response 12 of 58:

Jan 10 02:17 UTC 2004

I don't think #1 is true.  I don't recall any place that Picospan uses UID.

response 14 of 58:

Jan 10 05:26 UTC 2004

Here is a typical header for a response in a picospan item:
    ,E
    ,R0000
    ,U1017,bhoward
    ,Abruce howard
    ,D2887870b
    ,T

extracted from one of the conferences.  Note the ,U line which encodes
uid and login.  As others have pointed out, it is the combination of
both these things that uniquely identify the owner of a response (or
for that matter, item) when picospan needs to determine ownership to
decide whether you are allowed to do something.

response 16 of 58:

Jan 10 15:32 UTC 2004

Re #14:  Right, Picospan response headers contain both the uid and
the login id.  To verify that Picospan actually uses them both, I
created an account with the same login id as a long-deleted user
who had posted in the test conference and tried to retire and freeze
the user's items.  Picospan wouldn't let me do it, as expected.

response 18 of 58:

Jan 10 16:18 UTC 2004

If you used newuser to create a new account with the same login id
as your old  one, then the answer is yes.  Your new account got a
different uid than the old one, and Unix uses uid's to determine
file access rights.

response 20 of 58:

Jan 10 20:19 UTC 2004

Picospan and Backtalk require both login and UID to match before you can
scribble an response.  Unfortunately it isn't as careful about
fairwitnesses.  If a fairwitness is reaped and you capture the old login
id, it will work for you.  Yapp fixes this defect.

Valerie wrote her reap program in quite a hurry.  If one were to spend a
bit of time at it, one could write one that runs much faster with less
impact on the system.  I could write a backtalk script that would do
pretty well.  I have no plans to do so, but if the system load were the
only objection to such "blitzcraig" scripts, then it would be a
surmountable problem.

response 22 of 58:

Jan 10 22:13 UTC 2004

>Yapp fixes this defect.

Uhh, the YAPP that runs on m-net sure doesn't.  OR maybe you're talking about
a newer version.
Plus, valerie's reap program is too user-friendly to be a quick hacked-up job.
Plus, there's also the 'nice' command.

response 28 of 58:

Jan 11 17:42 UTC 2004

Re: yapp.  Fairwitnesses in Yapp can be given in either of two formats.
 Login ID alone, as in Picospan, or login plus uid number.  The former
is for backward compatibility.  The latter option has existed in the
code since almost the first release.  It's possible that the cfadms on
M-Net don't know it are are entering fairwitnesses in the old format.

Valerie wrote her script in an evening.  She's a good programmer and
though I haven't looked at it, I'm sure it's pretty well done.  But
something could be written that would run much faster, even on the
stunningly slow Grex computer.  It would take much more than an evening
to really do it well.  I could do a pretty good job in an evening
because I have the backtalk code base to work off of.

response 30 of 58:

Jan 12 01:26 UTC 2004

The world is well supplied with bad programmers.  Valerie is not one of
them.

response 32 of 58:

Jan 12 05:55 UTC 2004

Guys, user-friendly is not the same as documenting your code.
Incidentally, valerie's script has practically no documentation!
Unless of course your idea of a good programmer is one who puts lots of
instructions but practically no comments.

response 34 of 58:

Jan 12 06:04 UTC 2004

valerie may be a good programmer, but it sure takes a kick in the ass to get
her going.