Tin Eye

Monday, 14 April 1997

I've come up with a temporary solution to the news server problem: I've been telnetting into my Interport account and reading news via tin. This looks something like the following:

I should have captured a screen with the commands showing. The command menu is three lines of text at the bottom of the display, telling you that you need to hit K to mark a thread as read, or f to followup, or r to reply by e-mail. Anyway, most of tin's commands are letters, sometimes modified by the Shift key. So it was lots of fun to discover that I needed to use a different interface (a different program, in fact: Pico) to compose a message:

The carat (^) indicates the Control key, so to display the help text, instead of typing h, as I would in tin, I would have to type Control-g. Another difficulty appeared when I wanted to select a large chunk of text. I ought to be able to just mark the beginning of the range with my cursor, and then move my cursor to mark the end of the range. The bit that says "Mark cursor position as beginning of selected text" sounds ideal, doesn't it? But check out the command to invoke that function: ^^. Control-Control?! I figured they might mean Control-^ (with the second being a true carat, the character that appears over the 6 on most keyboards), but Control-Shift-6 and Control-6 both just printed the character 6. I never did figure out how to do this, and wound up just using ^K (that shows up in a later help screen, not reproduced here) to delete lines of text one at a time.

I tried reading news at home with NewsWatcher over the weekend, but NewsWatcher (both MT and standard) crashes my computer. There's no apparent reason for this, since I haven't changed my system in any way since I stopped reading news from home. Ah, well. My home system needs serious fiddling around with, but isn't going to get it until I can afford to throw some money at it, which is going to be a few months.

As an example of the virtues of Doing Things The Hard But Low-Bandwidth Way, let me tell you about the two hours I spent trying to download a form from the IRS's website. The IRS webmaster was clueful enough to have anticipated the demand, and had put up a text-only version of what is normally a high-graphics site. Unfortunately, the site's organization is still cluttered enough that I had to click through at least six or seven pages to get to the information I wanted, and then through two or three more to get to the forms download page. Actually, I never got to the download page; each page took multiple tries to retrieve because of the intense server load. I think everyone in the United States was trying to download forms at the same time. I ran out of patience just about the time I ran across an alternative: One page made reference to an FTP server. I fired up Fetch, pointed it at ftp.irs.ustreas.gov (that's the web page address, with ftp substituted for www; an educated guess), and let it fly. Within two minutes, I had Adobe Acrobat versions of the forms I was looking for. The lesson, young Jedi, is to remember that there's more to the Internet than the World Wide Web, and sometimes the low-bandwidth way is the best way to go.