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This article first appeared in the September 1999 issue of the Louisville Computer News. It was written by Lee Larson.
Several years ago I visited Thomas Jefferson's home, Montecello, in Virginia. Although the mansion and grounds are impressive, it was something I saw in the gift shop that really stuck with me. Dominating one of the upper shelves was his collected correspondence--fifty fat volumes and still growing, as more letters are found. Jefferson lived to 83 and apparently spent much of his life writing letters.
I've since been to the library and spent some time browsing his correspondence. Jefferson was pen-pals with a who's-who of his world, but also took time to answer letters from the not-so-famous. Reading his mail is like peeking into his mind. No biography can give such a feeling of actually knowing the man.
An image of Jefferson laboriously writing late into the night with a quill pen by flickering candlelight keeps flashing into my mind because I've been doing a lot of thinking about e-mail lately. What if Thomas Jefferson had e-mail? I don't think we'd know nearly so much about him because e-mail is much easier to destroy than paper.
Almost all my correspondence is by e-mail, and I think this is going to become ever more typical. Most of my family and all my co-workers have given up snail-mail. There's no paper trail to follow and the e-trail is a tenuous track. Historians of the future are going to have a hard time with future Jeffersons.
This struck close to home last month when I had to dredge up an e-mail I sent last year. Until recently, I did all my e-mailing with Emailer, a wonderfully Mac-aware e-mail program published by Claris with the unique capability of checking both POP3 and America Online mail over the Internet. This allowed me to do all my e-mailing in one program and also let me bypass that woefully under-achieving and klunky mailer in the AOL client.
When Claris was reabsorbed into the Apple mother ship, Emailer was one of the casualties. It seems Apple has not officially declared it dead, but it has been removed from the product list and no updates have appeared. Emailer still works well with Mac OS 8.6, but the program is showing its age. In particular, no styled text, rumored Y2K problems and no IMAP support finally pushed me into trying other programs. (That grisly tale should appear here in a month or two.)
Anyway, this e-mail message I sent last year had to be found, and it was sent with Emailer. Being a fanatic about saving my correspondence, I made sure all my sent mail was copied internally by Emailer. Sporadically, I used a nice AppleScript found on the Fog City Emailer utilities site to archive the mail to a FileMaker database. So, it should have been easy to find the one message I needed.
The problem was that the message was sent around Christmas, my last FileMaker archiving was done around Thanksgiving and I hadn't used Emailer since New Year's Day. In the half year since, a malevolent demon or a stray cosmic ray had whacked the file where Emailer stores its mail. A month's mail was unreadable and none of my DAT tape backups were made before the file got whacked.
There's an undocumented, but quite well known facility in Emailer to rebuild its index of stored messages; when Emailer is launched, hold down the option key. This usually repairs a bad mail file. In this case, Emailer churned away for a half hour or so before I gave up.
Emailer never did succeed in opening the file, but there are other ways. Luckily, Emailer stores its messages in a big file with one message right after another in the data fork and doesn't do any fancy compression. Any good text editor can read the file. Although much of it looks like garbage, the messages are readable. In the end, I used BBEdit 5.1 to finally extract the text of the message.
This time, I was lucky. A few years from now it will be nearly impossible to do the same thing because graphics, sound and fancy formatting are moving e-mail ever farther away from simple text. There's no standard file format in which the messages are saved, and every e-mailer does it differently.
After a number of reports about Adobe Premiere trashing hard drives, Adobe stated "We have discovered a significant problem in our recent release of Adobe Premiere 5.1b English. [We] are actively working on a fix. Update 5.1b will be replaced with Update 5.1c as soon as we have addressed all outstanding issues; please check our web site for updated information. Due to the serious nature of these potential problems, Adobe recommends that you discontinue your use of Premiere 5.1b, and reinstall Premiere 5.1a until we have released a fix."
About a year ago, Apple's Java offerings were downright dismal. Its Java was slow, old, and not very reliable. Steve Jobs announced Apple was going to get serious about Java.
The latest release, Mac OS Runtime for Java (MRJ) 2.1.2 is five times faster, robust and feature-laden. This newest release allows Java programs to be driven by AppleScript and has QuickTime support. It still falls a bit short however, because MRJ 2.1.2 only has full support for release 1.1.7 of Java, even though Java 2 has been out for several months.
Programs able to use the new MRJ include the browsers Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.5 and iCab as well as Apple's Applet Runner. Netscape Navigator and Communicator contain their own, sluggish, built-in Java, and can't be configured to use MRJ. Apple says "Apple and Netscape are working together to develop a future version of Netscape's browser that will use MRJ."
MRJ 2.1.2 is a free eight megabyte download.
There is a bug in Mac OS 8.6 where fonts can be corrupted by the operating system, and characters may not be displayed at their full height. To fix these problems, Apple released Font Manager Update 1.0. The update includes a small extension to patch the Mac OS 8.6 Font Manager and a program called Font First Aid to repair corrupted fonts. Apple recommends all Mac OS 8.6 users apply the update. It can be downloaded from Apple's update site.
The growing pains for SETI@home continue. SETI is an acronym for the "search for extraterrestrial intelligence." The SETI@home project is a two year experiment to use the idle time on small computers all over the Internet to analyze data from radio telescopes in hopes of finding signals created by intelligent alien life.
Their problem is they asked for volunteers and everybody came. The project was designed for about 100,000 participants. Nearly a million participants from more than 200 countries have signed up since its start on May 17. They have logged over 40,000 CPU-years of work, while looking at more than 10 million blocks of data. In aggregate, SETI@home is the most powerful computer ever seen on this planet.
In the beginning, this unexpectedly huge response simply overwhelmed them. After all, the entire staff consists of four part-time employees and two volunteers. For several days, the servers kept handing out the same blocks of data over and over again because they couldn't keep enough on hand to go around. Sun Microsystems came to the rescue by donating a substantial amount of hardware and Quantum gave 360 GB of hard drives.
To compound their problems, on July 4, someone cracked into their web page and replaced it with a picture of that fuzzy little loud-mouthed TV alien Alf, who most of us are thankful to have nearly forgotten.
In recent weeks, the problems have been reined in and the project seems to be running pretty smoothly, with a steady growth in its output. E.T. hasn't phoned in for pizza yet, but they're doing an impressive job of listening for the call. Right now they are handing out fresh data to all volunteers, but there is some worry the huge growth may be outstripping the supply.
On the client side, the original Mac client sorely needed some fine tuning. The original 1.0 client had several annoying bugs, which were fixed with the 1.05 version. But the 1.05 version introduced a new and very severe bug causing a block of data to sometimes be marked finished in a few seconds without any real processing. This did wonders for the overall statistics of Mac users, but really messed up the project as a whole.
To fix this, version 1.06 is available from the SETI@home site.
The topic of the September 28 meeting of the Louisville Computer Society was not available at the time this was written.
The Louisville Computer Society meets from 7:00-9:00 P.M. at Pitt Academy, 4605 Poplar Level Road, at the intersection of Poplar Level Road and Gilmore Lane. Everyone is welcome to attend. For more information, on the web go to www.aye.net/~lcs, or e-mail lcs@aye.net.
The September 25 meeting of the Art Software Group will feature MSG Graphics and Macromedia show their tips and tricks for using Photosuite II, Dreamweaver II and Fireworks II. The meeting begins at 1 P.M. in the University of Louisville Natural Sciences Building, 215 Eastern Parkway. For more information, see the Art Software Group web site (www.aol.nu).
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