phayes@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu (Patrick W Hayes) (05/14/91)
There will be IRC NeXT Developers' meetings on Wednesday the 15th and Thursday the 16th at 11:30 PM EDT. The Thursday meeting is for people who can't make it because their local UG meets on Wednesday, but I hope everyone who can comes to both. The meetings will be on channel +NeXT as usual. The topic I would like to talk about is the possibility of using IRC or an IRC like program to communicate graphics and sound (especially voice.) Obviously, as the bandwidth we have to work with is limited, sophisticated data compression will be needed. I invite anyone interested in working on such a project to attend. You will be wasting your time though if you try to tell me it can't be done. This will surely not be the only topic however, so I invite anyone interested in talking about NeXTs to come. I want to organize multiple meetings at different times, so everyone in the world has an opportunity to meet. I think I am going to ask that everyone who is planning on coming regularly to send me a schedule of times they can make it. But, before I do, someone needs to enlighten me about world time. How does daylight savings time work around the world? Should I have everyone send me their schedules in local time along with what time 12:00 noon would be in Greenwich Mean Time? Also is there a unix scheduling program that is available for free somewhere that would be appropriate? If you have already sent me mail telling me that you are interested but cannot make 11:30 PM EDT, hang in there, and I will ask everyone to send me a schedule in a certain easy format next week. Still don't know what IRC is? It stands for Internet Relay Chat, and you need internet access to use it. You might ask around your organization to see if it is already compiled on a machine available to you. There are various servers that allow access to IRC via telnet, e.g. try: telnet bradenville.andrew.cmu.edu Note what it says about it being only a temporary service however. For efficiency's sake, if you are going to use IRC more than a few times you should compile a client on your machine. One place to get the source: ftp rvw2.hhs.ri.cmu.edu. It may need some work to get it to compile on a NeXT. I don't know as I have only used it on my school's email computer. Scott Hess mentioned he might try to get it to compile on a NeXT, but didn't promise anything immediately as he has finals coming up. Once you get on for the first time, try the following commands: /help /list /join +aChannelOfMyChoice See you there! Patrick Hayes