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Text of TeleFinder Chat from Tuesday, September 9, 1997 6 PM PDT.

In attendance:

From Spider Island: Rusty Tucker & eric

Special Guest from Keyspan: Jose Arellano

Sysops: Jim S., Ted Brindle, Bill Davies, mel redrup, Jonathan Paisley, Bob
Nunn & kjsfashk registered for the demo!

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     Rusty Tucker: It sounded like it would not help a sysop with a dial-up PPP connection,
     unless they also had a router.

     Rusty Tucker: On the other hand, if you did not have an Internet connection, Keyspan
     PPP will provide dial-up IP access to your LAN servers.  Is that right Jose?

     Jose Arellano: hehe ;)

     Jose Arellano: The PPP Server does not have a built in proxy server...

     Jose Arellano: so you can't share a single IP address with several machines...

     Jonathan Paisley: Can't the PPP server incorporate some of VIG's features?

     Jose Arellano: Not at the moment, we're looking into this.

     Rusty Tucker: What if you have an address block, and don't need proxying?

     Jose Arellano: Just getting to that...

     Rusty Tucker: :)

     Jose Arellano: You can use a block of IP addresses to serve to your PPP clients

     Rusty Tucker: But, will Keyspan PPP dial-out, or only accept dial-ins?

     Jose Arellano: It will only accept dialin PPP clients, it will not manage your Internet
     connection

     Rusty Tucker: OK.  So you really do need a router for that.

     Rusty Tucker: What about some of the PPP compression options, will it support those?

     Jose Arellano: Not yet, we're working on a new driver for this

     Rusty Tucker: Stac compression is pretty new, but if you've got compressing modems
     its probably not necessary.

     Jonathan Paisley: Is that to say that VIG and SoftRouter don't support PPP
     compression either?

     Jose Arellano: From my understanding, yes.

     Jonathan Paisley: Hmmn. Interesting.

     Rusty Tucker: There is Header compression, I'd bet that its supported.

     Jonathan Paisley: Rusty: compressing modems don't make as big a difference as
     compression in PPP protocol itself

     Jose Arellano: I'll take another look at some of the details and get back to you at the
     next chat

     Rusty Tucker: Van Jacobson Header compression eliminates some redundant data.

     Jonathan Paisley: Then there are various LZ compression techniques that may be
     implemented

     Rusty Tucker: But the Stac compression is like the LZ compression, it shouldn't matter
     where its implemented.

     Rusty Tucker: The modems use an LZ type of compression too.

     Jonathan Paisley: in-modem implementations are fairly restricted in terms of the code
     size and other parameters. As such their compression efficiency is limited. In addition,
     the compression used in the PPP protocol may be adaptive with respect to the data
     being transferred.

     Rusty Tucker: Yep, that's true.  Most have just 8k for the code libs.

     Rusty Tucker: Hi Bill and Ted. I missed you coming in!

     Rusty Tucker: Most everyone else here was at the earlier chat, so we skipped ahead a
     bit.

     Ted Brindle: Hello Rusty, just listening to see what I can learn.  :)

     Ted Brindle: no problem.

     Bill Davies: <-- Not Bill; Aaron Peckham, also working with MacNexus.

     Rusty Tucker: Bob's editing the logs ans they'll be up soon at
     www.spiderisland.com/~chat/

     Rusty Tucker: Oh, hi Aaron!

     Rusty Tucker: BTW - there is a beta of TF server online, 5.6b1

     Rusty Tucker: It updates the Web Star Plug-in Support to v1.2, same as WS 2.0

     Rusty Tucker: This version of the plug-in API lets plug-ins have their own windows, and
     lets them create TCP - IP servers.

     Rusty Tucker: Previously output was limited to the log  window, and PI's could only act
     as a client in TCP connections.

     Jonathan Paisley: I'm gonna start work on an FTP server tomorrow

     Rusty Tucker: Jon, why dont you tell us about your mail plug-in?

     Jonathan Paisley: sure.

     Ted Brindle: I am very interested in the Mail plug in.  I heard a little bit about it from
     Daniel.

     Rusty Tucker: it ROCKS!

     Jonathan Paisley: The Mail plugin, now almost ready for beta testing is basically the
     next-generation version of the original 'tfemail.acgi' program

     Jonathan Paisley: It supports telefinder email mail files (including full support for file
     attachments through binhex or macbinary)

     Jonathan Paisley: POP3 mail (including multipart-mime messages with HTML parts--
     shown in HTML!)

     Jonathan Paisley: attachments in POP3 mail

     Jonathan Paisley: AppleDouble attachments are currently not supported properly, but
     that's the top of the fix list

     Jonathan Paisley: Address Book (stored in the PUB folder in TeleFinder address book
     format„ie you can upload your address book from TF -User if you want)

     Jonathan Paisley: Default Signature for outgoing mail

     Rusty Tucker: That reminds me, what about a plain binary version for our PC friends?

     Jonathan Paisley: You can (I think) see the plugin in action on Spider Island BBS by
     accessing www.spiderisland.com/mail/

     Rusty Tucker: yep its there

     Jonathan Paisley: oops, I never thought of that (!)

     Rusty Tucker: I should see if there is an about screen in it yet:)

     Jose Arellano: Jonathan: Super cool!

     Jonathan Paisley: that'll be next :)

     Ted Brindle: I like it.  It works great.  How much to order it?  and will you take a
     purchase order?

     Rusty Tucker: nope, but its WSAPI 1.2!

     Jonathan Paisley: Rusty: Did you see the Preferences page?

     Rusty Tucker: Yep

     Jonathan Paisley: There's an option in there specially for you (background = white!)

     Jonathan Paisley: The price is currently undecided, but you'll be able to test it out
     when it's in public beta--soon!

     Bob Nunn: Jonathan, I'm ready to beta when you are!

     Bob Nunn: Can't wait.  Nice!

     Rusty Tucker: Whats the URL for that?

     Jonathan Paisley: access the preferences link at the bottom of one of the mail pages
     and at the bottom is an option for the background color (white or pattern)

     Jonathan Paisley: /mail/preferences.mail

     Ted Brindle: okay.  It looks like it is ready to me for beta testing.

     Rusty Tucker: found it, I was looking in global prefs

     Jonathan Paisley: All the pages may be customised fully, and its easy to add
     banners/etc that will appear on each and every page (eg the menu of links at the
     bottom is located in one file on disk)

     Rusty Tucker: BTW- each page has the same title, that makes it hard to use Explorers
     History menu.

     Jonathan Paisley: I plan to include a preference for using frames to keep the menu of
     links at the top or bottom permanently

     Ted Brindle: This looks like a great option for our staff.

     mel redrup: Sounds great to me too :o)

     Jonathan Paisley: Oh yes, so it does. I'll fix that so it includes more descriptive details
     in the title for each page (adding to the to-do list )

     Rusty Tucker: :)

     Jonathan Paisley: Did you get the white background option to work ok?

     Rusty Tucker: yep its white for me!

     Rusty Tucker: You should really be able to input a color variable or  link to a BG
     graphic.

     Rusty Tucker: I love makings suggs when I dont have to code it! :)

     Jonathan Paisley: Yup, that's the plan, but I just didn't get around to that this morning
     when I added the bg selection option. I planned to have a series of pre-set bg
     graphics/colours or the option to set your own

     Rusty Tucker: Then you'd need a color picker PAGE too .

     Rusty Tucker: Maybe Aaron knows the answer to this.

     Jonathan Paisley: heh, a large gif as an image map would solve that :)

     Rusty Tucker: Aaron, does NS 4 support BG colors in the <TD> tag?

     Rusty Tucker: Like explorer 3 supports colors in a table cell, but NS 3 doesn't

     Jonathan Paisley: Other cool features I've just remembered:

     Jonathan Paisley: Any text that looks like a URL in your mail messages are linked as
     hyperlinks that you can click on

     Jonathan Paisley: Attachments that are gifs or jpegs are inlined

     Ted Brindle: I think NS 3 does support background colors in the table tags.

     Jonathan Paisley: New and old mail is differentiated

     Jonathan Paisley: You can add a special piece of spml to your dir.spml and topic.spml
     pages that means it'll say "You have x new mail messages" with a hyperlink to your
     new mail :)

     Bob Nunn: and the customary bgsound you have new mail?

     Jonathan Paisley: Yup, that's actually in there too, but I need to add support in the
     plugin for identifying the browser as Netscape 3+ or IE 3+, since one uses <embed...
     and the other uses <bgsound>

     Ted Brindle: Can I start using this?  Let me know how I can help you, if you will let me
     beta test it soon.

     Jonathan Paisley: Send me email (jonathan_paisley@highlander.net.uk) and I'll send
     you the details when it's ready for beta

     Rusty Tucker: Oh hey, your right. NS 3 does support the colors!

     Ted Brindle: I have not even looked at Netscape 4 yet.

     Rusty Tucker: For now we can just edit a template and support one or the other I
     suppose?

     Bill Davies: Sorry I didn't answer your earlier questions! I haven't used the <TD> tag
     with a color, but I know it's possible -- Dave Winer's Scripting News site does it all the
     time. www.scripting.com. -- Aaron

     Jonathan Paisley: Yes, there is in fact a newmailsound wav in the distribution that you
     can use

     Ted Brindle: I am having a lot of trouble editting the templates for conference areas.
     Does anyone know if I am trying to do something that TF was not designed to do?

     Rusty Tucker: I didn't quite follow what you had posted Ted.

     Ted Brindle: That is what I was afraid of.

     Ted Brindle: I have been having a terrible time trying to explain it to Daniel also.

     Ted Brindle: I really need someone to visit the urls to see what I mean.

     Rusty Tucker: what's the url?

     Ted Brindle: hang on.  I will have to look it up.

     Jose Arellano: funny :)

     Ted Brindle: One url is:
     http://aberdeen.grps.k12.mi.us/topics/telestaff/Telestaff?which=all  and compare it to

     Ted Brindle: http://204.39.240.20/SIGMACHI/Alumni%20Chat?which=all  this is an
     entirely different organization, but the headers are still my school district.

     Rusty Tucker: this link:

     Rusty Tucker: http://aberdeen.grps.k12.mi.us/topics/telestaff//

     Rusty Tucker: has one too many /

     Ted Brindle: I tried to change the template so that I could have

     Ted Brindle: There is part missing.

     Ted Brindle: http://aberdeen.grps.k12.mi.us/topics/telestaff/Telestaff?which=all

     Rusty Tucker: Yes, isn't that a link to the page being shown?

     Ted Brindle: yes

     Rusty Tucker: The std is:

     Rusty Tucker: <a href="<!-- #echo PARENT_LOCATION --><!-- #echo DIRNAME -->/">
     Back to <!-- #echo DIRNAME --> </a>

     Rusty Tucker: that takes you back to the parent page.

     Rusty Tucker: <!-- #echo LOCATION -->

     Rusty Tucker: is the page you're on

     Ted Brindle: okay thanks,  I needed to fix that also.

     Rusty Tucker: + you need to add the CGI params : "?which=all"

     Rusty Tucker: You can use those to refresh the page,

     Rusty Tucker: is that what you want to do?

     Ted Brindle: no

     Ted Brindle: Did you see the Grand Rapids Public School headers?

     Ted Brindle: and the kids banners at the bottom?

     Rusty Tucker: Yes

     Ted Brindle: I want to have different templates to show different banners and headers
     for various organizations and department areas.

     Rusty Tucker: oh!

     Rusty Tucker: That's easy!

     Ted Brindle: I have not been able to get the templates to accept.

     Ted Brindle: I was afraid of that.  because it has had me stumped.

     Rusty Tucker: You need to make a folder for each org

     Rusty Tucker: or make a personal web site for each, that may be easiest

     Ted Brindle: okay, I did that.

     Ted Brindle: I have not tried the personal web site.

     Rusty Tucker: Copy the conference into the personal web site

     Rusty Tucker: then copy the Templates folder there and customize away

     Ted Brindle: does the templates folder go into the web space?

     Rusty Tucker: yep

     Ted Brindle: okay.  I will try this in the morning.

     Rusty Tucker: i just got mail!

     Rusty Tucker: To        rustyt@spiderisland.com

     From    lkfas@klsafj.com

     Subject demo register

     Date    09/10/97 02:20:54

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     kjhsk just registered for the TeleFinder Demo.

     company: kjsfashk

     other

     city kjsfk

     state kjsfa

     country jkd

     phone 342-435-4424

     Rusty Tucker: :)

     Bob Nunn: Hey Rusty I know that guy  he is a member on my system too.  Send me the
     log.  Goodnight!

     Rusty Tucker: well guys I think its dinner time!

     Ted Brindle: have a good night.

     Rusty Tucker: Thanks for your time Jose!

     Jose Arellano: Good night everyone!

     Jim S.: No... bed time

     Rusty Tucker: I'll get the log file to you before I go

     Jose Arellano: Thanks for inviting me, Rusty!

     Bob Nunn: See ya.  /~chat later this evening.

     Jonathan Paisley: heh :)

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September 9,1997 -- ©Copyright 1997, Spider Island Software