TeleFinder Chat Log

Text of TeleFinder Chat from Tuesday, November 3, 1997 11 AM PST.

In attendance:

From Spider Island: Rusty Tucker,

Sysops: Michael Davidson, Ken Sutherland, Jonathan Paisley, Bob Nunn

Jonathan Paisley: hi Michael

Michael Davidson: ready for mail PI questions?? :)

Rusty Tucker: Hola!

Michael Davidson: Hi Rusty

Jonathan Paisley: yah, sure!

Michael Davidson: I'm on another line with my ISP, I may have to "disconnect quickly"

Jonathan Paisley: modem hung up :(

Michael Davidson: Hi 2

Jonathan Paisley: ;

Michael Davidson: What's in the Rusty works?

Rusty Tucker: Looking at cleaning up 5.6 and releasing it soon!

Jonathan Paisley: how about including support for serving by file type/creator?

Rusty Tucker: :)

Michael Davidson: Great

Rusty Tucker: I'll take a look at adding that when Internet Config is installed.

Jonathan Paisley: great!

Jonathan Paisley: Like I said before, WebStar does it, so TF really ought to too :)

Rusty Tucker: I need to find out what is a higher priority extension or type

Jonathan Paisley: extension is higher priority

Jonathan Paisley: I saw a post about it in WebStar[dev|talk] list a few days ago

Rusty Tucker: From a "Purity" point of view, it should really just be extension

Rusty Tucker: It may be confusing to some users otherwise

Jonathan Paisley: W* searches for an extension match. If there is no extension, or there is no extension match with defined mappings, file type and creator are searched

Jonathan Paisley: First for an exact file/creator match

Jonathan Paisley: second for a file type only

Rusty Tucker: Some people just won't get why a file has a given Finder icon, but gets served by TeleFinder differently than another file

Rusty Tucker: that has the same icon

Jonathan Paisley: Surely if the file has the same icon its likely to be the same file type?

Rusty Tucker: Overall its much simpler to go by File Extension only

Rusty Tucker: Exactly Jon, but maybe a different extension

Jonathan Paisley: One example where this would be very helpful is for serving text files on the BBS over the web. Text files that don't end in '.txt' aren't served as text/plain, but are shown raw by the browser, without proper line mappings

Jonathan Paisley: Perhaps we could have an option for turning it on or off then?

Jonathan Paisley: Remember also though, that WebStar does this automatically, and I've never seen/heard of problems from WebStar users experiencing difficulty with this behaviors

Rusty Tucker: maybe so

Rusty Tucker: Do you know what priority Internet Config uses?

Michael Davidson: ?

Rusty Tucker: ga

Michael Davidson: Can IE display PICT previews if it has the QT plug-in installed?

Rusty Tucker: I didn't try that Michael

Michael Davidson: I might have to go in a second

Jonathan Paisley: my main reason for wanting this facility is to be able to serve up jpeg images directly from the bbs without having to add '.jpg' to the filename

Jonathan Paisley: I have a plugin working that extracts pict previews from jpegs etc and creates a GIF from it on the fly, caching as it goes

Rusty Tucker: I'll try it in the next B release

Jonathan Paisley: cool!

Jonathan Paisley: Michael: you had q's regarding the mail pi?

Rusty Tucker: Jon, did you get the TF Dir Mapping/Vir hosting issue resolved? I've never seen anything like that before.

Rusty Tucker: BTW - i send you an email file that produced the wrong downloading options.

Rusty Tucker: ( in the mail-pi )

Jonathan Paisley: Oh yeah, I remember that now. The file got filed away in my attachment sfolder and I forgot all about it. I'll add a sticky to remind me about it

Jonathan Paisley: What went wrong with that particular message?

Rusty Tucker: It showed 2 attachments, when there was really just 1

Jonathan Paisley: Was it AppleDouble encoded?

Rusty Tucker: maybe so

Jonathan Paisley: It should have shown two files, the first with a '%' at the start (depends on what encoded the appledouble in the first place)

Rusty Tucker: yep that's it

Jonathan Paisley: The PI doesn't know about appledouble at the moment

Rusty Tucker: ok

Jonathan Paisley: Its a pain, because in general AppleDouble has the resource fork first, then the data fork

Jonathan Paisley: Unfortunately, all the mac encoding methods (eg macbinary and binhex) encode the data fork before the resource fork.

Rusty Tucker: why is that a prob?

Jonathan Paisley: What I need to do is either extract and cache the resource fork to a file, or save the file position (probably what I'll do) and go back and read that part.

Jonathan Paisley: It's a prob since the PI tries to do absolutely everything based on a single non-positionable stream

Rusty Tucker: you shouldn't need to do that much work

Rusty Tucker: just create the res file and write it, then the data

Jonathan Paisley: IE, it decodes base64 Pop3 attachments as it goes and then re-encodes in macbinary or binhex in order to send to the client

Rusty Tucker: o i c

Jonathan Paisley: But I'd rather not have to build the file on disk. But I may resort to that...

Jonathan Paisley: The other thing is that building the file on disk will take time, time during which the client is not receiving any data

Rusty Tucker: right, plus you might run out of space

Jonathan Paisley: exactly

Jonathan Paisley: Also, the code to parse multipart 822 messages is a real pain

Rusty Tucker: seeking back is probably the thing to do

Rusty Tucker: have you checked out "hotmail"

Jonathan Paisley: especially when you have to consider that some multipart parts constitute one attachment (appledouble), whereas sometimes the part is just an alternative (text/html)

Jonathan Paisley: I don't know about hotmail, I have an account there but rarely use it. I have a friend who uses hotmail exclusively, so he may know about hotmail's handling of attachments

Jonathan Paisley: Basically, everything would be very easy if I were to parse the 822 file TWICE. However, I'd rather not do that since

Rusty Tucker: I know they have a 1 Meg limit.

Rusty Tucker: I'll send myself a appledouble and see what happens

Jonathan Paisley: the 822 file may contain (say) a 10mb attachment, and that would take an awful long time to parse twice

Jonathan Paisley: You might find that it just lets you download the appledouble file

Jonathan Paisley: And then you have to somehow drop that into something like your POP3 email client that will decode it for you.

Jonathan Paisley: One thing you can do with the mail pi is let the browser view the RFC822 file as MIME type message/RFC822

Jonathan Paisley: When you are viewing a message, the url should be something like view.mail?file=12345

Rusty Tucker: u mean as raw test?

Ken Sutherland: is it me or is this sllloooowwww

Rusty Tucker: text

Rusty Tucker: not slow here

Jonathan Paisley: Change it to RFC822.asimail?file=12345

Jonathan Paisley: That should show the RFC822 as the browser will view it

Jonathan Paisley: That way you can let the browse re-extract the message

Jonathan Paisley: I know for one that Netscape just downloads the appledouble part and does nothing else with it

Jonathan Paisley: .

Rusty Tucker: it wanted to download it as RFC822

Jonathan Paisley: yah, that's right. That URL I indicated should to that

Jonathan Paisley: .

Ken Sutherland: where did every 1 go

Rusty Tucker: no chatters today

Ken Sutherland: was telling Jon, demon in the uk are testing a mail plugin for pc

Ken Sutherland: nt

Rusty Tucker: yeah?

Rusty Tucker: did you see it?

Ken Sutherland: amy sing in the us

Ken Sutherland: not yet, will try tonight

Rusty Tucker: www.hotmail.com

Ken Sutherland: any sing

Rusty Tucker: a whole site based on web mail

Ken Sutherland: ok

Ken Sutherland: several virtual bbs's based on web are starting to become popular

Rusty Tucker: it would be great to sync the release of the mail-pi with TF Server 5.6 :)

Jonathan Paisley: what do you think about $$ for mail pi standalone (ie just the plugin)?

Ken Sutherland: Jon, status with attachment prob?

Rusty Tucker: also it would be nice to use SPML type code for customizing the pages.

Rusty Tucker: $150 seems good to me

Jonathan Paisley: I think a lot of users would think that a bit steep

Ken Sutherland: $149.99

Jonathan Paisley: How do you work with the commercial/hobby pricing strategy?

Rusty Tucker: You can always 'seed' the market with hand picked sites to get some examples in use

Rusty Tucker: Its pretty much in line with other Plug-in prices

Rusty Tucker: Check what they charge at Maxum and other web* PI's

Jonathan Paisley: BTW, I got the source from Suzie from Chris today...

Rusty Tucker: I just picked a price for hobbyists that seems good

Rusty Tucker: me2, that's the file that had the Apple Double attachment

Jonathan Paisley: What I meant was do you think it's worth having a 'hobbyists' price for the mail pi?

Jonathan Paisley: Having said that, hobbyists are unlikely to have a need for the mail pi

Jonathan Paisley: ie they're unlikely to have the necessary internet connection

Rusty Tucker: right

Rusty Tucker: I'd bang on sunflower and mac connect to get their interest in the mail pi

Jonathan Paisley: righto

Jonathan Paisley: [I'm gonna have to go in 10 mins]

Ken Sutherland: give k56 a miss BTW

Rusty Tucker: I found a folder with a bunch of ca 1995 Internet downloads :)

Rusty Tucker: things sure have changed!

Rusty Tucker: GNN was a "big site"

Ken Sutherland: dusty

Ken Sutherland: Jon, how is the SI feed, its crap through demon

Jonathan Paisley: I'm on through Glasgow uni dialup

Ken Sutherland: wow , big pipe

Ken Sutherland: have u worked out how to get plugin working with aims yet?

Rusty Tucker: Hye Bob!

Ken Sutherland: hi Bob

Bob Nunn: Hello sorry I am so late get tied up sometimes hate to miss anything. I need OAT update my server may be down if it expired right?

Rusty Tucker: brb

Jonathan Paisley: nope, not yet

Jonathan Paisley: yah

Ken Sutherland: u got new key

Ken Sutherland: ?

Ken Sutherland: will be showing Apple UK the mail plugin on Friday at the MacExpo in London

Bob Nunn: Did you say you sent me a new key. I have an office full.

Jonathan Paisley: gotta go, cya folks later!

Rusty Tucker: c ya

Bob Nunn: By Jon

Ken Sutherland: Bob, ok , what do you need?

Bob Nunn: I think my OAT is ready to expire.

Ken Sutherland: serial no.

Bob Nunn: Does 19063 sound right

Ken Sutherland: snap

Bob Nunn: think that is right.

Ken Sutherland: ok, copy paste these details, then delete from log 8-)

Rusty Tucker: yep its right

Bob Nunn: wait let us do that separate

Rusty Tucker: do it by IM

Ken Sutherland: ok

Ken Sutherland: that should do you for 30 days

Rusty Tucker: BTW - Should start updating the Spider Island Web Site today w/ new home page and TF Info pages

Ken Sutherland: we are hoping to release fc6 in the next few days

Ken Sutherland: we are classing it as final release

Ken Sutherland: ie OAT v2 by start of next week

Ken Sutherland: so even Rusty could run it 8-)

Rusty Tucker: The TeleFinder info is split into 4 sections, Web Server, BBS, Mail Server and TF Clients.

Ken Sutherland: BTW its been stable for weeks

Rusty Tucker: yee ha!

Ken Sutherland: smart

Ken Sutherland: Rusty, u promised me some docs, any chance of getting them

Rusty Tucker: oh yeah, TF User?

Ken Sutherland: for both clients

Ken Sutherland: when are u planning to release 5.6

Rusty Tucker: very soon - just gotta make the final tweaks

Ken Sutherland: rusty, would it be ok to use SI's chat room for a q/a session on oat and mail plugin

Rusty Tucker: Jon wants an change in the file mapping, so that it will work by extension and file type

Rusty Tucker: Yes, please do.

Rusty Tucker: Would you like me to post a time on the schedule?

Ken Sutherland: what day is better, Tuesday or Friday, best to run after SI chat

Rusty Tucker: i may have missed that

Ken Sutherland: what day is better, Tuesday or Friday, best to run after SI chat

Rusty Tucker: I'd go for a separate day- since the TF chat runs on from time to time

Ken Sutherland: 8-)

Rusty Tucker: + it would make the OAT chat more distinct

Rusty Tucker: like take Wed or Thursday

Ken Sutherland: IÕll check with Jon, if we release on schedule ( I hope) then maybe next Thursday

Ken Sutherland: Bob, any final probs we need to know about?

Rusty Tucker: time for me to go, I'll upload the log to chat

Bob Nunn: Not really. I haven't had time to retry the file search plug in again. I did not get it to work the first time I tried it. Thanks Rusty.