SpiderChat

TeleFinder Chat from Tuesday, January 12, 1999 11 AM PST.

In attendance:

From Spider Island: Rusty Tucker

Sysops: Donald McHose, mikael fredriksson, Bob Nunn,

Donald McHose : Broncos?!...eeeeew.
Rusty Tucker : :)
Rusty Tucker : those vike sure look good tho!
Rusty Tucker : you getting a new net connection?
Donald McHose : yupper!! actually it is going to be a good game every week now.Everybody is top notch..well Atlanta needs help but..
mikael fredriksson joined the chat.
Rusty Tucker : Welcome to the chat mikael!
mikael fredriksson : Hi!
Rusty Tucker : howzit?
Donald McHose : I am now doing the waiting game...I was to have been called Friday.What a pain.
Rusty Tucker : the new and improved RustyTV is at explorer.spiderisland.com/tv/tv.html
Donald McHose : OK ! ;-)
Rusty Tucker : It's a Java applet that interacts with the camera plugin
Bob Nunn joined the chat.
Rusty Tucker : Welcome to the chat Bob!
Rusty Tucker : it will finally cause your browser to run out of memory or crash...
Rusty Tucker : so don't watch too long!
Rusty Tucker : That problem appears to be fault in the Java virtual machine, but I'm not sure yet
Bob Nunn : Give me that url would you?
Rusty Tucker : explorer.spiderisland.com/tv/tv.html
Rusty Tucker : it's rather crude, but makes a smoother appearance than the HTML refresh does
Bob Nunn : Guess I will have to update got a tv got a class security violation. Using 3.04
mikael fredriksson : what kind of HW do you need for your webcam?
Rusty Tucker : Yep, you'll need 4 -- it uses Java 1.1 features
Rusty Tucker : I'm just using the plain ol B&W QuickCam
Donald McHose : Having trouble pulling it up.Explorer says : Nope, not here.
Rusty Tucker : you did tv/html instead of tv.html
Rusty Tucker : :http://explorer.spiderisland.com/tv/tv.html
Donald McHose : danke
Rusty Tucker : there you go
Donald McHose : Bingo!
Bob Nunn : Have u up in Netscape 4.07
Rusty Tucker : yeah, getting good thru put too
Bob Nunn : Clock makes you a masked man.
Rusty Tucker : :)
Rusty Tucker : The clock was a debugging tool -- I should take it out or move it
Bob Nunn : The large white object looks like a fume hood.
Rusty Tucker : better angle?
Bob Nunn : Go Broncos?
Rusty Tucker : that;'s my go bronco's sign :)
Bob Nunn : Almost not visible.
Bob Nunn : Better...
Rusty Tucker : u can see the server behind me there
Rusty Tucker : the cam is running off my workstation..
Bob Nunn : When you show people your server do they make that disappointed sound? I guess they expect something different.
Rusty Tucker : :) -- guess they want it to look like one of those nice looking Dell or Compaq server racks
mikael fredriksson : or like the new G3 tower..
Bob Nunn : Yep. Had a few visitors over the holidays and they seemed that way about the Headgap.
Rusty Tucker : glass it in a room with an elevated floor and card pass
Bob Nunn : Yeah or a big dummy panel in front with lots of light. What they didn't see was the mess of wiring behind it. Complex enough for me.
Donald McHose : Hey , that's my home ISP ! But all the servers are on the floor sucking up dust ;-). The manager says they have no funds for desks or racks ...ha!
Bob Nunn : Whatever happened to cinder blocks and particle board? I cleaned my external fans this weekend. Thought I was going to have to go to the high pressure car wash.
Rusty Tucker : F*in AT&T!
Rusty Tucker : like these?
Bob Nunn : Perfect! ;-)
Rusty Tucker : I upgraded to Melamine covered particle board :)
Bob Nunn : Wow Hi Tech!
Bob Nunn : Hard to wipe down the old part. board. Bet the melamine is much better.
Rusty Tucker : I hope Jim DeHaven didn't take offense at my reply to his SPML questions...
Bob Nunn : I thought your answers were good and civil. I hesitate to respond because of that.
Rusty Tucker : OK -- that's good to hear.
Donald McHose : Explorer 4.0 0n a Win 98 can't handle a few min. of the Java before losing it and giving up .But when I do a refresh it looks like an old quick time movie with about 10 frames.Jim is from Mich. I think.
Rusty Tucker : Sometimes disagreements come off wrong
Rusty Tucker : I don't' want to defend the SPML docs too far :)
Donald McHose : Frustration is a bitch to deal with.
Bob Nunn : Hard to put emotion into type. Learned that running a board all these years. The examples are always the best help for me as well.
Donald McHose : Always keep it Dick does Jane simple.
Bob Nunn : It took me a while to figure out the limitations of the templates. Now that I understand I have user sights and customer sights set up using the templates.
Rusty Tucker : Yes, in learning to program something it helps to have a reference and examples.
Bob Nunn : Shouldn't call them limitations really. It just is how they work. Once I understood the flexibility is really amazing. I really like being able to sort now.
Rusty Tucker : I have an alternate Topic template I'll post --- it lists the content too.
Rusty Tucker : takes one step out of reading topics
Bob Nunn : Cool. Can see potential applications for that.
Bob Nunn : I was thinking about putting together a mini web bbs template that a user could throw into their web folder and have the basics. Think anyone would find that useful?
Rusty Tucker : have you seen what I put together for the TeleFinder Demo?
Donald McHose : Funny how alot of the hot Mac sites on the web are starting to get the BBS look and feel now.I find that anything that you -n-RT-n-Dan do is helpful.
Rusty Tucker : The "Portal" style is slowly becoming a BBS
Bob Nunn : no but will look at it..
Rusty Tucker : check out go.com
Bob Nunn : Have you been on my site lately?
Rusty Tucker : its the new Disney/excite portal -- many bbs type features there
Rusty Tucker : not recently
Rusty Tucker : on my way now
Bob Nunn : I have been trying to capture some of that. I see the same thing.
Rusty Tucker : "4 fortune tellers! No Waiting! " :)
Rusty Tucker : Yes, its looking good!
Bob Nunn : My sight is still too complex and slow loading. I know I need to simplify it a bunch.
Rusty Tucker : check out go.com, its very clean!
Rusty Tucker : but modeled around a search engine... so it s different focus than your site
Bob Nunn : Will look. Saw them in the news this morning.
Rusty Tucker : but you might organize categorically like it does
Bob Nunn : Did you see the pulldown at the top?
Rusty Tucker : yes -- very long list!
Bob Nunn : I would like to do the index folder type thing. Don't know what they are using to build that. Have to get my arms around how they set up those tabs.
Rusty Tucker : I could see that as yahoo style hierarchy of categories
Rusty Tucker : index folder?
Bob Nunn : Like amazon
Rusty Tucker : the easy way is to have multiple GIFs that show each tab state
Donald McHose : That's how it looks how they did it from here.
Rusty Tucker : there's a way to optimize it with tables and tiny gifs that form the curves too
Bob Nunn : I understand. THANKS. You would have to keep it small since it would have to reload the full graphic for each tab clicked.
Rusty Tucker : cool
Rusty Tucker : In the second method with tables you can reuse the same gifs -- so the reload is very fast
Rusty Tucker : esp on Windows browsers -- Table generation is MUCH faster in the Win browsers for some reason
Donald McHose : conspiracy...I'm sure
Donald McHose : Did you take HDS mail off Bob?
Bob Nunn : I understand. I think. The clicked tab would be the only graphic that would change the rest would be in the buffer done in tables that way. I sort of do that with menu bars now just need to make them look like folder tabs at the top of the page.
Bob Nunn : No still using both on Headgap and Wang's.
Rusty Tucker : not even that BN
Rusty Tucker : start with tables only and a lot of imagination
Bob Nunn : Our online store for Wang's opened this week and our sales department using HDS to handle registration mail and pick up order.
Rusty Tucker : Dark bg, + White cell for the active tab, gray cells for the inactive tabs
Rusty Tucker : then you can put "curved" GIFs into the upper corners of the cells to make them look more like folder tabs
Bob Nunn : Will think on that. I see where you are going. Just haven't thought that way before.
Rusty Tucker : I see, amazon is using separate GIFs for the tabs -- that good too
Donald McHose : try : http://www.infoave.net
Rusty Tucker : www.go.com is using the method I was describing
Donald McHose : same solution
Bob Nunn : I will have a look at go today. Perhaps I can steal enough source to see what they are doing. I think it would work well for organizing my site. Gotten too complex.
Bob Nunn : Our Wang's site is on the same road. Will need to adopt a new style for it soon.
Rusty Tucker : infoave uses the BIG gif approach -- uses the most bandwidth
Rusty Tucker : I'll be right back!
Donald McHose : True.It was their first shot at building a site.
Donald McHose : So Bob how much Ram are you running on now?
Donald McHose : and did you think that Gifs I sent was too garish?
Bob Nunn : 72? on that 8100. Can't remember what simms I put in there but matched them up this time. think I have 4 16's and the built in 8.
Bob Nunn : Too nazi for biz, still thinking on the answer and suggestions.
Donald McHose : Tanx ;-)
Rusty Tucker : Bob, are you running Windoze NetScape 4.07?
Bob Nunn : Yes, I was fixing to say that this thing works better than the way we used to do the chats. You got this down smooth.
Rusty Tucker : That's cuz its such a bandwidth HOG
Bob Nunn : How would it do with multiple participants?
Rusty Tucker : badly I think
Rusty Tucker : you're close to Maxxum me out
Bob Nunn : I could see if you knew the ip's of the participant where you could attempt this. I did have to close and reopen NetScape.
Bob Nunn : It was polite though and told me that I had better since it would crash soon.
Rusty Tucker : OK -- I wondered! NS won't goo too long before it maxes out memory
Donald McHose : Explorer just says illegal op! bye
Rusty Tucker : :) - the Mac versions usually crash of both IE and NS
Bob Nunn : I probably got through 2/3rds of the chat before it did. Don't know what I have it turned up to though and have 96 meg on this iMac
Rusty Tucker : I'm going to look at optimizing the BW usage much like CUSee me
Rusty Tucker : it gets very tricky in Java tho
Bob Nunn : Had the stock 4000 partition on this thing. Pretty amazing. I usually turn up NS to 12 or better. Don't use this version much.
Rusty Tucker : You're on a Mac or Windows Bob?
Bob Nunn : iMac. Don't do Windoze if I can help it.
Bob Nunn : Not quite as bad as Daniel about it though.
Donald McHose : ;-)
Bob Nunn : Or good about it ;-)
Rusty Tucker : its v 4.07?
Bob Nunn : Yes.
Rusty Tucker : I'm on 403, I'll get 407 then
Rusty Tucker : Time for Lunch here!
Bob Nunn : 128k ISDN connection for the whole company. Fortunately most Windoze users who can't figure out how to launch a browser so I have much of it available most of the time but our bbs.wangs.com server runs on it too.
Donald McHose : Wrapping up to get to the house ! Oh that's beeeeutifulll...!
Bob Nunn : I missed the first 5 if you have a log. If not will use this one.
Rusty Tucker : I've got a log here
Donald McHose : See ya'll and have a good one.
Rusty Tucker : its in the chat mailbox
Donald McHose left the chat.
Rusty Tucker : c-ya Donald McHose
Rusty Tucker : bye!
Bob Nunn : Thanks. Leave it and see you next week.