- -------
249 1848.76
Thanks everyone!
Thanks for all your work, Mark!
(Mary stands and applauds Mark.)
<<danr thanks aruba>>
This response has been erased.
if you open a tag that needs closing, backtalk will close it in your response so that it does not pollute following reponses. thanks Mark! Backtalk (even the old version) does seem to have a bug in the clickifying logic as reported in resp:136. That's my department. I'll be working on a fix for it.
I updated the telnet page on our website - it was vadly in need of this. see http://www.cyberspace.org/info/telnet.html
The next Grex Board of Directors meeting is at 6:30 pm, Tuesday March 23, at Zingerman's Next Door, 422 Detroit Street, Ann Arbor. The public is invited. See Item 85 in the Coop conference (item:coop,85) for the agenda.
Wow, all the modems were busy for at least a few minutes this afternoon.
I got a busy signal last night.. It's ironic (for those of us who Grexed or M-Netted before the internet connections) that getting a busy signal is news, but things are certainly different now than they once were..
<nods in approval...yay internet connection - yay staff!>
You have several choices: