HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: rww@mugwump.cl.msu.edu (Richard W. Wiggins)
Subject: More people would use Gopher if...
Organization: Michigan State University
Date: Wed, 18 Nov 92 03:39:51 GMT

In article <92321.102821NLAFLAMM@vma.cc.nd.edu> Nick Laflamme writes:
> For what it's worth, the problem with "gopher" may be simply that it's
> too cute and meaningless.

Nick, you raise some interesting points, but Gopher is far too widespread
and entrenched, and too known by that name already. The name's a done deal. 
In any case, as we evangelize our campus about this neat new tool, we have
not encountered a single soul who resists the name.  The sense of a "go fer"  
for data is well accepted.  And giving a little credit to the Golden 
Gophers for their fine contribution to the net shouldn't bother anyone.

The old joke is that if IBM named a light bulb, they'd call it a 
"Multipurpose Incandescent Source System Facility."  We have a perfectly 
fine two syllable word for this tool.  Let's worry about how to improve 
Gopher, not how to rename it.

/Rich Wiggns, Gopher Coordinator, Michigan State U
Newsgroups: comp.infosystems.gopher
From: mtm@CAMIS.Stanford.EDU (Mike Macgirvin)
Subject: Re: More bugs gopher1.1b1 (beta programmers as well as code)
Organization: Stanford University, California, USA
Date: Wed, 18 Nov 1992 06:32:11 GMT

lindner@mudhoney.micro.umn.edu (Paul Lindner) writes:

>Okay, alright, point taken...  I come from the hippie programming
>school.. I like to get stuff mostly working.  I let the AR's
>like yourself fix my little bugs :-)

	With all due respect, Paul, I sure hope you're wearing
something flame-retardent.... we all respect the work you've done,
but we all wish it worked better.
	Why are you using a string library anyway? You're not storing
strings with embedded nulls that I can see...
	Oh well, I should probably mention that it's getting very
difficult to justify why I'm spending such a high percentage of my
time troubleshooting one application which is only used by a small
handful of people currently. I have several thousand applications and
hundreds of other people that require my attention.
	It would be a whole lot nicer if we only were dealing the
"five-hundred year" bugs (see Scientific American this month). But
with gopher, it's more along the lines of "fifteen-minute bugs". Oh,
and consider what would happen if the fate of the world and your life
were dependant on the reliability of the code you create, and write
all your functions with that in mind. I can't believe that dumping
core is part of the curricula of even the hippie programming
schools...

"mike" (Mike Macgirvin)         Mike_Macgirvin@MED.Stanford.EDU
Unix Server Administrator       CAMIS Computer Project

PS> I hope I speak for most other gopher maintainers. Consider
following up to this thread by mail. Coding style issues can produce
horrific flame wars...
Newsgroups: comp.infosystems.gopher
From: netmgr@tellus.csc.FI (Pekka Kytolaakso)
Subject: Re: Waisindex indexing the index.* files
Organization: Centre for Scientific Computing, Finland (CSC)
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 92 14:53:59 GMT

In <92321.171224RBF@psuvm.psu.edu> RBF@psuvm.psu.edu writes:
>I am running the 1.03 Unix server from Boombox and the Wais code (from
>wais-8-b5) under Aix/ESA.  I build indexes in the usual way by cd'ing to a
>..index directory and then running waisindex.  The index.* files that are
>built work fine except that they also include the data in the index.* files.
>How do I prevent waisindex from indexing the index.* files that it builds in
>the .index directory (this occurs right before waisindex finishes).  I have
>tried this with and without the gopher daemon running and get the same
>result.

>Bob Fowles, Center for Academic Computing, Penn State

I like to exclude all special files directories from wais-index. I do it
using find+waisindex -stdin:

cd <directory from witch to index>
find . -print | grep -v '/\.' | \
  /usr/local/etc/waisindex -d .index/index -nocat -mem 5 -stdin

Pekka Kyt|laakso
--
---------------------------------------------------------------
netmgr@tellus.csc.fi     Centre for Scientific Computing
Pekka.Kytolaakso@csc.fi  PL 40   SF-02101 Espoo FINLAND
Phone: +358 0 4571       Telefax: + 358 0 4572302
From: MTan@uci.edu (Mary Tan)
Subject: Gopher 1.1 [ was Re: Boolean, literal and other biology data mods to WAIS 8b5 available ]
Newsgroups: comp.infosystems.gopher
Organization: NTS, UCI
Date: 16 Nov 92 17:37:07 GMT


  When will 1.1 be available?

  Mary

In article <1992Nov12.200841.18062@news2.cis.umn.edu> lindner@danzig.micro.umn.edu (Paul Lindner) writes:

>In <BxGKu8.I19@usenet.ucs.indiana.edu> gilbertd@sunflower.bio.indiana.edu (Don Gilbert) writes:


>>I've mostly finished adding boolean operators 'and' and 'not', 
>>partial words, literal phrases, symbol matching and extended results
>>retrieval to WAIS source.  

>>These modifications can now be picked up via ftp or gopher to 
>>ftp.bio.indiana.edu. Look in folder IUBio Software+Data/util/wais  
>>for iubio-wais-8b5.tar.Z (full source) or iubio-wais-8b5.patch for 
>>a difference or patch file.  Internet Gopher users: you will want
>>to pick up the file /util/gopher/iubio-gopher-v1.patch to properly
>>use the biology data modifications to wais.

>Gopher Users:  I will have these mods in 1.1 (and in the next 1.1 beta
>release 1.1b2)  

>It's really cool to have booleans and wais.  Don gets the gopher
>software seal of approval from me :-)
>--
> | Paul Lindner | lindner@boombox.micro.umn.edu   | Slipping into madness
> |              | Computer & Information Services | is good for the sake
> | Gophermaster | University of Minnesota         | of comparision.
>///// / / /    /////// / / / /  /  /  /   /      //// / / / /  /  /  /   /
Newsgroups: comp.infosystems.gopher
From: lwv26@cas.org (Larry W. Virden)
Subject: Re: Is There an Open Look Xgopher?
Followup-To: comp.infosystems.gopher
Reply-To: lvirden@cas.org (Larry W. Virden)
Organization: Nedriv Software and Shoe Shiners, Uninc.
Date: Mon, 16 Nov 1992 12:55:22 GMT

In article <1992Nov15.200600.1420@sjsumcs.sjsu.edu> rick@sjsumcs.sjsu.edu (Richard Warner) writes:
:This is not an abstract ideal.  There are a half-dozen major X based
:UI's, and a lot more minor variants.  Do we have one client for each?
:The *ENTIRE* idea of X was to have one, unifying protocol.  To add

Actually, the way _I_ read the X literature from the past 10 yrs or so,
and in talking to the X gurus from MIT, etc. during many different
conferences, is that while there be one unifying protocol, there would 
NEVER be one unifying user interface.  If possible, each user would be
given the encouragement to create his/her own look and feel.  And in fact,
if you look back at X10, that is the way things were back then.  But the
users theirselves complained.  There were too many user interfaces to
choose from (at least from a window manager point of view).  MIT continues
to resist officially sanctioning the user interaction.  They leave that
area up to the user community to decide.  

So if we want to use X itself as a model, then gopher users who wish to write 
a OpenLook, or Motif, or NeXTStep, or Mac, or Windows look and feel interface
should go ahead, but not expect the general gopher team to support it.  Let
the team choose an interface with which they are satisfied and they will
support it.

-- 
Larry W. Virden                 UUCP: osu-cis!chemabs!lvirden
Same Mbox: BITNET: lvirden@cas  INET: lvirden@cas.org
Personal: 674 Falls Place,   Reynoldsburg, OH 43068-1614
Newsgroups: comp.infosystems.gopher
From: a-steiner@nwu.edu (Albert Steiner)
Subject: Re: Sizing off-campus access infrastructure
Followup-To: comp.infosystems.gopher
Organization: Northwestern University
Distribution: comp
Date: Mon, 23 Nov 1992 18:36:03 GMT

In article <9211211618.AA11739@bluemoon>, cook%bluemoon@hub.ucsb.edu (Steve
Cook) wrote:
> 
> Our campus is reviewing the current infrastructure for
> access from off-campus.  I would like to get some feedback
> regarding what other campuses have in the way of:       
>   1) student/faculty/staff FTE  12,000
>   2) modem quantity   20@ 2400  49@ 9600 or 14400
>   3) modem speeds
>   4) pricing models  No charge, except over 2 hr/Day
Then move to $1500 install a dedicated line with 14400BPS modem, includes
line charges, port on term server, and management.  Thereafter $500/year
>   5) access time limitations  2Hrs day
>   6) service and performance expectations:  Special lines for POP with quick timeout.  Otherwise firstcome first serve.  The older 7E lines are often full.
8N lines without passwords get full.  The passworded lines (support slip
for off campus access to Gopher etc) get full 7-12PM weekday evenings.  We
need another 32 lines or so.
> 
> Thanks
> Steve Cook
> Computing Coordinator, College of Letters and Science
> UC Santa Barbara
> cook@bluemoon.ucsb.edu


Albert Steiner      a-steiner@nwu.edu     708-491-4056
MGR, Networking
Academic Computing and Networking Service
Northwestern University  2129 Sheridan Road
Evanston, IL  60208      USA
From: emv@msen.com (Edward Vielmetti)
Newsgroups: comp.infosystems.gopher
Subject: Re: database packages and gopher
Date: 16 Nov 1992 16:58:59 GMT
Organization: Msen, Inc. -- Ann Arbor, Michigan
NNTP-Posting-Host: garnet.msen.com
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.1 PL6]

James Powell (jpowell@borg.lib.vt.edu) wrote:
: Is anyone currently using a gopher system to connect users to a database  
: application developed under oracle, progress, or other unix  
: DBMS/development systems?  What are you using?  Is it possible for me to  
: see your system?  We have a number of SPIRES applications currently  
: residing on an IBM mainframe that we need to move to unix.  

Oh, let's see, what are people doing.

There's a SPIGOPHER (Spires interface to Gopher) package that has come out,
it was posted here so check the archives or I'll check my notes if that
fails.  The paper that goes with it talks about some design issues of 
putting a database under gopher, so even if you don't want to run SPIRES
any more it's worth a look.

There's some SQL mods that have been made to the USGS version of WAIS; 
see the WAIS archives for that, or again I can dig it up.  This is
surgery inside the WAIS server to make it handle SQL queries as well
as ordinary searches.  I suspect that you could put some goo in so that
this would work OK under gopher too.

Finally there are a couple of perl interfaces to dataase packages (oraperl,
sybperl) that give you some programming hooks to get at the data from
within perl.  I suspect that this would be a reasonable platform for
developing a 'go4gw' style application.

Best of luck, if you put something together be sure to write it up for
the next GopherCon....

  Edward Vielmetti, vice president for research, Msen Inc. emv@Msen.com
        Msen Inc., 628 Brooks, Ann Arbor MI  48103 +1 313 998 GLOB
From: zlsiimw@mcchpc.mcc.ac.uk (Mark Whidby)
Newsgroups: comp.infosystems.gopher
Subject: Re: Help with execing shell scripts
Date: 13 Nov 92 16:51:09 GMT
Reply-To: M.Whidby@mcc.ac.uk
Organization: Manchester Computing Centre

In article <1992Nov12.193642.12411@engr.latech.edu>, dan@engr.latech.edu (Daniel
Len Schales) writes:
<stuff deleted>
|> Name=misc
|> Type=1
|> Port=70
|> Path=exec:-g misc:/bin/gonntp
|> Host=aurora.latech.edu
<stuff deleted>
|> 
|> The main thing is to make sure everything is in the gopherdir,
|> you may want to try running gopherd non-chroot() to test things
|> out. But it does work, I have dozens and dozens of shell links
|> in my gopherspace.

Well I've started playing with gonntp today - it's fun. But I'm running
with -c (don't tell anybody!!). However, I find that I need to put gonntp
in the bin directory in the gopherhome. I haven't got anything else there
(perl for example). Anybody understand this? (I'm running the beta 1.1
version BTW).
-- 
_____________________________________________________________
Mark Whidby, Distributed Systems, Manchester Computing Centre
From: paolo@ai.univie.ac.at (paolo petta)
Newsgroups: comp.infosystems.gopher
Subject: Call for Artificial Intelligence related Gophers
Date: 18 Nov 92 10:43:48 GMT
Organization: Dept. Med.Cybernetics & Artif.Intelligence, Univ.Vienna, Austria, Europe

Following Edward Vielmetti's advice, this is a call to gopher sites
providing information related to Artificial Intelligence: please
send me (paolo@ai.univie.ac.at) your coordinates - I will collect
them in a "other AI Gophers" (very tentative title) entry at our site
(gopher.ai.univie.ac.at).

Thank you for your cooperation!

paolo

>
>The key I suspect is not invisible hunting through tangly warrens of gopher
>space, but clear and simple descriptions of what you have and calls for
>interest in related materails mailed out to people who might not know
>what a gopher was anyways until you told them.
>
>  Edward Vielmetti, vice president for research, Msen Inc. emv@Msen.com
>        Msen Inc., 628 Brooks, Ann Arbor MI  48103 +1 313 998 GLOB


-- 
paolo petta                                            +43-1-5336112(Tel)
Austrian Research Inst. for Artificial Intelligence    +43-1-5320652(Fax)
Schottengasse 3, A-1010 Vienna, Austria, Europe     paolo@ai.univie.ac.at 
Newsgroups: comp.infosystems.gopher
From: mandell@bach.helios.nd.edu (Dan Mandell)
Subject: Help Files - No such file
Organization: OUC, University of Notre Dame
Date: Sun, 15 Nov 1992 20:30:17 GMT

When I press "?" in our hpux gopher client running on an HP, I get the message
/usr/local/lib//gopher.hlp: No such file or directory

Any suggestions?


Dan Mandell (mandell@bach.helios.nd.edu)
Saint Mary's College, Computer Services 
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556  -  Phone: (219) 284-4610
Date: Monday, 16 Nov 1992 10:28:21 EST
From: Nick Laflamme <NLAFLAMM@vma.cc.nd.edu>
Newsgroups: comp.infosystems.gopher
Subject: Re: More people would use gopher if ...

For what it's worth, the problem with "gopher" may be simply that it's
too cute and meaningless.

It's OK to call a sports car "Mustang" if you have a huge publicity
campaign so that everyone equates "Mustang" with "sports car." Or, at
the very least, someone who wants a sports car is likely to go to a
dealer when it's open and say, "Show me your sports cars."

But names like Archie and Gopher are to our casual users obscure and
meaningless.  They don't care where their information retrieval tool
comes from.  (And who the heck is Archie, anyway, and why is my FTP site
navigator named after him?) They'd like a word processor to have the
word "Word" in the title somewhere so they can be fairly sure what it
is, and an information access system might as well have the word "Info"
or something else blindingly obvious in it.  When our users work after
our help desks are closed (or are staffed with minimally helpful
consultants), they don't want menus listing seventeen euphenisms or cute
names.  They want clear, meaningful names pointing the way to the
answers they need.

Most of the world are not computer nerds.  Most of us are.  Remember
the difference.

One computer nerd's opinion, of course. :-)

Nick

ps - Besides, like the posting said, gophers are solitary, anti-social
creatures.  They'd be the targets and instigators of continual flame
wars if they were really on the Net.  Is that a good image for a tool
for sharing all kinds of information selflessly? :-)
Organization: Valencia University (Universitat de Valencia)   SPAIN
Date: Friday, 20 Nov 1992 08:52:39 EST
From: <BELLVER@EVALUN11.BITNET>
Newsgroups: comp.infosystems.gopher
Subject:    MacToISO utility

The UJI Gopher Team has developed a Mac to ISO translation utility.
It is available in our gopher server: gopher.uji.es (port 70) in the
folder "Que es Gopher/Gopher Administrator Utilities" in binhexed format.
Header of file follows.

MacToISO 1.0b
_____________
This Mac program translates an ASCII Macintosh file (type "TEXT") into an
ISO Latin-1 file. Therefore, international characters can be seen properly
with an ISO Latin-1 compliant Gopher client, like TurboGopher. Please e-mail
me any remarks and suggestions.

Carles Bellver
bellverc at si.uji.es (Internet)
Servei d'Informatica
Universitat Jaume I
12071 Castello de la Plana
Spain
From: john@math.nwu.edu (John Franks)
Newsgroups: comp.infosystems.gopher
Subject: Gopher and Security
Date: 22 Nov 92 15:53:24 GMT
Article-I.D.: news.1992Nov22.155324.19094
Organization: Dept of Math, Northwestern Univ


Would it be possible (and reasonable) to have a command line flag for
gopherd which, when set, would allow the server to return items of type
0 and 1  ONLY if these items are in a .link file or have a
corresponding .cap file?

It seems like this might provide as much security as chroot without the
hassle that goes with setting up local versions of standard stuff in
the gopher directory.  Would this be less secure than chroot?  This
scheme would also eliminate any problems with unwanted files being
displayed.

The down side is that every file would have to have a corresponding
.cap file.  I tend to do this anyway, but it would be fairly easy to
automate the construction of .cap files (they could contain only the
name line).

While we're talking wish list, let me echo the comments made several
times here earlier, that it would be much easier to maintain a gopher
if all the .cap/* files for a directory were combined in a single file
for each diretory which could also contain all the .link entries.
Maybe for Gopher+ ?



John Franks 	Dept of Math. Northwestern University
		john@math.nwu.edu
From: heycke@sumex-aim.stanford.edu (Torsten Heycke)
Newsgroups: comp.infosystems.gopher
Subject: Re: Veronica:  an Archie for Gopher
Followup-To: comp.infosystems.gopher
Date: 18 Nov 1992 16:49:39 GMT
Organization: Center for Advanced Medical Informatics at Stanford
Distribution: comp
NNTP-Posting-Host: ksl-mac-66.stanford.edu


> VERONICA:  Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computerized Archives.

Clever acronym, and damn, it works too. Thanks!

Torsten Heycke

"A horse may walk to water, but a pencil must be led."
Newsgroups: comp.infosystems.gopher
From: raman@cs.cornell.edu (T. V. Raman)
Subject: Veronica an excellent idea:
Summary: Closing the circle searching browsing searching
Keywords: Veronica gopher-wais-gopher 
Organization: Cornell Univ. CS Dept, Ithaca NY 14853
Date: Thu, 19 Nov 1992 14:35:26 GMT



I think Veronica is an excellent idea. I make this statement without
having even used it, (not for want of trying ) and the popularity of
the service is reflected by the fact that the server is already
choked!

We have had the gopher to wais gateway for a while now with gopher
able to seamlessly access wais databases, and moving towards a setting
where we can first search then browse and then search again seems like
exactly the right thing.

Congratulations to the authors of veronica and hoping that more gopher
servers out there will start mirroring the service in the coming few
days.

--Raamn
-- 
   T. V. Raman <raman@cs.cornell.edu>Tel: (607)255-9202  R 272-3649
                       Office: 4116 Upson Hall,
Department of Computer Science, Cornell University Ithaca NY 14853-6201
                Res: 226 Bryant Avenue Ithaca NY 14850
Newsgroups: comp.infosystems.gopher
From: J.P.Knight@lut.ac.uk (Jon P. Knight)
Subject: Any other networking research gophers out there?
Summary: Request for links to like minded gophers.
Originator: jon@hill.lut.ac.uk
Keywords: Networking, distributed systems, research, gophers
Organization: Dept of Comp. Studies, Loughborough University of Tech., UK.
Date: Thu, 19 Nov 92 10:25:12 GMT

Seeing as everyone is building "gophers by subject", I'd like to put out
a request to anybody who has a gopher running that covers the fields of
networking and distributed systems research.  I'll include any responses
in a "Other networking gophers" directory on the High Performance
Networking and Distributed Systems research gopher:

Name=High Performance Networks and DS Research Gopher
Type=1
Port=70
Path=
Host=hill.lut.ac.uk

Cheers,

Jon

(also, could the above link be included in the list of worldwide
gophers?  I've just checked and it doesn't seem to be in there yet.)


-- 
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Jon Knight, Research Student in High Performance Networking and Distributed
Systems in the Department of _Computer_Studies_ at Loughborough University.
** I can't even talk to you without the aid of chemicals or lies. - Pele **
Newsgroups: comp.infosystems.gopher
From: rww@mugwump.cl.msu.edu (Richard W. Wiggins)
Subject: Net-wide Gopher Title Searches
Keywords: gopher title searches database
Organization: Michigan State University
Date: Sun, 15 Nov 92 22:54:32 GMT

Some months ago we implemented a "Title Index" tool, which allows a
Gopher user to type in a keyword.  The resulting menu lists all titles
in that Gopher that include that keyword.  This effectively flattens
the hierarchy, making it possible to find desired documents without
manually visiting every nook and cranny in that particular Gopher.

Now Jyrki Kuoppala proposes that we ought to build a set up a list
of Archie-like title search servers, allowing a user to search Gophers
net-wide for titles based on keyword.  It looks like someone's already
done this sort of thing on an experimental basis -- check out the Gopher
at gopher.unr.edu.  (University of Nevada System North, says the About
file...)  Look under "Experimental Searches" for a title index for 250
Gophers 'round the net.

This looks like exciting stuff -- it carries the idea of flattening a
single Gopher's hierarchy a step further.  Two problems come to mind:

1) Since we're all linking to one another for many resources, there's
lots of opportunity for duplicate hits that ultimately resolve to the
same resource. For instance, do a search at UNR for "catalog" -- you'll 
see lots of pointers to the library catalog list at Michigan State. Maybe 
we need to think about Gopher+ fields that allow a Gopher administrator 
to identify a document or a folder as "not local" or "not authoritative";
such titles would not be indexed by a central title server. 

2) Even within a single Gopher, the title search has the problem of 
serving up titles that don't mean anything out of context.  We're used
to the hierarchy itself providing meaning to the lower-level titles.
We may need a way for clients to display the host name and full path
name for each document -- sort of an enhanced "item info" service.


/Rich Wiggins, Gopher Coordinator, Michigan State U
From: JONESD@kcgl1.eng.ohio-state.edu (David Jones)
Newsgroups: comp.infosystems.gopher
Subject: Re: More bugs gopher1.1b1 (beta programmers as well as code)
Date: 18 Nov 92 17:39:48 GMT
Article-I.D.: magnus.1992Nov18.173948.26905
Organization: The Ohio State University

In article <1edt7rINN1sl@nigel.msen.com>, emv@msen.com (Edward Vielmetti) writes:
> The protocol per se is just not that complicated.

The original Gopher protocol is pretty simple.  Implementing a Gopher+
server from scratch appears a more daunting task however.


David L. Jones               |      Phone:    (614) 292-6929
Ohio State Unviversity       |      Internet:
1971 Neil Ave. Rm. 406       |               jonesd@kcgl1.eng.ohio-state.edu
Columbus, OH 43210           |               jones-d@eng.ohio-state.edu

Disclaimer: A repudiation of a claim.