Distant Early Warning, or DEW, is background-only application which uses asynchronous NBP-lookups to find people playing Bolo in any zone in your AppleTalk network. This program arose from my need to keep my productivity coefficient high, yet play Bolo. I realized that I was spending too much time looking for people to play against than doing real work. So I wrote DEW to notify me whenever someone began playing Bolo. To make it a bit more challenging, and a little more livable as a background application, I forced myself to use only asynchronous routines in my network code.
If you want to search for Bolo players in all of your AppleTalk zones, just run DEW. I personally put an alias to it in my Startup Items folder.
If you want to limit which zones you want to search for Bolo players, you need to
add a STR# resource to DEW's resource fork. Using ResEdit (and on a copy of DEW), create a STR# resource with ID 257. Put the names of the zones that you want to
search through. If a STR# resource with ID 257 is present, it will use that list as its list of zones to search through. Now run DEW.
Be productive.
After someone begins playing Bolo somewhere, a Notification Manager alert will popup on your screen with a sonar ping telling you it found someone. Now, due to the way Bolo works, DEW will notify of which zone the person is playing from, NOT which zone
the user is playing in. It will also timestamp this notification.
It will only notify you once when it finds someone in a given zone. To be re-notified that someone is playing Bolo in that zone, everyone must have quit playing in that zone.
DEW will only run on a machine of SE class or above. This is due to a limitation in machines older than SE's in the number of concurrent NBP-lookups.
If you have any complaints, suggestions, bug-reports, or just wanna talk, you can contact me at:
dirty@engin.umich.edu
Cameron Esfahani
dirty@engin.umich.edu
August 8, 1992
Versions:
1.0.1 Fixed bug which wouldn't re-notify you about a zone. Decreased the application heap size.
