response 100 of 270:

May 31 01:27 UTC 1995

"Edalways" - ? Can this be understood by a minor? And what does it
have to do with dam's comment in 99? <all this is classified - I
know it to be true, otherwise I would have found references to 
this before, somewhere.> Thanks for the help, in advance.

response 102 of 270:

May 31 04:25 UTC 1995

The picospan text collector can share its text with an editor, Arnold.
I was going to explain this one day, as I have noticed that despite
your excellent typing you let a typo through every now and then.

I do not like edalways, I like edsometimes*. Edalways means that whenever
you want to make a response, you get to do it in an editor. I find
the picospan text collector to work just fine and a lot faster
for most responses. When I make a typo big enough to want to fix, 
I can drop into my editor by typing a line that consists entirely
of two characters, :e 

This is a "colon escape" command that tells the collector to edit the
response, and I find it far superior to edalways.

*there is no such thing as "edsometimes", unless you spell it colon-e.

response 104 of 270:

May 31 05:24 UTC 1995

        Yep, :e works when I want to clean up something.. maybe
making it a more widely-known option would be a good alternative?

response 106 of 270:

May 31 10:56 UTC 1995

If you're *that* concerned that electrons are an endangered species, you
don't have to log in to Grex at all!

Arnold, if you enter a line consisting only of : or :e, you will find yourself
in pico (since that is the editor you have defined in your .login), editing
whatever you may have already entered so far.  (That's if you're in the
default Picospan text collector, entering an item or response.)

If you do   set edalways   then you'll always *immediately* get dumped into
pico when you start entering a response (or item) - for your current session.
Putting a line saying    set edalways   in your .cfonce file will make this
the setting you get whenever you run Picospan.

Incidentally, at least at the moment you can also get this effect just by
joining melvin.  The FW put it into the conference's rc file.

response 108 of 270:

Jun 1 02:46 UTC 1995

See! I knew this was clasified! I will try those suggestions - but 
just be on notice, I have left a letter in a safe-deposit box in
case something happens to me while I am on this mission - and it
does name names! :) Thanks to you all for the help. 

response 110 of 270:

Jun 4 18:39 UTC 1995

I don't remember the first suggestion (/home/m/j/mju) drawing a lot
of heat -- I think the main argument was about how to handle
people whose login-id was 1 character long, and how to handle people
with numerals in their login-id.  The main problem has been a
lack of staff time to implement it, coupled with the fact that
it is fairly low on the priority list.  (At least, below the
sun4 on the priority list...)

response 112 of 270:

Jun 5 01:56 UTC 1995

   An excellent idea Dave, and one that we've planned on doing,
once our disk problems are gone.  Right now, hashing would be a
real disaster.  We've been planing on a two tiered system so "sfa"
would be stored under /home/s/f/sfa.  But, given our current problems,
/home/s might go, and all ids starting with 's' might go.  Or even
weirder, if /home/s/f went, all ID's starting with 'sf' would have
gone byebye.  Can you imagine MOTD announcements?  And the confusion
of people wondering why their login went, and their friends didn't? ;-)

   But, once we're more stable (most likely on the SPARC), we'll
press ahead with it.

response 114 of 270:

Jun 5 05:03 UTC 1995

sfa is another account that STeve has here. 

response 116 of 270:

Jun 5 06:34 UTC 1995

Arnold, if you are going to become more involved with the nity gritys of
how this system works, I suggest you get a book on UNIX and read it. The
stuff steve was talking about in #112 are not classified, they are pretty
basic things. CompSci 101 type things.

response 118 of 270:

Jun 5 11:45 UTC 1995

Arnold: Everybody on Grex has a home directory, where their files are
stored.  Yours is called /home/adbarr.  Mine is /home/popcorn.  On Grex,
there is a "symbolic link" between /u and /home, which means that we
could also call your directory /u/adbarr, and mine /u/popcorn.
The problem is that there are 8000 people who have directories in /home,
which slows down the system.  If we broke /home into several smaller
chunks, it would speed up the access time to people's directories.
The proposed way to split up the directories was to split /home into
26 subdirectories with the names a, b, c, d, and so on.  Then, each 
of those subdirectories would have 26 subdirectories, also called a,
b, c, etc.  Then, your files would be moved from /home/adbarr to
/home/a/d/adbarr (because "a" and "d" are the first two letters of
your login ID).  My files would be moved to /home/p/o/popcorn.

However, Grex has a problem where files (and directories) disappear all
by themselves, for no reason.  A while back, someone set up the
alphabetical home directory structure, but we never moved people's
files into the new directories.  This turns out to be a good thing:
last time I rebooted Grex, we lost /home/I/f and /home/O/g (or something
like that).  If people's home directories had been located there, we
would have lost the home directories for everybody whose login ID started
with the letters "if" and everybody whose ID started with "og".  That's
a mess to clean up!!  The way things are set up right now, I dread the
chance of losing /home itself, but there aren't other targets like
/home/I/f to risk losing.  Once Grex is on a stable disk, the
/home/I/f idea will become much more feasible.

response 120 of 270:

Jun 6 06:33 UTC 1995

Arnold, I agree that learning more about Unix might be a very useful
thing, but it is peripheral both to the HVCN contract you are working
on and the item here. I think it is highly likely that HVCN may
want to do the same thing with tiered directory structures, but 
only in the fullness of time, and there's no need to fret about it 
right now. Grex, otoh, has about 8000 active accounts and needs to
be thinking about doing somethin like this.

We are, in fact, planning to reorganize the home directories here
as soon as the disk instability is fixed. (Soon, I hope).
I will discuss this issue in more detail with you by email in reference
to the HVCN considerations.

response 122 of 270:

Jun 7 03:02 UTC 1995

  Is there anyway, or maybe there should be, that new users could be
prompted to list their favorite confs and then they could type
"read all new" or something and get all new responses in the
designated confs in one read.  This would save having to join each
conf individually, and would lead to people reading all their 
favorite confs on a more regular basis.

response 124 of 270:

Jun 8 13:14 UTC 1995

Um, kerouac, do you know about setting up a .cflist file & using the "next"
command?  I don't really see what your proposal has that improves on that.