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then "United States and Missouri Census Information" and "United States Census." COMPUTERS wuarchive.wustl.edu Dozens of directories with software for all sorts of computers. Most programs have to be "un-compressed" before you can use them. sumex-aim.stanford.edu A similar type of system, with the emphasis on Macintosh programs and files. DISABILITY val-dor.cc.buffalo.edu The Cornucopia of Disability Information carries numerous information resources on disability issues and links to other disability-related services. ENVIRONMENT ecosys.drdr.virginia.edu Copies of Environmental Protection Agency factsheets on hundreds of chemicals, searchable by keyword. Select "Education" and then "Environmental fact sheets." envirolink.org Dozens of documents and files related to environmental activism around the world. ENTOMOLOGY spider.ento.csiro.au All about creepy-crawly things, both the good and the bad ones. GEOLOGY gopher.stolaf.edu Select "Internet Resources" and then "Weather and geography" for information on recent earthquakes. GOVERNMENT marvel.loc.gov Run by the Library of Congress, this site provides numerous resources, including access to the Library card catalog and all manner of information about the U.S. Congress. gopher.lib.umich.edu Wide variety of government information, from Congressional committee assignments to economic statistics and NAFTA information. ecix.doc.gov Information on conversion of military installations to private uses. sunsite.unc.edu Copies of current and past federal budgets can be found by selecting "Sunsite archives," then "Politics," then "Sunsite politcal science archives." wiretap.spies.com Documents related to Canadian government can be found in the "Government docs" menu. stis.nih.gov Select the "Other U.S. government gopher servers" for access to numerous other federal gophers. HEALTH odie.niaid.nih.gov National Institutes of Health databases on AIDS, in the "AIDS related information" menu. helix.nih.gov For National Cancer Institute factsheets on different cancers, select "Health and clinical information" and then "Cancernet information." nysernet.org Look for information on breast cancer in the "Special Collections: Breast Cancer" menu. welchlink.welch.jhu.edu This is Johns Hopkins University's medical gopher. HISTORY See under Art. INTERNET gopher.lib.umich.edu Home to several guides to Internet resources in specific fields, for example, social sciences. Select "What's New & Featured Resources" and then "Clearinghouse." ISRAEL jerusalem1.datasrv.co.il This Israeli system offers numerous documents on Israel and Jewish life. JAPAN gopher.ncc.go.jp Look in the "Japan information" menu for documents related to Japanese life and culture. MUSIC mtv.com Run by Adam Curry, an MTV video jock, this site has music news and Curry's daily "Cybersleaze" celebrity report. NATURE ucmp1.berkeley.edu The University of California at Berkeley's Museum of Paleontology runs several online exhibits here. You can obtain GIF images of plants and animals from the "Remote Nature" menu. The "Origin of the Species" menu lets you read Darwin's work or search it by keyword. SPORTS culine.colorado.edu Look up schedules for teams in various professional sports leagues here, under "Professional Sports Schedules." WEATHER wx.atmos.uiuc.edu Look up weather forecasts for North America or bone up on your weather facts. 8.5. WIDE-AREA INFORMATION SERVERS Now you know there are hundreds of databases and library catalogs you can search through. But as you look, you begin to realize that each seems to have its own unique method for searching. If you connect to several, this can become a pain. Gophers reduce this problem somewhat. Wide-area information servers promise another way to zero in on information hidden on the Net. In a WAIS, the user sees only one interface -- the program worries about how to access information on dozens, even hundreds, of different databases. You tell give a WAIS a word and it scours the net looking for places where it's mentioned. You get a menu of documents, each ranked according to how relevant to your search the WAIS thinks it is. Like gophers, WAIS "client" programs can already be found on many public- access Internet sites. If your system has a WAIS client, type swais at the command prompt and hit enter (the "s" stands for "simple"). If it doesn't, telnet to bbs.oit.unc.edu, which is run by the University of North Carolina At the "login:" prompt, type bbs and hit enter. You'll be asked to register and will then get a list of "bulletins,'' which are various files explaining how the system works. When done with those, hit your Q key and you'll get another menu. Hit 4 for the "simple WAIS client," and you'll see something like this: SWAIS Source Selection Sources: 23# Server Source Cost 001: [ archie.au] aarnet-resource-guide Free 002: [ archive.orst.edu] aeronautics Free 003: [nostromo.oes.orst.ed] agricultural-market-news Free 004: [sun-wais.oit.unc.edu] alt-sys-sun Free 005: [ archive.orst.edu] alt.drugs Free 006: [ wais.oit.unc.edu] alt.gopher Free 007: [sun-wais.oit.unc.edu] alt.sys.sun Free 008: [ wais.oit.unc.edu] alt.wais Free 009: [ archive.orst.edu] archie-orst.edu Free 010: [ archie.au] archie.au-amiga-readmes Free 011: [ archie.au] archie.au-ls-lRt Free 012: [ archie.au] archie.au-mac-readmes Free 013: [ archie.au] archie.au-pc-readmes Free 014: [ pc2.pc.maricopa.edu] ascd-education Free 015: [ archie.au] au-directory-of-servers Free 016: [ cirm2.univ-mrs.fr] bib-cirm Free 017: [ cmns-sun.think.com] bible Free 018: [ zenon.inria.fr] bibs-zenon-inria-fr Free Keywords: <space> selects, w for keywords, arrows move, <return> searches, q quits, or ? Each line represents a different database (the .au at the end of some of them means they are in Australia; the .fr on the last line represents a database in France). And this is just the first page! If you type a capital K, you'll go to the next page (there are several pages). Hitting a capital J will move you back a page. The first thing you want to do is tell the WAIS program which databases you want searched. To select a database, move the cursor bar over the line you want (using your down and up arrow keys) and hit your space bar. An asterisk will appear next to the line number. Repeat this until you've selected all of the databases you want searched. Then hit your W key, after which you'll be prompted for the key words you're looking for. You can type in an entire line of these words -- separate each with a space, not a comma. Hit return, and the search begins. Let's say you're utterly fascinated with wheat. So you might select agricultural-market-news to find its current world price. But you also want to see if it has any religious implications, so you choose the Bible and the Book of Mormon. What do you do with the stuff? Select recipes and usenet-cookbook. Are there any recent Supreme Court decisions involving the plant? Chose supreme-court. How about synonyms? Try roget- thesaurus and just plain thesaurus. Now hit w and type in wheat. Hit enter, and the WAIS program begins its search. As it looks, it tells you whether any of the databases are offline, and if so, when they might be ready for a search. In about a minute, the program tells you how many hits it's found. Then you get a new menu, that looks something like this: Keywords: # Score SourceTitleLines 001: [1000] (roget-thesaurus) #465. [results of comparison. 1] Di 19 002: [1000] (roget-thesaurus) #609. Choice. -- N. choice, option; 36 003: [1000] (roget-thesaurus) #465. [results of comparison. 1] Di 19 004: [1000] (roget-thesaurus) #609. Choice. -- N. choice, option; 36 005: [1000] (recipes) aem@mthvax Re: MONTHLY: Rec.Food.Recipes 425 006: [1000] ( Book_of_Mormon) Mosiah 9:96 007: [1000] ( Book_of_Mormon) 3 Nephi 18:185 008: [1000] (agricultural-ma) Re: JO GR115, WEEKLY GRAIN82 009: [ 822] (agricultural-ma) Re: WA CB351 PROSPECTIVE PLANTINGS 552 010: [ 800] ( recipes) kms@apss.a Re: REQUEST: Wheat-free, Suga 35 011: [ 750] (agricultural-ma) Re: WA CB101 CROP PRODUCTION258 012: [ 643] (agricultural-ma) Re: SJ GR850 DAILY NAT GRN SUM72 013: [ 400] ( recipes) pat@jaamer Re: VEGAN: Honey Granola63 014: [ 400] ( recipes) jrtrint@pa Re: OVO-LACTO: Sourdough/Trit 142 Each of these represents an article or citing that contains the word wheat, or some related word. Move the cursor bar (with the down and up arrow keys) to the one you want to see, hit enter, and it will begin to appear on your screen. The "score" is a WAIS attempt to gauge how closely the citing matches your request. Doesn't look like the Supreme Court has had anything to say about the plant of late! Now think of how much time you would have spent logging onto various databases just to find these relatively trivial examples. 8.6 WHEN THINGS GO WRONG As the Internet grows ever more popular, its resources come under more of a strain. If you try to use gopher in the middle of the day, at least on the East Coast of the U.S., you'll sometimes notice that it takes a very long time for particular menus or database searches to come up. Sometimes, you'll even get a message that there are too many people connected to whichever service you're trying to use and so you can't get in. The only alternative is to either try again in 20 minutes or so, or wait until later in the day, when the load might be lower. When this happens in veronica, try one of the other veronica entries. When you retrieve a file through gopher, you'll sometimes be asked if you want to store it under some ludicrously long name (there go our friends the system administrators again, using 128 characters just because Unix lets them). With certain MS-DOS communications programs, if that name is longer than one line, you won't be able to backspace all the way back to the first line if you want to give it a simpler name. Backspace as far as you can. Then, when you get ready to download it to your home computer, remember that the file name will be truncated on your end, because of MS-DOS's file-naming limitations. Worse, your computer might even reject the whole thing. What to do? Instead of saving it to your home directory, mail it to yourself. It should show up in your mail by the time you exit gopher. Then, use your mail command for saving it to your home directory -- at which point you can name it anything you want. Now you can download it. 8.7 FYI David Riggins maintains a list of gophers by type and category. You can find the most recent one at the ftp site ftp.einet.net, in the pub directory. Look for a file with a name like "gopher-jewels.txt." Alternately, you can get on a mailing list to get the latest version sent to your e-mailbox automatically. Send a mail message to gopherjewelslist- request@tpis.cactus.org (yep, that first part is all one word). Leave the "subject:" line blank, and as a message, write SUBSCRIBE. Blake Gumprecht maintains a list of gopher and telnet sites related to, or run by, the government. He posts it every three weeks to the news.answers and soc.answers newsgroups on Usenet. It can also be obtained via anonymous ftp from rtfm.mit.edu, as /pub/usenet/news.answers/us-govt-net-pointers. Students at the University of Michigan's School of Information and Library Studies, recently compiled separate lists of Internet resources in 11 specific areas, from aeronautics to theater. They can be obtained via gopher at gopher.lib.umich.edu, in the "What's New and Featured Resources" menu. The Usenet newsgroups comp.infosystems.gopher and comp.infosystems.wais are places to go for technical discussions about gophers and WAISs respectively. CHAPTER 9: THE WORLD-WIDE WEB 9.1 GETTING SNARED IN THE WEB As nice as gophers are, there's an even better way to navigate and find information resources on the Net -- the World-Wide Web. Originally developed as a resource for physicists, the Web today is fast becoming the Main Street of cyberspace. You'll find interesting characters wandering around, museums and galleries to visit, schools to teach you new skills, even restaurants (some of which will deliver real food in response to e-mail). You name it, chances are somebody's created a Web server about it. Growing numbers of people even have their own personal Web "pages" where they let the world know what they're interested in. The Web's exploded in popularity for two reasons. One is that it is fairly easy to use. As with gophers, you navigate the Web by making selections from your screen -- no more cryptic Unix commands to memorize. The Web also lets you connect to FTP sites, so you no longer even have to use arcane anonymous-FTP commands in most cases. But what really sets the Web apart is hyperlinks. To understand hyperlinks, think of an encyclopedia. As you read an article on, say, Africa, your eye is drawn to a picture of an elephant. You want to learn more about the animal, so you get out the "E" volume and look up "elephant" and start reading. Hyperlinks are the online equivalent of this browsing process. Tim Berners-Lee, who developed the original Web model, came up with a simple language that lets somebody developing a Web document embed pointers to related resources. When you then call up that document, you'll see some words in a different color or somehow otherwise highlighted. By moving your cursor to one of those words and then hitting enter (or clicking on it with your mouse, depending on your interface), you'll then call up the linked document. Because these hyperlinks are easy to create (more on that in a bit) -- anybody can put together a Web resource that can become a central clearinghouse of information on virtually any topic, linking documents that could be physically stored in dozens of locations around the world. 9.2 ALRIGHT, ALREADY, LET'S GO! We're almost there. But first a word about graphics. If you've heard of the Web, chances are good you've also heard of Mosaic. Mosaic, developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, brought a graphical, point-and-click interface to the Web, and in less than a year became almost synonymous with it. There are a couple of problems with Mosaic (and related programs), however. One is that you need a machine capable of providing a graphical user interface, such as those running Unix, Windows or the Macintosh operating system. MS-DOS users are out of luck. So are the blind. Also, Mosaic requires a fairly large chunk of computing and network capabilities to work well, so forget about using it on your old 2400-bps modem). If you do have these capabilities, we'll talk about how to set up Mosaic and similar programs in a bit. But for now, let's look at Lynx, a text- based program that gives universal access to the Web -- via a simple dial-up connection in most cases. It doesn't give you the pretty pictures (although you'll be able to download many of them) and it doesn't work with a mouse. But it's simple enough to use -- and one could argue that if you're using the Web just to find information, you might not want pictures, anyway, because they can take so long to get to your computer and display. Lynx, the creation of Michael Grobe, Lou Montulli and Charles Rezac of the University of Kansas, will remind you of gophers in many ways. As with gopher, probably the best way to learn how to use Lynx is just to dive right in. At your host system's command prompt, type lynx and hit enter (Free-Net users: go into the "Teleport" area and look for the "Communications Tower"). If you're lucky, your system administrator has already installed Lynx and you'll see something like this: -------------------------------------------------------------------------- GENERAL OVERVIEW OF THE WEB [IMAGE] There is no "top" to the World-Wide Web. You can look at it from many points of view. Here are some places to start. [IMAGE] by Subject The Virtual Library organises information by subject matter. List of servers All registered HTTP servers by country by Service Type The Web includes data accessible by many other protocols. The lists by access protocol may help if you know what kind of service you are looking for. If you find a useful starting point for you personally, you can configure your WWW browser to start there by default. -- press space for more, use arrow keys to move, '?' for help, 'q' to quit Arrow keys: Up and Down to move. Right to follow a link; Left to go back. H)elp O)ptions P)rint G)o M)ain screen Q)uit /=search [delete]=history list -------------------------------------------------------------------------- If nothing happens, consider asking your system administrator to get Lynx (tell him it's available via anonymous ftp at ftp2.cc.ukans.edu in the pub/lynx directory). Until he does, you can try out Lynx by using telnet to connect to this address: sunsite.unc.edu When you connect, log on as: lynx This is a popular site, so it can be slooow at times. Alternately, you could use telnet to connect to ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu with a log on of: www However, this site (the home of Lynx's creators) will not let you use all of Lynx's features. As you can see from the above, the Web has no real menus, at least not in the sense that gopher does. Instead, the system is composed of documents or "pages" (the "title of contents" or opening page on a Web site is known as its "home page"). If you are using VT100 or similar emulation and a color monitor, the above screen would have certain words in a different color than the others. These words are the hyperlinks. By moving your cursor to one and then hitting enter, you'll move to a new page -- which could be located on a completely different computer somewhere else in the world. The above main page, which comes from the CERN, the European High-Energy Physics Research Center (where Tim Berners-Lee developed the Web) has three main hyperlinks: [IMAGE] by Subject List of servers by Service Type The first one contains a list of various Web resources around the world, categorized by subject. The second one lists them by continent, country and then city. The final one lets you browse among non-Web services, such as our friend gopher and Wide-Area Information Servers (in fact, you could live your entire Internet life within the Web; not only does it let you connect to gophers, ftp sites and the like, but with some Web software, you can even read and reply to Usenet messages as well). To call up any of them, you move your cursor to it (with the down or up arrows) and hit enter. Play with the Web! Move your cursor around, hit enter, and see where you pop up. The key navigational keys are your arrow keys. The up and down arrow keys let you hop among highlighted links. The right arrow key is the same as enter -- it sends you to the highlighted service. The left arrow key is analogous to 'u' in gopher -- it takes you back to the previous document. This arrangement can take a little getting used to. If there are two hyperlinks listed on one line, you would use your down or up arrow to move between them -- NOT your right or left ones! There are additional navigational commands that will come in handy in a hypertext system (without them, it would be easy to get lost rather quickly). A key one is your backspace or delete key. Hitting that will bring up a list of links you've made in the current session; you can then choose one if you want to get back somewhere. Hitting m will bring you back to your "main page," that is, the first page you saw when you started up Lynx. 9.3 ADDRESSING A PROBLEM One feature Lynx has that gophers do not is the ability to go directly to a service by typing in its address. You get to this function by hitting a lower-case g at any point in Lynx. Here's where you run into the mess that is Uniform Resource Locators (URLs). The idea behind URLs is actually a good one: to create a universal system for accessing information on the Internet, no matter if it's a single file on an anonymous-FTP site, an entire gopher server, or a Web image. Unfortunately, that means that, in WWW, you're going to have to get used to seeing, and typing, things like: http://www.germany.eu.net/books/eegtti/eegtti.html (which is actually the Web address for an enhanced version of Everybody's Guide to the Internet). Ack! The "http" means you're dealing with a WWW resource -- it stands for "HyperText Transport Protocol," which is the particular way the Web moves information around the world. Lynx needs that information to be able to figure out how to connect to the system. Next comes the name of the site on which the resource is located, followed by the directory path. URLs are case sensitive, so be careful! In the above example, notice how the last item ends in ".html." That stands for "HyperText Markup Language," which is the coding used to create hyperlinks. You'll often find Web addresses ending in that, because they will be pointers to main pages for particular resources. Sometimes, if you are trying to reach a service without a main HTML page (a gopher, for example), you may have to end the address with a /, for example: gopher://gopher.eff.org/ Fortunately, in many cases, you will have to type these long names only once. Recall how hitting your backspace or delete key creates a list of hyperlinks to services you've tried in a particular session. You can also create a list of "bookmarks" to speed you to particular services in the future. To add a page to your list, hit a lower-case a while on that page. You'll be asked if you want to add the document or the hyperlink to your bookmark page. Choose the document option and it'll be added. To see your bookmark list, hit v. You'll then be able to zoom to any services in the list by moving your cursor to its highlighted name and hitting enter. 9.4 IMAGINE THAT -- DOWNLOADING PICTURES As you play with Lynx, you'll notice that some pages will have entries that look like this: [IMAGE]. If the word is the same color as the other text on your screen, you won't be able to download it. If it's a different color or somehow highlighted, you should be able to put your cursor on it and hit enter. You'll get one of two messages. One says something about how the "client" can't display an ISMAP image. In that case, there's not much you can do, except hit your left arrow key to get back to the previous page -- Lynx at this point can't handle this particular system for displaying maps. The other message also looks potentially frustrating: "This file cannot be displayed on this terminal. D)ownload or C)ancel." This is actually good news, however, because it means it's an image you can retrieve. If you hit a lower-case d, you'll be asked if you want to save the image to your host system, or if you want to use Zmodem to download it directly to your own computer. If you're using a communications program with Zmodem, selecting the latter will immediately start the process of transferring it to you. The file names will always look something like: L23015.HTM. In most cases, the files will be GIF images, occasionally JPEG images, and, rarely, TIFF images. You'll need a GIF/JPEG viewer on your computer to view these. If you don't have Zmodem, save the image to your host system. Interestingly, when you do this, you'll get a more descriptive file name, OLDBONES.GIF instead of L2015.HTM, for example. In either case, when you're done transferring the file, hit your left arrow key to get back to the previous page. Before you actually download the file, you'll see a message indicating how large it is -- handy to know if you're using a relatively slow modem. Sometimes, instead of the above message, you'll get a more forbidding looking one: showpicture -viewer xv /tmp/L229787.html This message contains a picture, which can currently only be viewed when running X11. If you read this message while running X11, and have your DISPLAY variable set, you will then be able to see the picture properly. Yikes! Ignore this and look for the prompt asking if you want to save this to a file. Hit a lower-case y and you'll be prompted for a name. Type in whatever you want to call the file and hit enter. You've just saved a copy of the file to your home directory on your Internet host, which means that, when you're done with Lynx, you can download it to your home computer. A related function to downloading is retrieving a copy of a document. To do that, hit p within a document. You'll be given several choices as to how to retrieve it, including sending it to yourself via e-mail or saving it to a file in your home directory on your public-access site. 9.5 LYNX, MEET GOPHER One of the nice things about Lynx is that you can also use it to reach non-Web resources, from FTP and telnet sites to gophers. This means that you can use it as your one-stop interface for Internet information services. Recall earlier how you have to type "http://" as part of the URLs for Web sites. There are similar prefixes for other types of services, for example: gopher://, ftp:// and telnet://. Telnet is the easiest to use. Say you want to connect to the Electronic Periodic Table of the Elements at camm57.caos.kun.nl. In Lynx, hit a lower-case g and then type: telnet://camm57.caos.kun.nl and hit enter, and you'll be connected. The one caveat with telnet sites is that many have their own user interfaces, so keys may do different things than they would if you were connected to a Web site. If you're ever stuck on a telnet site and can't get out, hit control-] (your "control" and "]" keys at the same time) to return to Lynx. Connecting to an FTP site works basically the same: for example, to get to ftp.uu.net, type a lower-case g and then ftp://ftp.uu.net You won't have to log in, though, which is nice. And once you're in, you'll be able to navigate by making selections off a menu, rather than having to type any Unix commands. If you already know a particular file's name and path on a site, you could even go to it directly, by hitting a lower-case g and then typing in site name and path, like this: ftp://ftp.uu.net/systems/ibmpc/msdos/simtel/zippkz204g.exe Getting to a gopher works basically the same, except you'd substitute "gopher://" for "telnet://" or "ftp://." Where it does get tricker with gophers, however, is if you want to get to a specific document or directory on a gopher. This is because gopher administrators usually mask their Unix directory names with natural-language titles, for example, "Sports and recreation" rather than "sports_rec." But URLs use the Unix paths, so that if you're used to being told "Connect to gopher.site.com, select 'Society' and then 'Sports and recreation'" you'd have to translate that into URL-ese as something like: gopher://gopher.site.com/11/soc/sports_rec. How to find these? Connect to the top-level gopher address, for example: gopher.std.com Then make selections until you get to the document or directory you want. Now either hit a lower-case a to add the path to your bookmark list, or, if you want to write it down, hit an equal sign, which will show you the path. Like Gopher, the Web is a fascinating place to explore -- just keep following links to see where they take you. In fact, Lynx and other Web programs are often called "browsers" for just this reason. Eventually, however, you might want to find something specific on the Web and you might want to find it now. Unlike with Gopher and Veronica, there is no single way to search the Web. Instead, several organizations around the world have developed different types of databases that let you find Web documents and hyperlinks. The ones that follow are all fairly powerful yet relatively easy to use. Because they all seem to use different methods for finding things, it can sometimes be worthwhile to try several of them as part of your search -- you'll find different resources with each. An added bonus is that often, the people who maintain one search "engine" will provide quick links to the others, making it easy for you to get from one to the other. One of the more useful systems is EINet Galaxy, run by the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corp. in Austin, Texas, both because it's easy to use and because it lets you search for both Web and Gopher resources. To get to it, hit a lower-case g within Lynx and then type: http://galaxy.einet.net When you connect, you'll actually see what looks an awful lot like a table of contents or index for the entire Internet -- dozens of entries on broad topics from architecture to sociology. If you're not in a hurry, these entries can prove an interesting introduction to just what's avaialable these days. But today, we are in a hurry, so keep hitting enter until you see something that looks like this: Search for: ____________________ Search Clear selections [40 hits_] ( )Galaxy Pages ( )Galaxy Entries ( )World-wide Web ( )Gopher ( )Hytelnet Up - Home - Help - Search - Top -- EINet Galaxy First, notice the "Search" in the bottom list of options. If you moved your cursor to that and hit enter, you'd be given a list of links to other searchable databases of Web resources. But for now, move your cursor (with the down-arrow key) until it's on the dashes. Here is where you type in the word or words you're looking for (don't worry about capitalization). Now it gets slightly tricky (because the system was designed with mouse users in mind). Hit your down-arrow key until you get to the space before "Galaxy Entries." Hit enter, and you'll see an asterisk appear. As you might surmise, you're telling the system to search for your keyword among "Galaxy Entries" (which are those indexed listings we just passed over). Hit your down arrow again to move to the "World-wide Web" entry and hit enter again. Do it once more for Gopher. Now use your up key to move backwards, until the word "Search" is highlighted. Hit enter. EINet Galaxy now starts a search of its database, looking for any potential matches in both Web and Gopher documents. Let's say you were searching for information about the King, ol' Elvis himself. Had you used "Elvis" as your search word, something like this would come back: Galaxy Entry Results - for `` elvis'' 4 documents found * ELVIS+ WWW server from RUSSIA - Score: 1000 Size: 29 * Elvis Aron Presley Home Page - Score: 1000 Size: 28 * Elvis Aron Presley Home Page - Score: 1000 Size: 28 * The Elvis Costello home page - Score: 1000 Size: 28 World-wide Web Results - for `` elvis'' 28 documents found (Option list) Hit return and use arrow keys and return to select option Each of the lines starting with an asterisk turns out to be a hyperlink to a particular Web server. Curious about the first one, you move your cursor there and hit enter -- and discover that a group of Russian computer programmers have set up a software company they've decided to call ELVIS+. OK. So you hit your left arrow key to get back to the EINet Galaxy search results. Try the next one, and you find yourself reading about the King. The "score" represents the database's attempt to show you how relevant a particular item is to your search. If the word you're looking for appears in a document's title or first paragraph, for example, it will score higher in the databases 1-to-1000 ranking than if it did not appear until the very last paragraph. Another good Web info-searcher is David Filo and Jerry Yang's Yahoo server at Stanford University (it stands for something along the lines of "Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle"). It'll remind you of EINet Galaxy -- it, too, provides a table-of-contents type of interface to Web (no Gopher) services, along with a more specific search tool. You'll want to connect to: http://akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo One of your choices in a menu bar across the bottom of the screen will be "Search." Select it, and you'll get a small form similar to EINet Galaxy's. Although Yahoo will let you find all sorts of resources, it really shines in the area of online businesses and the services they offer. Lycos at Carnegie-Mellon University is a third search system, which is interesting in part because of the way new entries are added to its database. Part of Lycos consists of an automated "web crawler" that periodically, well, crawls around the Web looking for new servers and documents. It then adds the information to the database. Connect to http;//lycos.cs.cmu.edu. You'll be given a choice of searching Lycos1, Lycos2 or Lycos3. These are different computers, but each contains the same database, so it doesn't really matter which one you choose (unless one doesn't work, then try one of the others). You'll then get a page with these choices: Lycos Search Language description Form-based search with options (same database) Register your own URLs with Lycos or Delete your own URLs Lycos: Frequently Asked Questions Select the second one and hit enter, which will bring up the search form. It will then return a list of potentially relevant documents -- along with snippets from those documents to help you decide whether you want to look at them. By default, the computer will only respond with the first 10 matches it finds. You can change that via a setting in the search form. 9.7 SLIP: BUT I WANT TO USE MY MOUSE! OK, so you have a Windows computer or Macintosh and you want to use the Internet via a point-and-click interface. You can. Many Internet providers now offer Serial Line Internet Protocol (SLIP) or Point to Point Protocol (PPP) connections. Among other things, this sort of link will let you run a growing number of programs that let you fully integrate everything from e-mail to the Web into the interface with which you're familiar -- you can use your mouse, drag and drop things, etc. IBM now includes such software as part of its OS/2 operating system, while Microsoft Corp. has similar plans for its Windows 95 operating system. There are also several companies that offer complete graphical Internet starter kits. For example, O'Reilly and Associates sells an "Internet in a Box" kit for Windows users. And two Internet providers, Netcom and Pipeline, offer their own, proprietary graphical user interfaces for the Internet. Although using these programs can be easy, setting them up is sometimes a pain (it gets even more complex if you decide to download free and low- cost software from the Internet that provides the same features). First, check with your provider to see if they do offer SLIP or PPP access, and if so, at what price (some may charge extra). If they do not, ask if they will allow the use of The Internet Adapter, software that lets Macintosh and Windows users use graphical programs via a standard dial-up connection. 9.8 MORE ON SLIP Computers tied directly to the Internet communicate with each other using a standard known as Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP). This standard allows for direct interaction between these computers -- so that, for example, you can tap into a database halfway around the world over the Net (it also deals with such issues as routing information from A to B). This is NOT what you are doing when you dial into a public-access site with, say, Procomm. Once your computer and your host establish a link, your computer basically goes to sleep and you interact with the network via programs on your host. That terminal emulation you always have to remember to set is merely a way to tell the host system what kind of keyboard to pretend you'd be using if you were actually at the host computer sitting at one of its terminals. All of the programs you need to run to interact with the Net, from mail and Usenet readers to Gopher and Lynx, are actually running on your provider's computer (or network); the only time your computer wakes up is when you do something like download a file (and even then, you're not using any particular Internet program). SLIP makes your computer an active participant on the network (PPP essentially does the same thing). With a SLIP account, it's essentially your host that goes to sleep, acting only as a sort of doorway to the rest of the Internet for you and your computer. Now your computer has direct access to TCP/IP message packets (which can be anything from e- mail to World-Wide Web images). Of course, this also means you'll need all the software to do things sitting on your hard drive. Think of it as the difference between renting an apartment, where the landlord takes care of the maintenance, and owning your own house, where you gain the freedom to do things the way you want. 9.9 HTML: BUILDING YOUR OWN A growing number of Internet providers let users set up their own Web home pages. If your providers is one of these, and you want to tell the world your story, you'll need to know the HyperText Markup Language (HTML). Fortunately, this is tedious rather than difficult to learn, and there are HTML "authoring" programs out there that can help reduce the burden. The basic idea behind HTML is to embed codes within a standard ASCII text document that tell the computer displaying the document to do something, whether that's to put a word in bold, display an image, or jump to another document. Here's what a simple HTML command looks like: <title>Web Intro</title> HTML commands are always between such brackets. The first instruction tells the computer that what is to follow is a document title and to display it at the top of the page (in Lynx, that's actually the top right hand corner of the screen). The ending command, again in brackets, tells the computer that that's the end of that instruction. The user doesn't see these commands. There are similar HTML commands for paragraphs, italics, inserting graphics, creating lists, etc. The command for linking to another document elsewhere on the Web looks like this: <a href="http://www.std.com/NE/boston.html">Boston Online</a> Note that the URL is in quotation marks. The "a" (or "anchor") command tells your Web browser that a link is about to be displayed. "Boston Online" will be highlighted when a user calls up the page. The "</a>" at the end tells the browser to go back to normal type. To build a Web page, you'll need at least two things. First is permission from your provider and instructions relating to your specific site (for example, where to put the documents you create). Second is a guide to HTML (see FYI below) and a word processor capable of creating ASCII or text documents. Third, and optionally, is an HTML authoring program that can help relieve you of the drudgery of typing in all those HTML commands (again, see FYI below). 9.10 SOME INTERESTING WWW SERVERS AREA CODES http://www.xmission.com/~americom/ Ever wondered what the area code is for Watertown, NY, or the country code for Andorra? Help is now as near as your keyboard. AmeriCom, a long-distance company, has created a Web- based server with info on some 80,000 cities around the world. ART http://www.wimsey.com/Pixel_Pushers/ The Electronic Art Gallery in Calgary is exactly what it sounds like. BOSTON http://www.std.com/NE/boston.html An online guide to the city that modestly calls itself the Hub of the Universe, from restaurant and movie listings to car-repair recommendations and neighborhood profiles. CALIFORNIA http://www.research.digital.com/SRC/virtual-tourist/California.html This is your basic tourist-info center just over the state line on the Information Highway. It offers everything from traffic and road- condition reports to maps and pictures of tourist attractions. CHINA http://www.ihep.ac.cn:3000/ihep.html This is the People's Republic's first Internet connection, run by the Institute for High Energy Physics in Beijing, providing everything from e-mail addresses of Chinese scientists to information on Chinese regions and a directory of foreign companies in Beijing. DINOSAURS http://www.hcc.hawaii.edu/dinos/dinos1.html Look here for images of dinosaur skeletons. DUBLIN http://www.dsg.cs.tcd.ie/dsg_people/czimmerm/pubs.html This is "the definitive review of Dublin's watering holes.'' ENVIRONMENT http://www.econet.apc.org/lcv/scorecard.html See how your local congressman/woman is ranked by the League of Conservation Voters. http://polyn.net.kiae.su/polyn/manifest.html A group of researchers at the Kurchatov Institute for Atomic Energy in Moscow have created a World- Wide Web resource devoted to the Chernobyl melt-down. GAMES http://wcl-rs.bham.ac.uk/GamesDomain The Games Domain is the place to go for information on dozens of computer games. Resources include lists of hints for specific games and an online games magazine. GOVERNMENT http://www.fedworld.gov FedWorld is a gateway to dozens of federal information services in the U.S., some free, some requiring a fee to use. http://thomas.loc.gov The Library of Congress's Thomas (as in Thomas Jefferson) service lets you look up pending bills by keyword and read the Congressional Record (back to January, 1994). LAW http://www.law.cornell.edu/lii.table.html Cornell University's Legal Information Institute provides a variety of law-related documents, including information on specific legal issues and copies of U.S. Supreme Court decisions. http://venable.com/vbh.html Venable, Batejer, Howard and Civiletti is a Washington, D.C. law firm. Its Web server includes online newsletters on various legal topics. LEGOS http://legowww.itek.norut.no/catalog/index.html Yes, it's a set of documents (with pictures) all about the little plastic blocks with the pegs on top. MOVIES http://www.cm.cf.ac.uk/Movies/moviewquery.html You can search for filmographies for particular actors and directors here. http://bvp.wdp.com/BVPM/ The Buena Vista Pictures Web server has information and photos of current Disney and Buena Vista Pictures movies -- even some QuickTime loops for Macintosh owners (caveat: those are large files). MUSIC http://www.music.indiana.edu/misc/music_resources.html This resource at Indiana University will help you find Web sites devoted to virtually every type of music and band. NEW ZEALAND http://www.cs.cmu.edu:8001/Web/People/mjw/NZ/MainPaige.html Your personal guided tour of New Zealand, complete with pictures of its cities, scenery and people, begins here. PATENTS http:/town.hall.org/patent/patent.html. This database, run by the Internet Multicasting Service, lets you search for U.S.-issued patents from 1994 on. REAL ESTATE http://www.gems.com/realestate/ Real-estate listings from several cities around the U.S. SLOVENIA http://www.ijs.si/slo.html Learn more about the former Yugoslav republic in words and photographs. SMALL BUSINESS http://www.sbaonline.sba.gov The U.S. Small Business Administration uses its Web site to provide tips for businesses and lists of available resources. SOUTH DAKOTA http://www.state.sd.us All you ever wanted to know about the state, from tourist attractions to pending legislation, can be found here. SPACE http://sspp.gsfc.nasa.gov/ Look here for info on discount space flights from NASA, like the "Get Away Special" -- only $27,000 to launch a 90-pound cannister aboard a space shuttle. TIME WASTERS http://www.primus.com/staff/paulp/useless.html It's amazing what some people are using the Web for. There's the guy in California who's connected his hot tub and refrigerator, so you can check the temperature in both; people who let you send messages to their cat; digital cameras that take periodic snapshots of coffee pots. Paul Phillips has assembled links to them all. WINE http://augustus.csscr.washington.edu/personal/bigstar-mosaic/wine.html Look for information about the grape beverage here. Besides links to other Internet resources, it also lets you leave tasting notes for other enthusiasts, and provides information on wineries in Washington state. 9.11 LYNX COMMANDS Down arrow Go to next highlighted link Up arrow Go to previously highlighted link Right arrow Same as hitting enter on a highlighted link Left arrow Move back to previous document + Scroll down to next page - Scroll back to previous page ? or h Help a Add current page to bookmark file c Send a comment to the creator of the current document d Download the document on your screen g Go to specific resource (you'll have to type in its address, or URL) m Return to main, or first, screen o Set personal options (for example, your e-mail address) p Print, save or download a document v View your bookmark file z Cancel document or image transfer backspace View your past links in the current session delete Same as backspace = Get address information for current file or link / Scan the current document for a keyword 9.12 WHEN THINGS GO WRONG * You try to connect to a site, but get an error message along the lines of "ERROR 404 Not found - file doesn't exist or is read protected [even tried multi]" Re-check the spelling of the site address you entered. WWW addresses are case-sensitive, so that might be a problem, as well. Hit your left arrow key, then g, then try entering the address again. It is also possible you did nothing wrong, but that the person in charge of maintaining the site either forgot to set the document so that outsiders could read it or deleted it without telling anybody. * You know the URL is correct, but when you type it in and hit enter, you get a "not available" message. Sometimes, links just don't seem to work the first time. Hit g and enter again and it may work the second time. * You try to use g to get to a new site and nothing happens. Lynx does not seem to let you go to sites from error-message pages and some other pages. If that happens, hit your left arrow, then try again. * You try to go to the next (or previous) hyperlink on a page, but are instead transported to an entirely different document. Chances are you tried to get to the next hyperlink by using your left or right arrow keys, rather than your down or up keys (remember, this'll take some getting used to). If you think you hit your right arrow key, now hit your left arrow key and you'll be brought back to the original page. If you hit your left arrow key, go to your history page (by hitting your delete key) and then chose the appropriate page to which you want to return. 9.13 FYI If you want to see what's new each week on the Web, check out the What's New service at http://gnn.com/gnn.wn.whats-new.html. You'll also find postings of new services in the alt.internet.services and comp.infosystems.www.announce Usenet newsgroups. Once a month, Thomas Boutell posts a WWW FAQ (answers to "Frequently Asked Questions") in the news.answers and comp.infosystems.www newsgroups in Usenet. You can also retrieve a copy via anonymous ftp (or ncftp) at rtfm.mit.edu. Look in the pub/usenet/news.answers/www directory for a file called faq. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications maintains a good introductory guide to HTML and related programs at http://union.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HyperNews/get/www/html.html You can get more information about TIA software via anonymous ftp at marketplace.com. In the /tia directory, you'll find copies of the software for several Unix varieties. In the /tia/docs directory, you'll find documentation, answers to frequently asked questions, etc. Frank Hecker's "Personal Internet Access Using SLIP or PPP; How You Use It, How It Works," gives a good overview of how the two protocols work. It's available via FTP at ftp.digex.net as /pub/access/hecker/internet/slip-ppp.txt or via the World-Wide Web at http://www.charm.net/ppp.html. At that latter URL, you'll find numerous other documents and programs related to SLIP/PPP access, including information and files related to Macintosh SLIP service. Henry Kriz has written a three-part series on connecting Windows computers to the Internet via TCP/IP, SLIP, etc. that goes into more technical detail than what you've just read. It's available via anonymous FTP at nebula.lib.vt.edu in the /pub/windows/winsock directory. Look for a file with a name like wtcpip05.asc, where the two digits in the first part of the name indicate the current version number. Chapter 10: ADVANCED E-MAIL 10.1 THE FILE'S IN THE MAIL E-mail by itself is a powerful tool, and by now you may be sending e-mail messages all over the place. You might even be on a mailing list or two. But there is a lot more to e-mail than just sending messages. If your host system does not have access to ftp, or it doesn't have access to every ftp site on the Net, you can have programs and files sent right to your mailbox. And using some simple techniques, you can use e-mail to send data files such as spreadsheets, or even whole programs, to friends and colleagues around the world. A key to both is a set of programs known as encoders and decoders. For all usefulness, basic Net e-mail has a big problem: it can't handle graphics characters or the control codes found in even the simplest of computer programs. Encoders however, can translate these into forms usable in e-mail, while decoders turn them back into a form that you can actually use. If you are using a Unix-based host system, chances are it already has an encoder and decoder online that you can use. These programs will also let you use programs posted in several Usenet newsgroups, such as comp.binaries.ibm.pc. If both you and the person with whom you want to exchange files use Unix host systems, you're in luck because virtually all Unix host systems have encoder/decoder programs online. For now, let's assume that's the case. First, upload the file you want to send to your friend to your host site (ask your system administrator how to upload a file to your name or "home" directory if you don't already know how). Then type uuencode file file > file.uu and hit enter. "File" is the name of the file you want to prepare for mailing, and yes, you have to type the name twice! The > is a Unix command that tells the system to call the "encoded" file "file.uu" (you could actually call it anything you want). Now to get it into a mail message. The quick and dirty way is to type mail friend where "friend" is your friend's address. At the subject line, type the name of the enclosed file. When you get the blank line, type ~r file.uu or whatever you called the file, and hit enter. (on some systems, the ~ may not work; if so, ask your system administrator what to use). This inserts the file into your mail message. Hit control-D, and your file is on its way! On the other end, when your friend goes into her mailbox, she should transfer it to her home directory. Then she should type uudecode file.name and hit enter. This creates a new file in her name directory with whatever name you originally gave it. She can then download it to her own computer. Before she can actually use it, though, she'll have to open it up with a text processor and delete the mail header that has been "stamped" on it. If you use a mailer program that automatically appends a "signature," tell her about that so she can delete that as well. The past couple of years have seen the development of the Multi-purpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME), which make e-mailing these files even easier. If you use an e-mail program such as cc:Mail or Microsoft Mail at work, or if you dial into bulletin-board systems, then you're used to the idea of file attachments -- you write a message, and then tell the computer you want to attach a file. MIME is essentially the Internet equivalent. The one caveat is that your recipient also has to have a MIME-enabled mail program; otherwise you could run into problems (and in that case, you'll have to fall back on uuencode). Probably the best way to use MIME on a Unix public-access site is with Pine -- it makes it very easy. Let's say you've just uploaded a graphics file that you want to mail to a friend. Call up Pine and start a message to your friend. With the cursor still in the header area (i.e., the area where you put in his e-mail address), hit control-J. You'll be asked for the name of the file you want to attach. Type in its name (or path if you put it somewhere besides your home directory) and that's it! You can now compose a message to your friend and then send it off as you would normally (only now it will come with an attached file). Assuming your recipient also uses Pine, when he gets your message, one of his options will be to hit control-V. If he hits that, he'll be asked if he wants to view or save the attached file. Assuming it's a binary file, he should hit his s key and then type in the name of the file under which to save the attachment. When he exits Pine, he can then download the file -- without the muss of first uudecoding it. A number of companies now sell software that lets users of proprietary e- mail systems send and receive MIME attachments. So if you plan on exchaning binary files with somebody on one of these systems (our friend, the cc:Mail user, for example) -- ask if her system can accept MIME attachments. It will make life a lot easier for both of you. 10.2 RECEIVING FILES If somebody sends you a uuencoded file through the mail, you'll have to go through a couple of steps to get it into a form you can actually use. If you are using the simple mail program, go into mail and type w # file.name where # is the number of the message you want to transfer and file.name is what you want to call the resulting file. In pine, call up the message and hit your O key and then E. You'll then be asked for a file name. In elm, call up the message and hit your S key. You'll get something that looks like this: =file.request Type a new file name and hit enter (if you hit enter without typing a file name, the message will be saved to another mail folder, not your home directory). In all three cases, exit the mail program to return to your host system's command line. Because the file has been encoded for mail delivery, you now have to run a decoder. At the command line, type uudecode file.name where file.name is the file you created while in mail. Uudecode will create a new, uncompressed binary file. In some cases, you may have to run it through some other programs (for example, if it is in "tar" form), but generally it should now be ready for you to download to your own computer (on which you might then have to run a de-compressor program such as PKUNZIP). Now if somebody sends you a MIME attachment, retrieving the attachment is simple. In both pine and elm, you'll be asked if you want to save the attachment to a file. If you answer by hitting your y key, you'll be asked for a file name to save it under (or just hit enter to save it under the default name suggested by the computer). You can now retrieve the file by exiting mail and then using the techniques listed in Chapter 4 for downloading Usenet files. All this brings up a related issue. Say somebody sends you a plain old e-mail message that you want to transfer to your own computer (as opposed to an encoded file). Assuming you're connected to a Unix public- access site, and that the message is straight ASCII, you have a couple of options. The quick and dirty way is to start your computer's screen-capture or