There are 14 messages totalling 626 lines in this issue.
Topics of the day:
1. (Off topic) Info needed about headers in European countries
2. <No subject given>
3. Filling form
4. Y2K nonsense (2)
5. Ask about news server
6. FTPMail, Agora, etc. statistics
7. A gift
8. Find wgnuplot (2)
9. Making forms (3)
10. Correction: New fax-to-email gateway URL
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Date: Sun, 21 Feb 1999 02:49:21 EST
From: David Ames <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: (Off topic) Info needed about headers in European countries
I have an E-mail chess opponent served by t-online.de. I transmit moves
at about 22:00 (-0500) EST using juno. My outbox shows a correct
date/time stamp. My opponent, who is one hour east of Greenwich,
confirms my sending as being on the following day. This has happened
three times in a row. I have directly challenged him that I want to see
the header of the message that he receives. His response is an offer to
ignore the rule about tracking time used. This is not in my interest and
I believe it is not in the best interest of the competition, so I intend
to refuse I have written in German to [EMAIL PROTECTED], with
copies to my opponent and to the tournament director, forwarding my
previous letter with the outbound header. I asked politely ("Sehr
geehrter Herr" und "Ich bitte Ihnen, was haben Sie gesandt, so dass Herr
X unrichtig denkt?") Perhaps the postmaster will respond after the
weekend, or perhaps not. My opponent knows that he has been challenged
directly and through his E-mail service, and he must understand that he
will be challenged through the tournament director. He is still
unresponsive.
Is there any basis in European usage to suppose that the date/time stamp
contained in my outgoing header has been altered to Greenwich or local
time? I must say that this man, refusing to justify his adverse actions,
is spoiling the pleasure I expected to have from this competition.
David Ames
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Train an eagle in the way he should go and he will never amount to
anything."
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 21 Feb 1999 02:49:06 PST
From: shahram vaziri <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: <No subject given>
Hi,
who can transfr only 35 US $ vie credit card?
Thanks
______________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 21 Feb 1999 14:48:29 -0700
From: Irwan Hadi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Filling form
How can I fill form using www4mail or agora, since the results are always
incomplete.
I try to fill form like this :
http://domain.domain/cgi-bin/input?Name=John+Doe&Occupation=Medical&password
=very+secret..................&submit=y
I found it does work by [EMAIL PROTECTED], but it doesn't work by www4mail,
agora, getweb,, etc.
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 21 Feb 1999 08:42:41 -0600
From: Lloyd Colston <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Y2K nonsense
While I don't feel all the hype is accurate, as part of the local
Emergency Management team, I do take parts of it seriously.
While I don't look for a worldwide computer meltdown, I do look for
three to five days of inconvenience which may or may not be
caused by computers and which may or may not be confined to 1
January 2000 and proximity.
For example, all the bad guys think all the computers and
radios quit working at midnight. All the bad guys, in unison, decide
to go do evil stuff. That is an outcome of the Y2K problem but it is
not related to computers.
Thanks for being a voice of reason in a world of concern. I also
am what you would call a fundamentalist Christian (a term that I
don't call myself because I am just a Christian). I am aware of the
infomercials on the Christian channels selling high priced food. (I
also am aware of the US$50 Billion to be released to banks to
cover the flood of ATM withdrawals (inflation concerns arise here.).)
Therefore, I keep my faith as this:
If this is a problem, it is just another problem that God can help
me overcome.
Until then, I will be involved in doing what planning one can
reasonably expect someone in my office to do.
Please let me know how more I can help.
Lloyd Colston Excellence is not an accident
Pryor, OK USA social worker, writer, editor
KC5FM Home page http://www.Lloyd.Colston.com/
Offering low cost communication WORLDWIDE
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 21 Feb 1999 12:52:41 +0700
From: Minh Duc <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Ask about news server
Hi all,
How can I find a public news server?
Thank you for your reading.
________
Minh Duc
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 21 Feb 1999 06:01:13 GMT
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: FTPMail, Agora, etc. statistics
FTPMail, Agora, etc. statistics for Sat 20 Feb 1999, posted Sun 21 Feb, 06:00 GMT/BST
Less than 1 hour
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1-4 hours
None
4-10 hours
None
More than 10 hours
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Response within 4 hours in at least 5 out of 7 recent tests
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This data is generated automatically around 0600 GMT/BST most
days. The performance reported is dependant on many factors and your
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Copyright Net Services 1999.
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 21 Feb 1999 05:09:39 PST
From: shahram vaziri <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: A gift
Hi,
Who can send me a gift.
I need a decoder for EROSTV!
Please they who can help me,contact with me.
Thanks
______________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 21 Feb 1999 18:14:17 +0800
From: xiong3 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Find wgnuplot
Hi, where can I download wgnuplot? I have downloaded a version from
ftp://ftp.tu-dresden.de/pub/soft/msdos/gnu/wgnuplot.exe
but i cannot find dll file. Thanks a lot.
Jiali
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 21 Feb 1999 20:15:14 +0100
From: Familia Larsen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Making forms
Hello!
I want to make an HTML page in my hard disk with a form to forward request
to searchers through Agora. Here's where I've arrived:
<FORM METHOD = POST ENCTYPE = "text/plain" ACTION
="mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]">
<INPUT type=text size=30
name=http://www.altavista.digital.com/cgi-bin/query?pg=q&what=web&kl=XX&q>
<INPUT type=submit value=Search>
</FORM>
What should I write as ENCTYPE to get a text in ASCII in the mail? I've took
a look in manuals and magazines, but I didn't found options for the
definition in ENCTYPE .
Thanks,
Ra�l
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 21 Feb 1999 14:53:42 -0500
From: Stephen Benjamin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Making forms
-----Original Message-----
From: Familia Larsen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Sunday, February 21, 1999 2:27 PM
Subject: Making forms
>Hello!
>I want to make an HTML page in my hard disk with a form to forward
request
>to searchers through Agora. Here's where I've arrived:
>
><FORM METHOD = POST ENCTYPE = "text/plain" ACTION
>="mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]">
><INPUT type=text size=30
>name=http://www.altavista.digital.com/cgi-bin/query?pg=q&what=web&kl=
XX&q>
><INPUT type=submit value=Search>
></FORM>
>
>What should I write as ENCTYPE to get a text in ASCII in the mail?
I've took
>a look in manuals and magazines, but I didn't found options for the
>definition in ENCTYPE .
Leave ENCTYPE out or just as you have it. The attribute values for
ENCTYPE are content types. Commonly used content types include
text/html, image/jpeg, model/vrml, video/quicktime, application/java,
etc. You don't need to specify this in the form.
That's a very clever form. You'll get this:
http://www.altavista.digital.com/cgi-bin/query?pg=q&what=web&kl=XX&q=s
earch+terms
Don't you want the 'send' command in there too? Well, you can't have
spaces in the name of a form so you'll have to replace the space with
a %20 which I don't think agora will parse. Maybe use the same form
you created but change the address to [EMAIL PROTECTED] which doesn't
need the SEND command.
- Stephen Benjamin
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
________________________________________________________
NetZero - We believe in a FREE Internet. Shouldn't you?
Get your FREE Internet Access and Email at
http://www.netzero.net/download.html
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 21 Feb 1999 12:11:12 -0800
From: "Gerald E. Boyd" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Making forms
Cross-Posted to HELP-NET and ACCMAIL...
At 08:15 PM 2/21/1999 +0100, Familia Larsen wrote the following:
>I want to make an HTML page in my hard disk with a form to forward
request
>to searchers through Agora. Here's where I've arrived:
>
><FORM METHOD = POST ENCTYPE = "text/plain" ACTION
>="mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]">
><INPUT type=text size=30
>name=http://www.altavista.digital.com/cgi-bin/query?pg=q&what=web&kl=XX
&q>
><INPUT type=submit value=Search>
></FORM>
>
>What should I write as ENCTYPE to get a text in ASCII in the mail?
I've took
>a look in manuals and magazines, but I didn't found options for the
>definition in ENCTYPE .
ENCTYPE identifies the media type which encodes the name-value pairs of
values
which the form outputs. The default is
ENCTYPE="application/x-www-form-urlencoded">
or ENCTYPE="x-www-form-encoded"> and has the following properties:
1. Name-value pairs are ordered in output as they are in the form
2. Each pair is separated by an ampersand ("&" )
3. Each name is connected with its value with the equals sign ( "=" )
4. Spaces in the name-value data are replaced by a plus sign ( "+")
5. Non-alphanumeric characters are replaced with "%" followed by their
ASCII
hexadecimal equivalents, i.e., a space (ASCII 32) is %20
6. Line breaks are represented by "%" followed by the standard carriage
return/line
feed hexadecimal code, "%0D0A" (ASCII 15 10)
NOTE: The above is for form processing by server-side scripts,
typically CGI (Common Gateway Interface) programming and only when the
METHOD type is POST.
ENCTYPE="multipart/form-data"> is used when the form contains a file
upload
element such as: (INPUT type="FILE"). This HTML tag was introduced by
Netscape for
upload of files.
ENCTYPE="text/plain"> is used when the form has its contents sent to a
mailto: URL
The HTML 4.0 Standards define enctype as:
enctype = content-type [CI]
This attribute specifies the content type used to submit the form
to the server (when
the value of method is "post"). The default value for this
attribute is
"application/x-www-form-urlencoded". The value
"multipart/form-data" should be used
in combination with the INPUT element, type="file".
6.7 Content types (MIME types)
Note. A "media type" (defined in [RFC2045] and [RFC2046]) specifies
the nature of a
linked resource. This specification employs the term "content type"
rather than "media
type" in accordance with current usage. Furthermore, in this
specification, "media
type" may refer to the media where a user agent renders a document.
This type is represented in the DTD by %ContentType;.
Content types are case-insensitive.
Examples of content types include "text/html", "image/png",
"image/gif", "video/mpeg",
"audio/basic", "text/tcl", "text/javascript", and "text/vbscript". For
the current list of registered
MIME types, please consult [MIMETYPES].
For more information, see: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/sgml/dtd.html
--
Gerry Boyd -- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 21 Feb 1999 16:59:32 -0800
From: "Gerald E. Boyd" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Find wgnuplot
At 06:14 PM 2/21/1999 +0800, xiong3 wrote the following:
>Hi, where can I download wgnuplot? I have downloaded a version from
> ftp://ftp.tu-dresden.de/pub/soft/msdos/gnu/wgnuplot.exe
>but i cannot find dll file. Thanks a lot.
The latest compiled version can be found at
ftp://cmpc1.phys.soton.ac.uk/incoming/. The files are typically
labelled gpbbbppp.zip or gp36-bbbppp.zip where bbb indicates the build
number and ppp indicates the platform. The platforms include w32
(32-bit Windows), nta (Windows NT for DEC Alpha), dj2 (DOS) and more.
Apple Macintosh and Power PC versions of Gnuplot can be found at
ftp://ftp.ee.gatech.edu/pub/mac/gnuplot/.
GnuPlot Beta Page
ftp://ftp.gnuplot.vt.edu/pub/gnuplot/
--
Gerry Boyd -- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 21 Feb 1999 03:26:44 -0800
From: Steve Klevatt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Correction: New fax-to-email gateway URL
The new service about to begin in the LA area is actually at
http://www.callwave.com (I might have misspoke earlier...)
ACCMailers can actually just send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
now in order to participate in a beta trial, giving your full e-mail address.
They'll contact you in a while to complete a registration form at their web
site (so it sounds like there's an additional getweb step that may be
involved), and begin using FaxWave. As stated previously, full service
is due to start up sometime in March.
Steve K.
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 21 Feb 1999 20:03:02 -0800
From: "Gerald E. Boyd" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Y2K nonsense
At 05:54 PM 2/20/1999 -5, HOWARD KARTEN wrote the following:
[...]
>phenomenon the reporter failed to notice. In a second
>story about "how it all came to be", the reporter badly
>garbled some information he'd been given. (Interested
>parties: go back and read that stuff; pay particular
>attention to the nonsense the reporter writes about the
>"picture clause" in Cobol!)
Pathetic is the word to describe this. When I read the article, I
thought this was written by a high school journalism major, not a major
US magazine writer.
>The bottom line is, don't pay too much attention to the
>nonsense you hear in the media. If you want more accurate
>information, find a programmer (preferably an older
>programmer who worked on mainframes years ago) and ask that
>person.
Ok, here is from the old-timer, especially IBM OS/360/370, MVS, MVS/XA,
MVS/ESA and OS/390 operating systems from IBM 1620's to new IBM CMOS
mainframes.
Once upon a time when computers meant mainframes and only a few thousand
people in the world worked with them, the Y2K "bug" was born. Probably
the most significant date was in 1964 when the IBM System 360 was
released. At the time computers and storage were expensive. Large
mainframe
installations were in the range $10-20 million each and computations
cost about $0.035 per 100,000. Computers and computing were expensive.
Computing charges were billed back to the originating department. There
was no such thing as a CIO or that computers should be taken for
granted or
that their costs should not be charged. Hence a program had to be
inexpensive
to run or the originating department would scream at the programmers for
costing them money.
The original OS/360 TIME macro instruction (the assembler language
macro that gets the time value from the computer system clock)
returned, in register 1, the date in packed decimal format: 00YYDDDF
where YY was the year as 2 digits, DDD was the Julian day number
(1-365) and F is the sign byte '1111' . So any date routine by any
computer program or computer language would only return a 2 digit year.
If you wanted 4 digit years, they would have to have been coded in the
computer program. The mainframe sure wasn't going to give it to you!
NOTE: The time macro since about 1980 or so with MVS, MVS/XA, MVS/ESA,
and OS/390 now returns data in the form 0CYYDDDF where C is a digit
representing the century. In the years 1900 through 1999, the macro will
return a value of C=0. In the years 2000 through 2099, the macro will
return a value of C=1. YY is the last two digits of the year. DDD is
the Julian day of the year (1-365) and F is a 4-bit sign character
'1111' that allows the data to be unpacked and printed.
The shortcutting of storing dates came about by most COBOL programmers
saving dates in the MMDDYY or DDMMYY instead of DDMMYYYY or MMDDYYY. We
were all saving 2 bytes per record. If you had a 10,000 employee
database and one file for each employee, you saved 20,000 bytes.
Computing was expensive. Small tightly-coded programs that ran quickly
were the rule. You had to cram as much code as possible into a program
but it had to be compact and quick running. You could not afford to run
large programs -- it was too expensive.
Mainframes had no more than 2Mb real memory. Virtual memory was unknown.
Large programs were limited to 1500K in size lest you bog down and hog
up CPU cycles.
Programs larger than 1500K had to be run in off-peak hours, not during
the business hours. We all learned good programming techniques such as
overlays so that we could squeeze a 2200K program in less than 1500K.
The first mainframe I worked on, an IBM 1620 only had 64K memory!!
The problem with PCs is everyone is now blinded to the reality of how
tightly-coded programs are in the mainframe world. Large mainframes
today still only run about 2Mb real memory and up to 64Mb virtual
memory. However, most have multiple CPUs -- 6 to 8 and verrrrrry efficient
operating systems to support multi-user and multi-programming
environments.
Tight code and quickly running programs is still the rule in the
mainframe world.
10,000 users and 350+ plus programs running simultaneously doesn't even
cause
the mainframe to slowdown.
The main Y2K problem in the business world is locating all the COBOL
source code, going through it to see if there is a date calculation, and
then revising the code for a four-character year. Programs that only
print dates or don't use them in calculations are not being updated
first but held for later updating. You then have to run the programs and
databases on a second or test sytem to simulate dates greater than 2000
and perform many performance tests. We are talking about tremendous
amounts of code throughout the world and tremendous resources being
used. You can't shutdown your day-to-day operations until one whole
database and all the associated programs that go with it are throughly
tested. You then have a production turnover at some off-peak hour, 2-4AM
usually, and roll out the new system.
Companies with many systems and programs have millions of lines of code
and thousands of programs to go through. This is not a simple task.
Where I worked we had gone through about 85% of our code by July 1998.
Full-scale testing will be done for the whole year of 1999 running
duplicate systems. It was cheaper for us to buy another small mainframe
computer ($4 million) and additional DASD to duplicate and run parallel
systems than try to disrupt day-to-day operations involving a customer
database of 1.3 million.
Our biggest problem involved old 360-assembler language programs that
were coded and linked to our COBOL code. Many of the original sources
have been lost and some of the routines were coded in the 60s and 70s.
Also, most newer programmers don't even know 360-assembler so some of us
"old" dogs got the reward of re-writing the code. You take a dump of the
code and go back and try to re-create the 360-assembler language. This
then will be re-written in "new" assembler language. Talk about
difficult. I'm glad I retired.
I'll say it again, Y2K is a programming problem. Mainframes have not
had a date problem since 1980 because their date routines are DDMMYYYY.
However,
the millions of line of COBOL code running do have a problem because so
many of us early programmers only carried the date as DDMMYY. We did
this because we had to have tightly-coded programs running in mimimal
memory quickly.
Heck, my PC today has more capability than the first $12 million IBM
360 I worked on. The big exception is that the Windoze 98 operating
system sucks and no way can be considered a multi-user
multi-programming OS. It's a pathetic excuse for an OS. And don't
bother mentioning Windoze NT which is another loser. The only OSs for
PCs that even comes close is Linux and OS/2.
--
Gerry Boyd -- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
------------------------------
End of ACCMAIL Digest - 20 Feb 1999 to 21 Feb 1999 (#1999-53)
*************************************************************
