response 73 of 109:

Aug 1 20:11 UTC 2008

("l" word... Unix commands... never mind.)

response 75 of 109:

Aug 1 20:55 UTC 2008

 See, I thought you were going for "WTF?  SysV style print commands suck --
 everyone knows that!"

response 77 of 109:

Aug 18 13:51 UTC 2008

So I made some changes to fronttalk today....

1) I incorporated bellstar's changes to add a 'respond' command at the Ok:
prompt.

2) I made 'l' work as a synonym for "last" at the RFP prompt.  So, "l", "la",
"las", "last" and "$" all do the same thing there.

response 79 of 109:

Aug 20 09:12 UTC 2008

Ain't no thang.

response 81 of 109:

Aug 24 02:47 UTC 2008

Maybe.  What's it do, and what prompt is it used at?

response 83 of 109:

Aug 24 18:47 UTC 2008

I'll look into it.

Jan hasn't responded about any of the patches I've sent him; I'm not
quite sure what to make of that.

response 85 of 109:

Aug 26 02:03 UTC 2008

It looks like that's already abbreviated to "pre".

response 87 of 109:

Sep 16 02:24 UTC 2008

RE #25 >>CMSs are "certainly" not the way for Grex to go.

Here!Here! I cringe at the mention of CMS in the context of GREX. I 
have developed sites using both XOOPs and JOOMLA solutions and have 
found both to be an insult to knowledgeable web design. They are 
certainly capable of producing professional results but they strike me 
as very 'Rube Goldburg' in nature. 

The XOOPs site I did only to test the software. But the JOOMLA site is 
a current project. I did a bunch of research on CMS software and 
decided to go with JOOMLA mainly due to it's massive following 
(translating that to mean a greater support community.) I had always 
wanted to try a serious CMS site when my son came up with a website 
idea he wanted to try. He has no web skills at all and I set this up 
for him because at least the administrative functions are logically 
presented and well documented. 

The thing is so overbuilt yet convoluted. Everything was included in 
the basic setup except what you need. I added a "Simple Machines Forum" 
(SMF) forums module which is very slick but It is so much like 
everything else on the internet. If all you want is a forum site this 
is really a nice solution. (Bridging Modules? - OMG!) 

What GREX would do with any of this stuff is beyond me. But trust me on 
this incorporating a CMS into the current setup would be a programming 
nightmare! It would be far easier to rewrite GREX in PHP from scratch 
to do "whatever" than to try to customize a CMS.

I like the new GREX website. The clean cut CSS design fits in well with 
the true GREX tradition (Telnet + ASCII.) I was NEVER fond of the old 
web front. It just never felt like it was promoting the place I had 
known as cyberspace.org. 

Back talk is VERY NICE in that it makes the conferences so easy to 
navigate and contribute to. However, on the telnet side the conferences 
where always just tricky enough to limit posters to folks that I felt 
have paid some sort of dues to participate. I think some of that is 
lost with BackTalk but so much is gained in ease of use, it is hard to 
argue against it.  

One thing I really miss from my old bulleten board days is ANSI support.
We used to have a blast goofin' around with the graphics and sounds. I 
know they where just toys but we could really do some fancy screens and 
menus. We segregated ourselves into SIGs (Special Intrest Groups). I 
always thought the various conferences here where the next best thing 
but there has never seemed to be much purpose to contributing to many 
(most) of those available. 

Here's an idea:

What about getting active groups to collaberate on webpages to promote 
their special intrest and having their conferences only visible to 
logged in members. Keep agora publicly readable, of course. But the "I 
Like Gardening" conference takes place 'behind closed doors.'

For instance the "I Like Gardening" conference would have a webpage to 
promote itself and invite folks to come join the fun. Perhaps allow a 
500K limit on graphics for use on the page. This would reguire some 
limited graphics handling (for reviews and what-not) maybe give each 
participating conference/group 5meg or so of storage to cull their page 
from. Not only would this sort of thing attract attention from the surf-
by visitor it would encourage GREXers to develop their web design 
skills or at least bring to the group an individual with such 
tendencies. 

If we could evolve into a GREX of Website Designers as well as UNIX 
users we would find we could maintain GREX and build it ourselves into 
anything we wish it to be.

response 89 of 109:

Sep 16 14:06 UTC 2008

resp:87 Hmm, interesting idea.  We've been thinking about "fishbowl" 
conferences for some time now; YAPP had the ability to have
finer-grained  access controls for conferences which would, I think,
provide a starting  point for the sort of things you are talking about
(accessible from the  command line, not accessible from the web; up to
the conference's  administration to decide which way to go).  The
problem with enabling that  sort of support in backtalk was, of course,
legacy support for Picospan.   Since we're moving away from Picospan,
however, we might be able to rethink  these sorts of things (fronttalk,
the "new" terminal-based interface for  BBS, is just a frontend to
backtalk).  Anyway, the point is that it's  technically possible,
provided it's something that the community wants to  do.

With respect to the web site, I think the thing to do is keep most of it
 static, with some cron scripts and 

resp:88 Certainly!  Read /usr/local/bin/fronttalk, and the libraries are
in  /usr/local/lib/fronttalk-0.9.2.  Feel free to read whatever you
like; if you  see bugs, or want to make a change, just send email or
post here, or (for  changes) copy the files in question to your home
directory, make a change,  and email or post a patch (diff -u format
works best).  Provided the changes  are reasonable, I've got no problems
incorporating them into the running  version here on Grex and sending an
email to Jan.

For that matter, there are a number of things that need to be
incorporated  into the current code to make it compatible with Picospan.

response 91 of 109:

Sep 18 12:05 UTC 2008

I thought of making some changes to web pages. 
1. Creating common header html which can be included in all the html files.
2. Creating common footer 
3. Creating common sidebar html file

In order to do this I tried copying all the files from /var/www/htdocs to my
home directory. But it looks like I dont have enough disk quota. Is there any
way I can copy this entire folder to my local machine? 

response 93 of 109:

Sep 18 15:23 UTC 2008

To download the htdocs folder is to attempt to get way more files than 
you need or would even want. There are subfolders to htdocs that are 
actually links to folders elswhere in the system and those probably 
contain symbolic links to other folders as well. It is entirely 
possible you are meeting yourself coming and going - downloading files 
more than once in some cases. Some folders and contents are permission 
based and cannot be accessed. Much of what you can download is no-doubt 
irrelevent to your project but may shed some light on the structure of 
the grex website. 

I have downloaded what I could. I have ommitted the GREX minutes 
documents but admit they would probably be in interesting (& dry) read. 
I've also pruned the stats folder (almost 50MB in itself.) I have made 
these files  available for downloading in a compressed ZIP file at the 
following link.


check here http://www.cyberspace.org/~madmike/GREX/


 I was hoping this might ease bandwith demands on grex in case anyone 
else was curious as to these files and their contents. I havent yet 
checked what all is included but I'm sure you will find what you are 
looking for. 


When I get the time I'll prune this down to the bare essentials. But 
for now I think I'll have a look myself.

STAFF: If you would rather I did not do this let me know.

response 95 of 109:

Sep 18 16:55 UTC 2008

Oops I tried downloading. But I am not able to do the same.