sahayman@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (Steve Hayman) (02/28/91)
The first version of my webster daemon for NeXT 2.0 is now available for anonymous ftp from iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (129.79.254.192), it's in pub/webster/NeXT-2.0/NeXT-websterd.shar.Z Gak, that's a hard pathname to type. I might move it around a bit, but it will be somewhere obvious in pub/webster. The old 1.0 version is in pub/webster/NeXT-1.0 . A webster client program that you can run on other machines is in pub/webster/webster-client.shar.Z . You need to ask NeXT to send you "libbtree.a" and "libtext.a" before you can compile this program, since those libraries are no longer supplied. A compiled version of the program is also available in pub/webster/NeXT-2.0/websterd.Z . This version is still rough in spots. Access to the thesaurus doesn't work yet, for instance. I welcome any and all feedback and will be updating and fixing this version as time permits. If you do ftp it, drop me a note so I can email you to let you know of any bug fixes. This program is different from but generally similar in spirit to the next-websterd program that Jim Mattson of UCSD mentioned in this newsgroup a couple of days ago. Jim and I are going to work together to maintain one version only of a Next webster daemon to minimize confusion. His is based on an earlier Webster server that ran on non-NeXT machines. Mine is based on something I wrote from scratch a couple of years ago in the NeXT 0.9 days. I'm going to incorporate some of his good ideas into my program. Steve Hayman P.S. What am I talking about? "websterd" is a program you can run on your NeXT to allow users of other (non-Next) machines to look up words in the dictionary. Users typically run the simple "webster" client - which is a command-line-oriented thing, you type "webster foo" on your Sun (or whatever), and webster contacts websterd on the remote machine (NeXT) and retrieves the definition of "foo" and shows it to you. There is also an "xwebster" program that users of the X Windows system can use to contact websterd. (you can get "xwebster" in the contrib directory on expo.lcs.mit.edu ) P.P.S. Someone is undoubtedly going to ask about the legality of exporting the dictionary in this way. I checked the 2.0 license agreement and didn't see anything there saying that the dictionary could not be accessed in this way. Besides, it's a generally readable file and there are a lot simpler ways to copy the whole thing than to use this program. Websterd does make an effort to restrict connections so that only people on your local network can access it. This seems like fair use to me, after all we are not copying the entire dictionary, merely looking up individual words in it, and that's why the dictionary is there. -- Steve Hayman Workstation Manager Computer Science Department Indiana U. sahayman@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (812) 855-6984 NeXT Mail: sahayman@spurge.bloomington.in.us