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Gateways 1.5: More Internet

It appears that I have hit a chord with my first article on the Internet. I don’t wish to delve into the details, but several people have offered useful suggestions to that first article that I thought you would find interesting.

Zen — Prentice-Hall will soon release the second edition of a $22 book called "Zen and the Art of the Internet." The first edition of this book exists all over the place on the Internet in Unix-compressed PostScript form. You may not want to check out this file since getting it will be complicated for a number of reasons, including the fact that you will be dealing with a 450K file. However, to get instructions on how to receive the first edition, send email to <[email protected]> with the command "send zen hints" in the body of your message. You’re on your own.

FAQ — You may see this abbreviation strewn around the Internet in various places, and unless someone has explained it to you, it may not make much sense. FAQ stands for Frequently Asked Questions, and since the Internet grows at a rate of about 20% each month, people come into a discussion group late and miss a long thread about a particular question. The late-comer promptly asks the question again, and the process repeats itself. Enter FAQ lists. They take the most common questions and provide answers so that late-comers don’t interrupt the ongoing conversations to ask about subjects that have been covered already.

A recently created Usenet group includes a FAQ posting about the Mac, and it has been made available via FTP at <sumex-aim.stanford.edu> as…

/info-mac/report/cmsf-faq.txt

(and remember what I said in Gateways 1 in TidBITS-130 about the mirror sites and mailservers). The file is 55K, unfortunately, so it won’t fit through the AppleLink gateway and America Online will truncate it to 27K.

 FAQ Table of Contents

  I.    Introduction
         1. What other information is available?
         2. Posting Etiquette
  II.   The Question of the Year:
         Why is my system using so much memory?
  III.  FTP
         1. Where can I FTP Macintosh software?
         2. Can I get shareware by E-mail?
         3. Where can I find Application X?
         4. Can someone mail me Application X?
         5. What is .bin? .hqx? .cpt? .image? .etc?
  IV.   Viruses
         1. Help! I have a virus!
         2. Reporting new viruses
  V.    Printing
         1. How do I make a PostScript file?
         2. How do I print a PostScript file?
         3. Why won't my PostScript file print on my mainframe's
            printer?
         4. Why are my PostScript files so big?
         5. How can I print PostScript on a non-PostScript printer?
         6. How do I make my ImageWriter II print in color?
         7. Why doesn't PrintMonitor work with the ImageWriter?
         8. Why did my document change when I printed it?
  VI.   System Software
         1. What is System 7 Tuneup? Do I need it?
         2. Do I need System 7.01?
         3. How can I get System 7.01 on 800K disks?
         4. Why do my DA's disappear when I turn on MultiFinder?
  VII.  DOS and the Mac
         1. How can I move files between a Mac and a PC?
         2. How can I translate files to a DOS format?
         3. Should I buy SoftPC or a real PC?
  VIII. Security
         1. How can I prevent users from changing the contents of a
            folder?
         2. How can I password protect my Mac?
  IX.   Hard Disks
         1. Help! My folder disappeared!
         2. Why can't I throw this folder away?
  X.    Floppy Disks
         1. Why can't my new Mac read my old Mac's floppy disks?
         2. Can I turn a double-density disk into a high density
            disk by punching an extra hole in it?
  XI.   Miscellaneous
         1. How can I preview a PostScript file?
         2. How do I edit a PostScript file?
         3. What does System Error xxx mean?
         4. How do I use a picture for my desktop?
         5. How do I make a startup screen?
         6. Can I replace the "Welcome to Macintosh" box with a
            picture?
         7. What is AutoDoubler? Is it safe?
         8. How does AutoDoubler compare to other compression
            products?
         9. What's a good text editor for the Mac?
         10. Where did my icons go?

FTP Tips — Andy Shepard writes:

Your interesting article on gateways in TidBITS-130 prompted me to write a short note with a couple of further useful tidbits:

  • When you FTP to an archive site, you must enter a username and a password. Almost exclusively, the username is "anonymous" and the password is your email address, usually in the form [email protected] (using my address as an example).
  • For the large base of UK Mac Users (and indeed other European countries), a better all-round site than the Swedish one you mentioned is at host <src.doc.ic.ac.uk>, which can be FTP’ed for simple file transfer, or you can logon for limited interactive use using "telnet src.doc.ic.ac.uk" (login="sources", no password) – the directory /tmp is writable. This site has archives of Mac, PC, UNIX, X, and Vax software and news. The Mac archive mirrors the umich archive as well as the sumex archive (in directories /mac/umich and /mac/sumex respectively). In addition there is even a mail-server facility, though I’ve never had to try this. The best UK/Euro archie site is nearby at <archie.doc.ic.ac.uk> (login="archie").
  • For people retrieving files from FTP-sites: you can save yourself a great deal of frustration if you remember that Unix (the operating system on most servers these days) is CaSe SeNsItIve!
  • Be respectful when using FTP – confine your time to out-of-hours periods – bear in mind the time differences across the Atlantic and Pacific!

Information from:
Andy Sheppard — [email protected]

List o’ Lists — Jon Pugh writes to tell us about the List of Lists file:

This file lists all the mailing lists you can subscribe to. Info-Mac is listed, and TidBITS should be. The file includes instructions on adding or updating your entry. The file is available via FTP from <ftp.nisc.sri.com> in the file

netinfo/interest-groups.Z

It is a compressed Unix text file. Use any Unix "uncompress" compatible command to expand it into a normal text file. For those of you not on Unix machines, make sure to download as binary and use MacCompress or Stuffit Deluxe to expand the file.

Definitely a must-read file for anyone interested in electronic communications. It’s 360K compressed and 879K uncompressed. Heavy, but worth it.

Information from:
Jon Pugh — [email protected]

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