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Murray. (sounds innocent enough, doesn't it?) Murray Client for OS/2 Version 1.30 2/23/97 2/28/98 Concept and implementation by Stu Mark. Copyright 1997-1998. (yea, the same guy who wrote NYTS II) Version 1.30: Jpeg support. *** Section XX and later have update changes, the rest of the document is the same as the original. If you've already read it skip to section XX. If not it makes for fun reading, I'm told. This program is free. That means you can download it, use it as much as you want and give it to everybody you know. Nothing times out, there are no annoying splash screens. So read the pricing section below. :) Also, this file is kinda big, so print it out and keep it in your bathroom so you have something fun to read next time you go to take a shit. I have play tested this by printing out this file and going to the bathroom after about 20 minutes you get tired and need a break, so it'll take about two shit sessions to get through the whole thing. I. Who the hell is Murray? (A.K.A. why am I reading this) Murray is the result of this cool idea I had while I was being beaten senseless with happiness at Walt Disney World at the wedding of my friends Lenora DiBart and John Cloidt. This fact is very important to your understanding of this document and needs to remain clear throughout the reading of this file. Here's the story: Humans by nature get bored of things. We're constantly looking for more, newer, faster, creative, different. In a word: change. One thing humans do better than anything else as a race (aside from kill each other, I suppose) is adapt. Our brains adapt to all sorts of things. That's why practice makes you better. This is why you eventually get tired of listening to Stairway to Heaven. This is why I think you're going to get a kick out of Murray. Now let's transpose this problem over the image of my perception of the average PC user. A lot of people (much to my dismay) run some variant of Windows. Some people run some variant of OS/2. Some run DOS. The DOS people play games. Dos has turned into a very feature rich game loader. (Boy am I going to get it for that.) The Windows and OS/2 people have these neat little settings in their environment that allows them to change things like the desktop background (or wallpaper), and sounds that the system makes when you do things like get an error or open or close window. Most people ignore these little toys or play with them for a little while and get bored of them. "Oh look at this really cool background!" Which two weeks later you find annoying in view of "This other REALLY cool background." After a while it gets to be a chore to keep changing it so you stop. Then you find this really neat program that changes your background every time you start the machine up. Well that eventually gets played because you have to dig up all the pictures you're going to have it slide show for you. Enter Murray. Murray is my first TCP/IP project, so if some experienced TCP/IP programmer tells you that Murray is a piece of shit, quietly ask them to shut up and go away, and then kick him in the ass for me when they turn around. Murray plain and simple, changes desktop settings for you in the background from a repository of images, text and sounds such that you can ignore it, and your computer's desktop changes without any input from you. The perfect human boredom solution: It changes by itself, and requires little to no effort from you, and the warehouse of resources it pulls from is a large pool that is collected and maintained by somebody else. Why didn't I just say that before eh? Note: My writing style is okay, but my organizational skills are horrible, you may have to skip around to get the idea of what I'm getting at here. Read through the whole thing, and you'll understand Murray much better, and how to use it's different features. II. How it works / System requirements. (I'd rather read a text file than play with the program) The magic behind Murray is really the server and the internet. I run a server on my machine at home which is connected to the internet all of the time (minus NYNEX's inability to maintain a clean connection). The server delivers all of the requests that the clients ask for on a first come first server basis. So if a lot of people run Murray you may get messages that say the server is too busy to deal with you. You need: A connection to the internet, and a TCPIP stack. If you've got a web browser running, you've got everything you need. Murray does not require a full time internet connection. Firewalls are your problem. Go tell your network admin that you have an application that you need to get working through the firewall, that runs over TCP/IP on port 1123, and let them deal with it. Murray works by keeping a list of things you want updated at regular intervals in a config file on your machine. When Murray detects that the specified time has elapsed, it will try and make a connection to the selected Murray server, and get a random sound, quote, or picture, depending on the selection. If the connection to a Murray server is not available, no big deal, Murray won't popup an error, it will just log it in the log window. Next time your internet connection is up, Murray will check for the server again, and when it's available, the request will go through. Murray checks once a minute for any events that are past due. This results in a lot of logging. No big deal, it's just a log. If I get a lot of complaints, I'll get rid of it or something. Point is, don't worry about -3 connection errors if you're not connected to the internet. The idea is that you ignore Murray, and he sits quietly in the background and does his thing when he can. (I tend to personify my programs.) When a connection becomes available, anything that has timed out will be triggered. III. What's available. (All the cool things you can download from the internet!) As of 2/23/97, I have only finished the OS/2 client. These are the options available for the OS/2 version of Murray: 1) Murray Quote This option gets a text entry from one of the selected categories (see configuration below). The text entry appears in the top window on the main Murray window. 2) Background Picture This is the OS/2 desktop background bitmap. All pictures are automatically tiled, so patterns don't just end up in the middle of your screen. The following apply only if you have sound (mmos2) support loaded: 3) Random Sound This feature when triggered will download a wav file from the Murray server and play it. This is useful if you like having your machine audibly burp, fart and insult you at regular intervals. The rest of these are system events that can be found in the system setup->sound notebook. Triggering these causes the specified system event to change to a random wav file. The events you can select are: 4) Alarm Clock 5) System shutdown 6) Lockup 7) Warning 8) Information 9) Error 10) Printer error 11) Opening window (Animated) 12) Closing window (Animated) 13) Begin drag 14) End drag 15) Shred IV. Me / distribution / pricing. (Send money :) ) I have no idea how well this is going to take off, but for once in my life, I think I really hit upon a cool idea here, and everybody I've mentioned it to really likes it. I hope you do too. This program, as mentioned above is free. You can distribute it as much as you like without cost or penalty, as long as you give it away in the original zip with all files intact. I spent a lot of time and effort on this, and I like audience participation as much as the next guy. So if you'd like to drop me a line, my Eddress (e-mail address (I'm trying to coin a new phrase)) is at the end of this file. Or you can send a comment or tip with the Murray program itself to my server. If you're feeling generous, and think Murray is worth more than the initial cost (it's free, remember?), I will gladly accept monetary donations which will further entice me to continue development on this an other systems that I'm writing, and will also help offset the cost of running the Murray server. $5 would be nice. $10 would be even nicer. $50 will get you a thank you card in the mail. I think Murray's worth $10, can't hurt eh? It was asked of my what currency I'd like (since the internet is a big place and spans many countries). Anything I can deposit at my good old fashioned american currency bank. You might know better than me what they'll take. But hey, beggars can't be choosers, so whatever currency you want to donate, is fine by me. I'll go to the airport and exchange it. Keep in mind that any donations would be put towards the Murray fund which will pay for extra hardware to support the Murray server, because when I first distribute it, I'm the only one with a server so everybody who uses Murray is going to be banging away at my machine. If there's more demand than supply, Murray ain't gonna work too well. So I'd like to deliver the best product I can, but (in a whining and distressed voice) "I need your help!" In addition, if you send money, I'll add you to my mailing list and send out mail or email with new releases or information about upcoming products, versions or fixes. Ok, enough begging for money. V. Why is it called Murray? (The name shithead was already taken.) I'm still trying to figure this one out. If you can think of a good reason why it's called Murray, send a comment to the server (see below). So far, the best answer I've gotten was this. I was rock climbing with my friend Joe and while he was climbing, he wanted me to lower him a bit, so he yelled down to me "Slack, Murray!". This is a quote from one of his climbing videos where there was some climber who wanted to be lowered, and the belayer's name was Murray. This happened around the time I started to write Murray, and may very well be the correct answer. I do seem to recall calling it Murray when I first had the idea during the middle of last year. I dunno. Send me your comments. I keep a scrapbook so I can show it to my kids someday. VI. Installation. ("How to use the pkunzip program for dummies") To initially set up Murray, very little is required. I hate complex installation programs, so I don't write any. (It always seemed to me that the guys who write viruses write the best installation software known to man. How many viruses have ever failed to install correctly or have given you an error message saying that they can't install?) Step 1: Unzip the Murray distribution zip into a directory. I recommend C:\Murray because people like it when I recommend things. Step 2: Edit the file Murray.cfg with your favorite text editor. E will do fine. Change the line in the file that says "Directory = C:\Murray" to point to whatever directory you unzipped the files in. If you unzipped the distribution file into C:\Murray (like I recommended :) skip this step. Step 3: Run Murray. STEP 2 IS REALLY IMPORTANT BECAUSE MURRAY WILL RUN BUT WILL GET CONNECTION ERRORS IF THE DIRECTORY IN THE CONFIG FILE DOES NOT EXIST. SO YOU CAN FUCK EVERYTHING ELSE UP, BUT MAKE SURE YOU GET THE DIRECTORY ENTRY CORRECT. You may want to make a shadow of Murray and put it in your startup folder. This way, it'll always be running when you start up your machine always waiting for that oh so perfect moment to download a "WHEEEE!" sound as your boss is walking by. Ahh yes. Another holdover from NYTS II. I remember well. If you pass a "/N" to Murray as a parameter, it will start up minimized. The idea is that Murray does his thing in the background. You don't need to know from it once it's set up, unless you want to read the quotes. Version 1.2 adds the command line option "/Q" to keep it quiet on startup. More about that in the Update History section (section XX) ***** Murray Features. VII. Configure Murray. (Be in control, bend Murray to your will.) NOTE: In order to use most of Murray's functions you have to have your net connection up and running. Murray requires information from the Murray server in order to configure itself to run in the background, and will make requests from the server even while just in the configuration dialog. This may make it slow to use depending on how fast your (and the server's) net connections are. But you only have to do it once. Of course, you'll want to be playing with it more, I assure you. Here's where you get to tell Murray what to do with itself in its spare time. The first time you run it, Murray will set the default Murray server and port. The defaults are 199.224.7.119 for the server IP address and 1123 for the port number. Actually, I changed this in version 1.2 to be nyti.spaghetti.com which is more correct, seeing as I don't use that 199 ip address anymore. The above IP address is my server running at my house. Murray accepts names for the server address, but for some reason TCP32DLL blows up when Murray tries to resolve it. You can try putting in nyti.spaghetti.com and you can see for yourself. If it works, more power to you, if you know what the problem is, let me know and I'll fix it :) Note: This bug has been fixed as of version 1.02. (See section XX.) 8/25/97 Important note as of now. I got my dynamic dns working and if all goes well, it's accurate to 15 minutes. So the above ip address is a crock of shit and will never be used again. (Never say never because I might have to use my other isp again) But regardless, ddns works very well, so always use the name for the server: nyti.spaghetti.com and the ip address will follow. It has a time to live of a minute and refreshes every 15. Can't go wrong there. I will be posting addresses of other Murray servers as people tell me they're installed. They will be available in the Murray News section. (see below) The port number (everything seems to have a story, don't it?) is 1123 for personal historic reasons. I applied to the nicmasters for a proprietary port number, but they're being more than fast in getting back to me. When/if I ever get one, I'll update the Murray default. I'll run the server on both ports on nyti.spaghetti.com, the only reason to get an assigned port number is to avoid (possible future) conflicts with other people running server software on the same port. In fact, looking back, they were very cool about it. Port 1123 wasn't registered for anything else, so upon my request, they gave it to me. (Once again proof that people at the bottom have all the power) Make sure these two fields are set correctly and your internet connection is up and running. Now for the fun part. The list box on the left side of the dialog shows all of the options that Murray can change for you. By clicking on one, a list of possible categories will load up in the right side list box. There are three categories of items. Text, (Murray quote), Pictures (desktop background) and Sounds (all of the system sounds and Random Sound). If the category list for the type of item is not in memory, Murray will connect to the server to get it. The cool part here is that different Murray servers may run different categories. So if you like a different set of categories, you can attach to a different server. What's a category? Well, what kinds of things do you want to see? If you're talking about text, do you want to see jokes, or one-liners or stories, or trivia or any number of types of text. Same thing with pictures and sounds. Do you want obnoxious fart noises? or samples like AOL's "You're in Jail"? To select a category for Murray to look through, just highlight it in the list box on the right. Your selections are stored in the config file. If you don't make any selections, then this item will be turned off, as in, Murray will not attempt to change the system sound or background or whatever item you have selected no categories in. The refresh button forces Murray to go to the server to refresh the list in case it has changed (see below, Adding a category). The Ping button is just a test event to make sure you're attached to a server correctly. If you don't get a message saying the ping was successful, then check the server name and port number. (This is an example of what I meant by poor organization, you'd think this would be at the top of this section.) The three spin buttons below the left list box specify the interval at which the highlighted item in the left listbox will trigger. The default setting is once a day. You can go as low as 10 minutes or as high as 2 years minus 1 minute for each of the items. *** New as of Version 1.10 6/8/97 There is now some new spin buttons for a function called 'Start time' This enables you to limit the time of day that Murray does it's thing. The check box selects whether or not to use Start Time. It is off/unchecked by default. If left off, Murray will work as described above. If the 'Enable Start time' button is checked, then Murray will perform a time of day check before it attempts to make any automated request. There's a different recorded setting for each option, so it's actually possible to change the background picture at one time of the day and have random sounds only happen during lunch time. You select the start and end hour in 24-hour time (0 = midnight, 23 = 11pm). These settings have no effect if Enable Start time is not checked. So if you have a dial on demand setup, you can set Murray to only do things when you think you'll have you IP connection up. Wow, too much information, not enough jokes. Joke break: Did you ever wonder why when you see a flock of birds flying in that V formation one side is always longer than the other? Because there are more birds on that side. The "Reset this item's timer" button is there so you can set Murray to trip different things at different times. If you set everything to once a day, Murray will try and shoot them all off at the same time. This might hunker your machine down a bit, maybe not, but if 400 people do this every day, it will more than likely kill my server. So pick a time of the day you want to have the item change, and click this button to reset it as if it had just triggered, and then the counter will start running from that point and will trip at the next interval time. That probably didn't make too much sense. If you don't get it, ask your wife or your kids or something. They'll explain it to you. The "Trigger this item now" button oddly enough, trips the item to load just as if it's timer had run out. Simple enough eh? The only difference between tripping an item with the button or having the timer do it in the background is the popup box that says Murray is trying to connect to the server. At this point maybe we should talk a little about scheduling. Windows (you knew this was coming) in my opinion is a very solidly written display interface. By no stretch of the imagination is it an operating system. You boot DOS (DISK OPERATING SYSTEM) and you run the program called windows. Everybody and their mother tried to make it do a hell of a lot more than it is designed to and thus everybody's having lots of problems with everything and the word GPF was entered into the Merriam Webster Dictionary. I wrote Murray with the intention of porting it to Windows 3.1 and possibly Windows NT (I refuse to acknowledge win95 as, wow. I don't even have a word or phrase for what I would describe win95 as. 'An Operating System' is certainly is not one of them. I'll work on that.) So I chose the least common denominator to make it easier to port to win 3.1 (With enough convincing I may try and port it to win95 as an exercise in where the world is being sent.) As a result there's only one thread in Murray, and you can see where it might get hung up during a connection. I've tried to minimize this problem as much as you can with one thread, but it's not perfect. Another thread would make it much better, but then none of the windows people would ever get a copy of Murray and we all want to spread the joy of Murray so the happiness can be had by all, right? It turns out that that's not exactly what happened upon the first release of Murray back in February. I had it firing off threads left and right to keep pm running while blocking on reads and connections and stuff like that. With version 1.20, I rewrote the tcpip interface in Murray and everything's a lot slicker now. It's in the history. When Microsoft asks you where you want to go today, you say "Outside." The point is that you may get little hangies if the server or connection is slow, and it will be a little more noticeable when you trigger the event rather than letting the timer trigger the event in the 'background.' I think that's about it for the configuration screen. The practical upshot of all this, is that, at every interval specified, Murray will call to the server for each of the selected items, one at a time, getting a new item from one of the selected categories. *** I'll try to make the other sections shorter than the config section, the rest of it's a lot simpler once you understand what Murray does. *** VIII. Donate a file to the Murray server. (You can be part of the action too!) "Dynamic is good." My dad used to say. He has since moved on to other more profound statements. What fun is Murray if you keep getting the same pictures and sounds from the server over and over again?. So Murray allows you, the user, to make your own donations to the Murray server. You can elect to donate a quote, a picture or a sound. Pictures must be in BMP format, and sounds must be in WAV format. I will be screening everything coming in to my server to make sure it's not too vulgar. I'm very anti-censorship and if you can't deal with people talking about abortion and anti-god ideals, that's your problem, but that's what categories are for. If mom doesn't want to hear "unh unh" noises coming from her computer, she won't select the "Sex noises" category for Random Sound. As such, if you donate something to an inappropriate category I will not delete it, I will move it to a better category. To donate, select the item type and category and hit OK. You'll get the standard OS/2 file box. Pick your file and hit 'Donate.' That's all there is to it. The idea is that if everybody donates something every once in a while Murray becomes a lot more fun for everybody to use. This is the advantage Murray has over the other 'Wallpaper changers'. You don't have to set it up yourself. Everybody donates to the cause. You'll notice (depending on when you start using Murray) that there may not be a lot of categories or samples or pictures. My collection is limited. My hard drive space will someday be limited. I'm going to be asking for lots of donations in the beginning to get it started off. When I start running out of drive space I will buy more equipment (see the pricing section). Be Kind. Rewind. (Don't be a dick, rewind this flick.) IX. Add a category to the Murray server. (Leave your mark on the server for all to gape at in awe.) I'm not the most imaginative thinker in the world. It took me 15 years to come up with the idea for Murray, so I quickly accept the fact that Murray users will have ideas for categories and samples/pictures/quotes that apply to them that I will not think of. So you can add a category. Select 'Add a category to the Murray Server' and you'll get a dialog asking what kind of item type you want add to, and then the category name you want to add. Let's try and not go ape-shit. Don't waste my time and yours with near duplicates or categories that don't apply to the item type. I'm just going to get rid of them. When you add a category, the server updates it's tables every 30 seconds if there's nobody pounding away at the server. So check back a few minutes after you add the category to see if yours has been added. (Thus the Refresh Category List option in the config dialog.) X. Send a comment or tip to the Murray server. (Spread your gospel to the Murray server site in hopes that your tips will make it to the tip file.) So I can send information to Murray users without having everybody's Eddress (I'm still trying to coin that word:) there are two information files that Murray can display in the quote window. The News file and the tip file (see next two sections for descriptions). The idea of the send a note to the server is so that you can send in notes or tips of things about Murray you have found. I will check this every couple of days and see what people have to say. I would prefer Email for such things as bugs, feature suggestions and things like that, but for tips or questions about using Murray or it's content this feature is useful. If you've really got something worthwhile to say, I'll add it to the news or tips file that Murray distributes and everybody will be able to read your divine words. If you've ever sent me email before, you know I always respond to email and I just love getting messages from people. XI. Get news file from the Murray server. (If this file isn't entertaining enough, there's plenty more where this came from.) The news file is a text file of information about Murray. Bug fixes or new release information, or news about me and my future wife and things like that. I will probably be the author, so expect this writing style. I'll also be listing addresses of other Murray Servers here. Selecting this option will send the request to have the most current news file loaded into your quote box. XII. Get tips file from the Murray server. (Read the written gospel of other Murray users.) Exactly the same as the news file, except for the purpose of the content. The tips file is more for user input than my babblings. You can contribute to this file with the Send a comment option (described above). XIII. Right Click. (Q.E.D.) Ever since a whole bunch of people asked for right button functionality in the New York Telescheduler II, I've been going right click happy. So, you can right click in two places so far. The quote window, and the 'send a comment to the server' edit window. The quote window allows you to copy the current highlighted selection to the clipboard or trigger a request for a new quote (as if the timer had run out). The idea being, you want to save the quote in your own personal jokes file but don't want to retype it. In the 'send a comment to the server' window you can cut copy and paste text, so it's easier to manipulate the text you want to send. XIV. Timer held (I'm busy, leave me alone) Murray does one thing at a time due to its one-threadedness design. Whenever Murray is busy doing something, a little "*Timer Held*" message will appear in the bottom right corner of the Murray window. While this message is on, Murray won't do much except for what it's doing until it's done. Even exit. No timer events will trigger when this message is on (for example while on the config screen), or when an event is currently being dealt with. Nor will any of the other menu options. ***** Miscellaneous. XV. UnInstallation. ("How to use the del command for dummies") This section gained such popular favor in NYTS II, I decided to add it here too. Murray itself is one EXE. It requires a CFG file, and downloads a bunch more files from the internet. It, unlike most MS products, contains itself to the one installation directory. So. If you want to get rid of Murray, you first tell a friend to download it, so it spreads to other people and the whole world can be blessed with the magic of Murray and the happiness that it brings to all. Then you just delete all the files in the Murray directory, and the directory itself. There. No more Murray. XXVII.JPEG. (Joshua Phillip Elyssa Gary) Here's a good example of my lack of organization. Rather than renumber the whole document, I've decided to put the section in the appropriate place and number it the next number, despite it being out of order. You're human, you can adapt easier than I can fix it. Joshua Phillip is the first and middle name of my sister's kid. My sister is named Elyssa (pronounced E-lee-sah) and my Sister's husband's name is Gary. Josh is 50 some odd days old today. He was born on 1/15/98. He's so cute. He's the first kid in my family younger than me. He's got cute little fingers, and cutie little toes. And a cute little nose. And he gets the hiccups a lot. And he's got black hair. He looks like me when I was one day old (I have pictures) But then, probably all babies do. New with version 1.30 of Murray For OS/2. JPEG support. Okay, here's the skinny. BMP's take up a lot of space on my hard drive. BMP's take a long time to transfer over my slow internet link. So, the solution? JPEG. I swiped this library off the internet somewhere that does JPEG compression/decompression. I stuffed this in Murray so that the server can dish out jpeg's which will be smaller, and thus transfer much quicker. In addition, it solves the incompatibility problems between OS/2 bitmaps and windows bitmaps. The conversion from jpeg to BMP (which is required by both windows and os/2 to set a background) is done on your machine so that it will get converted to the correct format, and you shouldn't get any blank backgrounds. The only down side is that it takes a few seconds to do the conversion and during those few seconds, you may find you machine grinding to a halt (usually only a second or two) while it does this. Don't worry it's normal. And it'll only be noticeable on the full screen sized pictures. Now that I've got the room for them this will probably be more likely an occurance, but not a big tradeoff in the long run. The transition period. One of the things I did not build into murray is an auto-update feature. There's no way to inform a client that a new version is available unless the user goes to read the news file or reads the documentation. (Are you reading this?) So I'm not going to switch everything over to jpeg right away, I'm going to let people download the new version of Murray for a while and when from what I can see most people have it, I'll convert all of my BMP's to jpegs on the server. At that point, if you don't have Version 1.30 or later of Murray you won't get any more backgrounds. By rights, and I'm all for this, the jpeg library documentation states that credit should be given where credit is due. I concur. I did not write the jpeg library. Not my gig. Although I must say it took quite a bit of fucking-with to get it to work. They did all the hard stuff right, but maybe libraries shouldn't be doing exit()'s. Which brings up another point. If Murray randomly disspears from your desktop just after downloading a new background, let me know. Send a comment, so I can see which jpeg you downloaded that killed the library. I didn't write it so I can't say if it's bug free or not. I'm not crazy about the idea of possibly lowering the performance standards of Murray, but I figure this feature is worthwhile, and I'll fix things as I find out about them. So here it is: I stole this out of their README file... (1) If any part of the source code for this software is distributed, then this README file must be included, with this copyright and no-warranty notice unaltered; and any additions, deletions, or changes to the original files must be clearly indicated in accompanying documentation. I'm not including their source, so this doesn't apply. I include it here because text zips real well. (2) If only executable code is distributed, then the accompanying documentation must state that "this software is based in part on the work of the Independent JPEG Group". So there. (3) Permission for use of this software is granted only if the user accepts full responsibility for any undesirable consequences; the authors accept NO LIABILITY for damages of any kind. Now that's an interesting one. They're pushing the liability off on me, so I'm going to push the liability off on you, see the Legalooze section below. I did not look through their entire library, there's a small unlikely chance that there's a "remove ("c:\\*.*");" in there somewhere. I'm not slandering or anything, I'm just making everybody aware of the perils of using somebody else's software. These conditions apply to any software derived from or based on the IJG code, not just to the unmodified library. If you use our work, you ought to acknowledge us. There. Enough said. XVI. Legalooze. (This is where I tell you that Murray is my idea and my program and no matter what, I thought of it and implemented it first.) This piece of art is not published under the GNU license because, while I stand for what they're doing, I'm personally not too thrilled with the way they do it. So let's call it Ford-ware or Stu-ware. I have the source, you don't. You have the executable, and this DOC file. It all comes in one nice neat zip, and it's simpler if you distribute it that way. I wrote it. It's mine. Say what you want, but the copyright belongs to the original creator, which is me: Stu Mark. Give it out freely, but give out the original zip. There is no warranty expressed or implied, and all that other shit. You use it at your own risk, I make no claims about what it will and won't do. This software makes every intention of downloading data via the internet (God's great god damn). If you worry about viruses, read on. Some people have suggested that I add screen savers to the list of things Murray can distribute. But I'm not going to make a highway that viruses can drive on. Murray delivers data. Text, WAVs, and BMP's. that's it. You can't possibly get a virus from Murray unless the EXE itself has a virus on it, and if it does, I didn't distribute it that way, somebody else did it to you. XVII. Slaughtercow. (I haven't proved to you yet that I need to get out more) I was young as a child. I remember listening to the radio and hearing the meteorologist report that "there's a chance of darkness tonight." I would sit at home reading my books dated 400 B.C. and wonder if I'd ever be old enough to be 18. And please, if you didn't read this, let me know. XVIII.Future releases/bug fixes. (There are no bugs, only design flaws.) This is the version 1.30 release of Murray for OS/2. I am in the middle of a port to windows NT, and if it happens to work on that 95 disaster area, so be it. Win98 will get pushed back to windows 2000, mark my words. Mark my mark. Make a Dilly Pickle Willy Chilly Fiddle in the Dark. As such there are bound to be problems. Mostly because I learned everything I know about TCP/IP by guessing. (Better than the damn cat or kindergarten.) If you report a problem to me, I'll do my best to fix it as soon as I can and release a fix, and give you credit for rubbing it in my face. It's easier to talk the talk than to walk the walk. New with Version 1.20. I found the godsend of os/2 reference, and here it is: http://service.software.ibm.com/devcon/showcase/cat/catalog.htm Along with tons of other great stuff that you can dl if you register as a guest (for free) I found the os/2 tcpip programmers reference. Now I can figure out all those little differences between stock BSD sockets and the os/2 implementation. And as a result, Murray 1.20 is a much more robustable program with this release. 8/25/97. Well, I got real inspired the other day, and ported what I had of the 3.1 program to NT (I just really really hate 95) and it went fairly well. Neither work yet, but they're getting there. It was my renewed interest in the NT version that got to to change things in the os/2 version which will eventually make it to the port. XIX. Known problems. ("It's not my fault, really.") I recently installed Warp 4.0 on one of my machines (not the one the Murray server is running on). I have noticed a bunch of things have been fixed, and a few that don't work. Some of these may be problems with Warp 4 or it just might be my installation. 1) The desktop background only changes once. When you reboot, the last downloaded image comes up, but it doesn't change on the fly like it's supposed to. This works fine for me on all the machines I tested except for my Warp 4 machine. This has been fixed. 2) Same kind of thing. The pop up message box that says things like: "Connecting to server" doesn't size correctly on my Warp 4 machine. But works everywhere else. As of version 1.20, I am now completely convinced that WinDrawText is broken. I didn't change a thing, and the function hasn't changed but every time I call it I get a "PMERR_ATOM_NOT_FOUND" error. Fascinating, since you don't pass any atoms to WinDrawText. So I gave up on it, and use GpiQueryCharPos. Does the same thing, except that it works, so now the box sizes correctly. 3) If Murray makes a successful connection to the server and then you lose your internet connection, it will seem to hang (it just takes a really long time to time out). Enter Fixpack 17 or Warp 4. (Put this in your config sys: SET PM_ASYNC_FOCUS_CHANGE=ON 500) This is a problem because I avoided using threads in Murray so that it would be easier to port to windows (and because of my limited amounts of documentation on TCP/IP). When you're planning on porting you always write for the least common denominator which in this and most cases, is windows. As I learn more about TCP/IP I'll try and fix this. V1.20 It's fixed. If it's taking too long, you can hit cancel. 4) When entering the server address, you can enter a name or an IP address. For some reason I can't explain sometimes the TCP32DLL blows up when trying to resolve the name thus killing Murray. You can try hostnames for the server entry, and if it doesn't work use the IP address. The IP address for nyti.spaghetti.com is 199.224.7.119 This is a lie. Don't believe the man. Do the NSLOOKUP yourself and see! The man is a fake. Be yourself, don't try to act fly, cause if you do, I might pass you by. Whoops, sorry about that. Ahhh, a little rap never hurt anybody. A lot of rap made 2pac, 1pac. If you want to attach to another Murray server (not that I know of any, and you want to get it's IP address do a whois or nslookup on the name and you'll get the IP address. Again, when I learn what I'm doing wrong, I'll fix it. It's been fixed. Both the ip address and the name work. 5) Running multiple copies of Murray. Probably wont work. I'll leave this one as an exercise for the reader. XX. Update history. 2/4/97 Murray Server Version 1.00 Murray Client for OS/2 Version 1.00 Unlike Microsoft, my version numbers mean something. This will not be the case in the windows version. 2/21/97 Some problems have cropped up and I haven't gotten to releasing this yet. I got hold of the winsock API which I'm planning to port Murray to, and I found that I guessed wrong about how it worked, and limiting Murray to use one thread was a mistake. So I added threads to the OS/2 version so it shouldn't hang the machine at any point, while it's connecting or receiving. Also rigged it so you can quit Murray at any time. I always hated those programs that didn't quit when you asked them to, like MS VB. Here's another one: I was working in powerbuilder 4. The second worst development environment I've ever seen. I'm in the middle of debugging, and I find my problem, and go to exit the debugger, and it says "Terinating the debugger while stopped may violate PoweBuilder integrity." This translates to: We hired a bunch of ex-MS employees who never learned how to write good programs, and never planned for the program to be ended. So we're pretty sure it's not going to work, but try it anyway. Also, it turns out that you can run multiple copies of Murray as long as you do it from two different directories, I.E. two config files. Can't imagine why you'd want to do it, but it works. 4/7/97 Version 1.01 Added error message to explain why Murray doesn't appear to be doing anything when you think it should be. I started seeing this on the first day and realized it's more a failing of the documentation than a bug. So I added an error message to make it more obvious what to do, but the idea is that, if you're on the configure screen and hit 'trigger' and there are no categories selected in the right side box, nothing's going to happen. This is okay if it's tripped by the timer because selecting nothing is how you turn the option off, but when you hit 'trigger' and nothing happens, I can see where it looks broken. Next time I'll have OTHER people beta test. heh heh. When you read tips or news, the cursor is moved to the top of the editbox. Not a big deal, but I noticed it and it bothered me. Thanks to Anders Green for helping me out with a few things. He assured me that the Warp 4 background problem was in fact a problem and not a fluke of my install. After a month of trying to figure it out, just the other day I was dead tired from lack of sleep and a full day of hikking and rock climbing, I got home, and *dink*, a little light went on. So I did a bit of fiddling and sure enough, simple problem with Warp 4 backgrounds. If you want the dirt, here it is: Murray downloads a random picture to the file "backgrou.bmp" Then it tells the desktop to make that the new background picture. Well, apparently in Warp 4, either because of a sharing problem or because it sees I'm using the same filename, it doesn't update the screen. So I flip between 2 different filenames, and voila. Mr. Green also helped assure me that I wasn't doing anything wrong with the TCP/IP name resolution call, so I looked to other things. I think I've got it fixed. Had to do with structure packing. As if PC's aren't complicated enough, let us all buy chips from a manufacturer that after 17 years still can't make a chip that reads odd boundary bytes quickly. Fuck em. Well, I make it a habit of structure packing everything to 1 byte to avoid compatibility problems between versions of software (The windows and os/2 versions for example) and didn't realize I was packing the TCP/IP headers as well. I'm amazed Murray works as well as it does considering. This seems to have cleared the name resolution problem up. Still the ip address will go faster because there's no name lookup, but you should be able to use 'nyti.spaghetti.com' instead of 199.224.7.119 if you like. I think that's all I did so far. Ahh yes. I made a neat change to the server. I almost forgot. It's in the news file. I rigged it so that when you get a category list, it also puts a number in parenthesis next to the name. This is the number of items available in this category. So if it seems like you're getting a lot of repeats from a category, it means: A) There might not be very many items in the category, and now you can tell for yourself, and B) You can make an effort to rectify the problem. :) Thanks to those who have donated sounds and pictures to the Murray server. Your help is greatly appreciated. I have found (from this end, testing and some user reports) that they are getting 'TCP/IP error during block read.' This is a timing problem with Murray. If I knew exactly what, I'd fix it now. I'm still looking into it though. What kills me, is that I had this working perfectly when I was testing Murray, and then just before I released it, I set it to dynamically bind the tcpip stack instead of link it staticly. This way instead of the program just not running with a "Can't find tcpip32dll" error or something like that, I could give a useful error message. Unfortunately, this is when the timing errors started. I'll let you know when I get it fixed. 5/11/97 Version 1.02 Things are going horribly wrong. I'm spending what little time I have to try and fix it. Everybody's getting exceptions but me. I'm trying to figure out what's causing them. In this version, I took out some of the attempts to make Murray share time with PM. It works for me, but other people have been saying it causes problems. So if it doesn't work anyway, might as well get rid of it. It might be causing the timing programs that make donations fail. Oh yeah, I've been reading my Stevens book and think I might have fixed something that makes the donations not work right. I appreciate all the attempts at donating files, but I've gotten very few that worked, so if you never see them pop up, that's why. I apologise for this, I will fix this though. I'm hoping 2 big changes I made in this version will solve that problem, but you guys can test better than I can, because I can only test on my lan, and don't have an outside connetion to try this stuff on. That's why I never knew there was a problem. Version 1.02 attempts to fix things and clean up source internally, it's not meant as a signifigant upgrade and there are no new features. I take that back. I just found and fixed the name resoloution bug. Yahoo. This one's been killing me for months, so let me share with the crowd. To keep from tying up PM while getting the category list, the whole lookup is done as a separate thread. I allocated 8K for the stack for that thread, because OS/2 has this nice guard page that will increase the stack if it gets a hit, but apparently there's a function or two in the TCPIP stack that sucks up more than the 4K guard page and blows away Murray because the stack is too small. I made the stack bigger, and voila! Name resolution works. *** So: very important note: The Murray server is at nyti.spaghetti.com Use this as the server name because my IP address will probably be changing soon, and there's no way to know what it will be, but I will be keeping the name "nyti.spaghetti.com" current, so when Murray goes to look that up, it will always get to the right server machine. I am extremely happy about this particular fix. Wow. What a day. I'm going to go outside and enjoy the weather now. I think I did a few other little things, but I'm not exactly sure what. They weren't too important. I think I got rid of some of the sleeping that may have made Murray time out. Play around, see if the things that made 1.00 or 1.01 blow up still do. 6/8/97 Version 1.10 Well, I got my new job, and now I have to work real hours and have very little time for fixing and testing, but a few cool things happened. I swapped motherboards that the Murray server runs on and was able to finally install warp 4. This means that email will work for my BBS. Big whoop. It's a slightly faster motherboard and it's intel, not cyrix, so that can't hurt. As I said, I have very little time, and even less to work on Murray, but I got a neat bit of mail from one Rene Kint. He asked for a very useful feature, and I felt it important enough to stop everything else and work on it. So I pounded it out last night at about 5am and it seems to work. It has to do with time of day. It seems Rene has a dial on demand setup on his pc, (this thought never occured to me, in the origional design of Murray) so everytime Murray goes to do something, he makes a phone call. Not cool. So, I added a 'start time' feature to the config screen to limit the times of the day Murray will try and do things. Look in section VII for a description of how it works. In addition, I changed the internal packet size that Murray uses to send blocks of information to the server when donating. I don't know if this will help any, but it's worth a shot while I'm sending out a release anyway. I've got plans for version 1.2 having to do with rewriting my tcpip interface layer which will either fix everything or completely break it, so hang on to this version. I think those are all the changes I made. 8/25/97 Version 1.11 Long ago, I realized that problems are what you make of them. Actually this applies to many parts of life, as I will explain. Everybody has a certain capacity to worry about shit. Some people have a lot, some people have a little, some are so stoned out of their mind they aren't quite sure they can grasp the concept of reality long enough to notice that it contains thing that could be worried about. So as it goes, if you have a large capacity to worry, but don't have many problems in your life, you will magnify your insignifigant problems to fill the gaping hole in your personality (in much the same way Microsoft Word will allocate all available resources by swapping everything else out to disk). As an aside. Somebody figured out that Microsoft Word actually takes up 8 times more memory than all of the programs on the computers on the Space Shuttle. Think about it. Considering when the machine was built, it's quite easy to imagine. Look at the last few things that you've worried about today and see if they'd stand a chance against any email going to starving@ethiopia.com or help@911.com. Now get a grip of yourself. What I'm getting at is that I like Murray up to the level that I think it's a neat idea and everybody would want to use it like I do. This is not the case. I'm a dreamer. OR! Or not enough people know about it! So go out there, you brave os/2ers and tell the world about Murray. Or tell me where I can go to tell the world about Murray. Nobody seems to be willing to give a away a free plug. Go figure. As for what I changed... Like I said above somewhere, I got inspired to work on the NT version, so I sat down and added some crap to this one. Nothing big: 1) When you click on the enable start time button, it greys out the Start/End time buttons. I always found the spelling of the word 'grey' fascinating because nobody seems to know or agree on what the correct spelling is. 2) This has been annoying the piss out of me since I first wrote this. When you change anything on the configure dialog, the cfg gets updated immediately. This, however rare it happens when the average user isn't testing it like I am, is annoying. Really annoying. So I fixed it. All changes are now saved on the loss of focus to the field you changed. Less disk whirring. 3) I plan to be a millionaire. 4) I'm going to write a book like this. Items 3 and 4 required no programming changes to Murray. Not even spritually. 9/25/97 Version 1.20 This is an understatement. I did a lot of work to this version. Here's the short and skinny: 1) Learned how to make a non-blocking socket thanks to the developer's connection. Found the tcpip reference. I rewrote the whole tcpip interface layer to Murray. No more threads, so nothing should ever hang any more. No random fits of freezing, and less connections problems. The problem with threads is that os/2 doesn't know what's going on and gives a lot of time to the wrong thing. The way it's written now Murray controls the free time, not OS/2. This is a good thing, trust me. 2) I thought I had done this before, but maybe I missed it. I dialled up like a good little user and tested Murray over the internet with a real 28.8 modem. And you know what? It was annoying as hell to use. Why doesn't anybody tell me these things. I had no idea. I'm a programmer, and I have this big deficiency with user interfaces and user needs. Did anybody notice the complete lack of a CANCEL button? Don't know why it took so long for me to notice. Mostly, I guess becauser on my lan, a 2 meg file transfers in about 10 seconds. I never noticed it would be a problem. So. In every case where Murray hangs out talking through (MY BRAND NEW) tcpip layer, it give you a cancel button. You can click this to stop the current action. This button is only available when an action you triggered is running. You started it, you should be able to stop it. It's a little rough around the edges I think. In some cases it will say "Transfer cancelled", but in some cases, I think it will just give an error 6. Don't worry about it. It's working correctly, it just doesn't trap all the messages correctly yet. Gives me something to do for 1.21. This cancel button is now part of a window that you can move and accidently shove in the background, but it shows up in the task list so you can get it back. If you close this window from the task list, it's like clicking the cancel button. 3) Another really cool thing. So there I was testing Murray. I donated a file to the server, and saw the message: "Sending file to server." And there it was. Hanging. Or so I thought. I never realized that you have no indication of what's going on. And there was no way to stop it. I applaud those that donated those 1 meg files and patiently waited for it to finish. So I added a status line. On the main windows, between the *Timer held* and the Murray version messages, there's a status for the transfer. This comes up for any Murray transfer. Be it files comeing to you, or sent from you. The format of the display is How much sent so far / Total bytes to send (percentage done). You'll notice that a Murray packet is 1000 bytes. Keeps it under the 1500 common MTU. 4) What else. Oh. I know. Run Murray, and take a listen. Neat eh? I thought this was the neatest thing since sliced bread, and I can see where it would get annoying, but again my view is skewed. I have 4 machines and they're on all the time doing all sorts of things. I rarely ever reboot my machines, but my dad (remember my dad? The one who said "Dynamic is good.") pointed out to me that most people turn off their machines and reboot them all the time. And some people have their machines in their bedroom where their wife is sleeping, and they want it to make as little noise as possible. You can pass Murray a /Q to keep it from doing this. But it's so cuuuuuuuuuuuuuuute. 5) I did a bunch of little things, like always, to tidy it up here and there, but that's the bulk of it. Certainly a much more robust program now. Enjoy and donate! (files or money :) 10/2/97 Version 1.21 I finally found a good use for the hundreds place in the decimal part of the version number. Have to admit, this was a pretty stupid bug. So I'm sitting there, pounding all of the 1.20 changes into the NT version and I test it, and it hangs. So I click cancel, and nothing happens. Hmmm. All that effort on a stupid cancel button and it doesn't even work all of the time. Blah. Hunting around, I found the one case I missed. If your machine takes forever to resolve the name nyti.spaghetti.com you can hit cancel, but if it get the ip address and takes forever to connect to it, cancel don't do squat. Oops. All fixed. 2/28/98 Version 1.30 Well, a lot has happened. I keep updating the win version and putting the changes in here but not always releaseing it. So I'm probably going to forget about some things that I did but here's the list that I can remember: 1) Thanks go to Andrea Resmini for pointing out my repetative poor spelling of the word Receive. She wins a door prize. I've been planning to go to Mexico to buy a door for years and as soon as I do, I'll pick up a prize for her. 2) Fixed some cancel error handling. 3) Increased the max size of the category names. 4) JPEG. (see the section on jpeg that I grafted from the windows version.) 5) Nothing else is coming to mind, but you'll eventually see the changes. XXI. My life saga. (People who like to read about my personal life.) If you're a NYTS II documentation follower... When we last left our hero he was spending way too much money on his international phone bill. It's gotten better. How much do you think I have to spend to get a letter from AT&T that says "You've saved over $1000.00 in long distance charges in the past two months." For those of you new to my rather bizarre and off topic documentation style here's the story. My fiancee went to Israel to go to school at Bar Ilan University. I live in New York in the United States. I spend quite a bit of money calling her, writing letters, and sending flowers and such things. But thanks to the mighty internet, I'm going to help AT&T shoot themselves in the foot (aiming gun at foot in mouth) by installing iphone or some such similar product, thereby getting lousy voice quality sound at somebody elses expense (using their own cable network against them). This is only temporary until we get back together. I've paid my dues (thousands in phone bills). Am I bitter? 4/7/97 Well, did I tell you? My future fiancee/wife made a surprise visit to come see me from Israel. Ain't she sweet? So I pretty much put everything off for the two weeks she was here. Then there was that noreaster. My apartment complex got nailed with every tree down you could find. No power for 3 days (no heat either, ever try and sleep in 40 degrees (farhenheit)?). No power, no Murray server. Only so much complaining to the power company I can do. Sorry for the loss of service. The windows version is about 80% done, but I'm currently looking for new employment and this is taking up some of my nonexistant free time. I will finish it. Oh yes, it will be done. For all you os/2 fans out there (like me), I installed Win NT on my DX4/100 with 64 megs of memory. And it's still a dog. Os/2 is happy as shit with all the memory, I don't have a swap file. It's neat. If you can afford it, I recommend it. Just say No to NT. 5/11/97 My girlfriend said she's coming back in August. This will be the shit. Hopefully I'll have all the big problems squared away by then because I don't know how much time I'm going to have after she get's back here. We have a lot of catching up to do. Murray for windows has been put on hold for a bit, until I can get the OS/2 version working the way I want. I'm having a few problems with the machine that the Murray server is running on, doesn't effect Murray, just my BBS. Oh yeah, I won't go into details, but you might have noticed that you can't telnet to nyti.spaghetti.com anymore. This makes me very angry. Until I can resolve this problem, you can telnet to nyti.spaghetti.com on port 1111. This will work. I also lost my http port and my ftp port for a similar reason. I will be fixing this. And lastly. I got a new job. It's farther away from my apartment, and if you take into account the extra commute, I'm not really making any more money, but there's no dress code (jeans and sneakers are allowed, YAY!) and it's near most of my friends, and I'll get to actually do work, as opposed to being on the phone all the time. My part timer that I'm in charge of told me that the phone would have to be surgically removed from my ear soon. At that point I knew it was time to get out, if she noticed it. That's all for now. Got to go distribute. 6/8/97 Well, here's some gossip you can sink your teeth into. My girlfriend/fiancee-to-be that I've been talking about? Well, we broke up. Sorta. She's coming back from Israel to hang out and we can discuss what we're going to do with ourselves or without ourselves, but it was a mutual thing, not unhappy. But we realized that some of the things we really hold near and dear to us are far enough different to make marriage difficult. But we'll be spending the summer together, so don't expect to catch me around here much :) I'll keep you posted as to when we make up and get back together. 9/24/97 Oh well. It's over. My ex-girlfriend moved out the other day. She's leaving this coming sunday. And now I'm lonely. Waaaaaa. It tell ya, computers whirring all the time make for a really empty and cold sounding apartment. Experience. That's what it's all about. Anybody wanna start a rock/metal/ex-grunge band? XXII. Are you paying attention? (Have you finished your shit yet? You can use the end of the last page for toilet paper if need be.) If you've been reading religiously, you'll remember the names of the people who were getting married at the time I had the idea for Murray. If you don't, you won't. XXIII.I still haven't figured out a good word or phrase to describe how I feel about win95. We'll also leave this as an exercise for the reader. People tell me "I'd've" isn't a valid contraction. Damn efficient though. Remember the first time you saw Star Wars (you did see it didn't you?) and they're in the garbage bin and there's that thing slithering under the muck? Well, I was 7 when I first saw Star Wars in the theater and that left a scary sorta worried feeling in me. That's the closest thing I think of to describe how I feel about win95. XXIV. Running a Mighty Murray Server. (Consider the fact the 99% of the time, your Mighty P200 is spinning it's wheels at 200Mhz waiting for the mouse to move and blinking a cursor. Now there's a good use of technology. Why not run a Murray Server?) If you're interested in running a Murray server. Contact me. I'd be very glad to help you set it up. There's only one version of the Murray Server and I don't plan on porting it to any other OS, so if you don't run OS/2 and you don't plan on writing your own server, this is probably not a viable option for you. It's really a good idea to have a 24/7 connection to the internet otherwise nobodies going to attach to your server. Remeber those BBSes that we up between 10pm and 6am. Yeah, that worked well. XXV. Not There. I just had this silly idea. Actually, I had it a long time ago, and just remembered it now. Free thank you card to the first person who can answer me this question: (The answer "Because everybody does what microsoft says." is not valid.) Win 3.1 is a solid program. NT is a solid program. 95 is not a solid program. These are all well known documented facts. NT can run 3.1 program. 95 can run 3.1 programs. Don't need 3.1. NT can run NT programs, and NT can run 32-bit native 95 program. (If you've ever seen the requirements for getting a "designed for windows 95" sticker on your box you'll see that it says it's got to run under NT.) Why do we need 95? or 97 or whatever it's going to be called when it finally comes out. The hardware requirements for 95 are just as bad as the requirements for NT, so what's the point? Everybody knows that they're going to dump 95 anyway soon enough, microsoft said it themselves. So why is everybody running win95, a shittier less stable dos hack than a 32 bit stable OS? Coalition to get everybody to drop 95 and start using OS/2, Linux or NT. XXVI. Movie Reviews (The visual arts are for the eyes) COMING SUMMER 98, THE GREATEST BLOCKBUSTER SMASH OF ALL TIME! THE NEW ACTION THRILLER FROM MOUNTAPARROT PICTURES.... T h e F e r t i l i z e r . . . Jack Graves is a renegade cop, who doesn't believe any crime should go unpunished. He sees that the Police have their hands tied, and he wants to do something about it. Brandished with the most unique weapon known to police enforcement, Jack Graves is going to make a difference. (a scene from the movie...) "Hey Jack, what's the noise." (rustle rustle) "Let's check it out." ... *SMASH* *ALARMS* "GO GET HIM JACK, HE'S RUNNING DOWN THE ALLEY!" "I can get him from here." And with a swift motion spins around, turning his back to the thief, bends over, pulls the ripcord exposing his mighty ass to the world... PFfffffffphhphpphphhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhtttttt. pft. Pphhhhhhhhhhlllllllllooooooommmmmmmmpppppphphhhhhh. "SHIT!!!!" "GET THIS SHIT OFF ME!!!!" "Good job Jack." "Yeah, he should be happy I didn't fertilize him with the strong stuff." T h e F e r t i l i z e r . . . Coming Summer 1998 to a theater near you. ***************************************************************************** Feel free to get in touch with me. I'm human, just like most of you. And I like to know the world needs me :) -----------------------------=====================-------------------------- Murray Client for OS/2 V1.30 2/28/98 Copyright Stu Mark. email: fordii@j51.com or call my BBS: 914-267-0504 or telnet nyti.spaghetti.com on port 1111 (24 hours a day) Check out my web site, it has a cool background. http://nyti.spaghetti.com Monetary donations (see section IV) can be made payable to: Stu Mark Attn: Murray P.O. Box 77 Valley Cottage, NY 10989 U.S.A. Latest and greatest versions of all my software are available via ftp at nyti.spaghetti.com I have some utilities that I wrote a long time ago that I'll be putting up sometime. Come visit my web page (it's rather sparse right now, all my free time goes to working on Murray and I don't have any time to make a nice page) at (guess where...) http://nyti.spaghetti.com -----------------------------=====================-------------------------- As you can tell, I enjoy bashing MS and would do it more, but this file is long enough as it is. This is an OS/2 program. Why ruin it by mentioning MS too much. However, I always put in the following disclaimer: (any nasty remarks sent in the general direction of window's capacity to function, [are fully intentional,] are not opinion, but state of fact. So don't try to slam me with some bullshit libel suit.) I've also decided to start a campaign to make it a really loud notion to compare The Microsoft marketing department to the Marketing department at Sirius Cybernetics Corp. Anybody with me on this? If so, mail a message to my BBS at doom@nyti.spaghetti.com