emv@ox.com (Ed Vielmetti) (04/03/91)
(is there a uucp mapping project member in the house?) i'm interested in developing code that does sanity checking on uucp map entries. ideally you would feed it in one of the many files in comp.mail.maps and it would flag any errors and format the information in the map uniformly. it would be good to make it interactive or batch so that errors could be fixed or so that it could be used to explore the uucp maps. this could well make use of a number of external databases or servers; for instance, you'd like to get the latitude/longitude right, either from the zip code or from the city name. the telephone number should match up similarly. map entries which were too old (per the #W line) would be flagged as such. with the help of pathalias, it could form a nice browser; if you want to see who is connected to who and both ends of the link, it should be straightforward to trace the path. just thinking about all the possible things you might want to do, and what all the external dbm's you would want to keep around between runs so that you could make lookups arbitrarily quick. say you want to answer the query "show me all the sites in alabama connected to uunet". or "where is handwriting research corp". or to the extent that people put real information in their maps "who is running news and mail on a mac". thoughts? ideas? specs? working code :-) ? the geographic name server at martini.eecs.umich.edu port 3000 is a home for some of this information. there has to be a telco database lying around somewhere to get at least rough agreements on phone numbers. i have a skeleton command line parser that could be thrown at the interactive part. send me mail or post, i'll summarize as needed. if you have ideas, comp.mail.uucp would be best; if you have code, contact me and i'll try to coordinate mushing things together. -- Msen Edward Vielmetti /|--- moderator, comp.archives emv@msen.com "With all of the attention and publicity focused on gigabit networks, not much notice has been given to small and largely unfunded research efforts which are studying innovative approaches for dealing with technical issues within the constraints of economic science." RFC 1216