Adam: Although the World Wide Web is the best place for aimless wandering and for finding information on a given topic, there are other tools. In order to find out what information is available on some general topic, I sometimes turn to WAIS databases and Gopherspace.
Bill: What about Archie?
Adam: Archie also is a good tool for answering a nagging curiosity, although Archie's information generally seems to be less useful to me than what I find via WAIS and Gopher, mostly because all that Archie finds is files, and then you must transfer them to your Mac before you can find out whether there's anything useful inside. Anyway, let's start with penguins.
Bill: Penguins? You're going to use the most powerful information tool in history to search for flightless waterfowl?
Adam: Smile when you say that. Just to placate you, I'll start with an Archie search via Anarchie. It finds a good number of files (see figure 5.14) with the word "penguin" in the title, although there are number of duplicates, and most of the rest appear to be graphics files, including a scan of the cover from Berke Breathed's Penguin Dreams and Stranger Things.
Figure 5.14: Penguin files on the Internet.
Bill: What's that one that lives in a "lyrics" folder?
Adam: I suspect it's the lyrics to a song done by a group called The Penguins. Let's retrieve the file and take a look. Whee -- it seems to be the lyrics to "Earth Angel." We'll spare you.
Bill: Kate Bush it's not.
Adam: Enough of these files, and I'm not sure that I want to delve any further in that group's lyrics. Next up is a swing through Gopherspace, using TurboGopher and searching via Veronica. Although it often makes a difference how you search for things in Veronica, in this case I think "penguin" will probably find most everything we could want. The range of penguin items in Gopherspace is much broader than the range of files that merely have the word "penguin" in their names (see figure 5.15).
Figure 5.15: Penguins in Gopherspace.
Adam: Look at all those books written for penguins. You never realized that penguins were such literary birds, did you Bill?
Bill: Those are books from the publishing house called Penguin Books.
Adam: Oh. Are you sure?
Bill: Positive. But what's that bit about penguin events at Cornell?
Adam: A friend told me about that a while back. It's some thoroughly obscure physics thing where the Feynman diagram of it looks vaguely like a penguin.
Bill: Oh, come now. You're making that up.
Adam: No I'm not. Take a look at figure 5.16.
Figure 5.16: Penguins infiltrate high-energy physics.
Bill: Say, what have we got out there on movies? I need some information for my Lambada film festival.
Adam: First, Bill, that's a terrible idea. Second, you should save it for later, when we find specific things. Third, umm, what's a Lambada?
Bill: True, that's a bit more specific than we want right now. The Lambada is a type of dance, Brazilian I believe, in which the partners get extraordinarily close. It makes for terrible movies. How about just general movie information?
Adam: That, we've got (see figure 5.17).
Bill: Well, I think that's an adequate warm-up. We've browsed and searched on general topics just to see if they're out there -- I think now it's time we work on something a bit more practical.
Adam: Yes. Lest our readers begin to think that the Internet is useful only to browsing bookworms with time on their hands, let's see if it can answer some specific questions for us. Will we be able to find what we're looking for? Will any good information exist? Will our editor tell us we're blathering too much? Is there any other way I can create some suspense?
Bill: Only way to find out is to try it. Let's go dig for some answers.
Bill: We've separated the things we're going to look for into two groups that we're going to call "files" and "facts." A file is any given thing that you want to obtain -- a program for your computer, for instance, or a back issue of an electronic journal that you can obtain over the Internet, such as InterText or MÖÖse Droppings. You also may find the lyrics to that song that's been driving you crazy for the past 36 hours, such as the theme to "Gilligan's Island."
Adam: Whatever you do, folks, don't think about it! Just drive the millionaire and his wife straight from your mind. Don't let it take hold! Don't think about the theme to "Gilligan's Island"! Just relax, and sit right back, and you'll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip!
Bill: Adam, that was a terrible thing to do! Folks, I apologize. After we've gone out onto the Internet and located some files, we'll start looking for facts. A fact is any piece of information that you can locate on the Internet -- the answer to a riddle, help on a specific problem you may be having, or perhaps a concert date.
Let's get started; maybe we can distract you so you don't think about the theme to "Gilligan's Island" too much. We're going to be downloading a few things, so I'll want to make some room. Hold on while I clean up my desktop a bit here
Adam: Wait, how did you do that?
Bill: Do what?
Adam: You dragged that icon into your menu. The Mac doesn't normally allow that.
Bill: Oh, that's MenuDropper, by David Winterburn! I couldn't live without it, and as freeware, you can't beat the price.
Adam: Well, let's go get it. This is a case where a direct approach could work well: I know MenuDropper's name, and I know where Macintosh utilities are stored. I could probably find it relatively quickly by browsing through the directories on sumex-aim.stanford.edu.
Bill: But you can never get into that site these days. It's become extremely popular, and tends to be completely filled with as many users as it can support, all the time. So we're probably going to have to find another source.
Adam: True, and that's a good use for Archie, since we can ask Anarchie to search for the file and tell us where it lives. A double-click later and it will be on my hard disk.
Bill: I should note once again that Archie is the name of the program that runs on the Internet machine, whereas Anarchie (pronounced like "anarchy," not "an archie") is a Macintosh client that talks to the remote Archie server.
Adam: I'm going to take advantage of a small piece of information I happen to know from having been around for a while. There are two main sites that archive Macintosh files, and they have slightly different naming schemes. The Info-Mac folks like putting dashes between words, whereas the administrators of the site at mac.archive.umich.edu don't use any separator at all. Since we're searching for a file called MenuDropper, I suspect that it will be called either "menu-dropper" or "menudropper" so I'll search on both of those words.
Bill: And the winner is?
Adam: Anarchie was able to find a number of sites that carry the same file. In this instance, I'm afraid we're going to have be rude and request a file from overseas, since I know for a fact that the U.S. sites that we've found are down (see figure 5.18).
Figure 5.18: The Scandinavian version of MenuDropper.
Adam: Luckily, it's early evening here in Seattle, which means that it should be the middle of the night in Sweden, where the file we're snagging lives. If you must use a site on the other side of the ocean, please try to do so in the middle of the night there, when you aren't likely to interrupt people trying to do real work.
Bill: I've heard of a game called Bolo that can supposedly be played over the Internet. You can locate ongoing games and join in, teaming up with and fighting against people you've never met. Could be fun.
Adam: Sounds like you've been watching too much violence on television again. But sure, let's see if we can find it.
Bill: Shall we do an Anarchie search? We know what we're after, and it's a program, so we know it'll be stored at an FTP site. This kind of search is what Archie was made for, and Anarchie will make it easy to retrieve the file once we've found it.
Adam: In many cases, you'd be right about a situation like this. But Bolo's extremely popular, and there has been an awful lot of Bolo-oriented stuff produced. I suspect you may be disappointed by Archie on this one.
Bill: Good lord, you're right. Anarchie was set to tell us about the first 100 items it found with "bolo" in their names, and it did that admirably -- unfortunately, the actual game itself didn't turn up in the list! We'd have to boost that 100-item limit way up to find the program, I bet.
Adam: I can't quite say why, but this feels like a job for Veronica. Since it's just as easy to retrieve files via TurboGopher as with Anarchie, there's no real reason not to search with Veronica and, if it finds anything, download directly in TurboGopher. The only thing I don't like about downloading files in TurboGopher is that it doesn't tell you how large the file is, so you don't know how long it will take, or how far along you are at any given time. Nevertheless, there are a ton of Bolo folders and one of them contains Bolo 0.99.2 (see figure 5.19).
Figure 5.19: More than one way to skin a tank game.
Adam: For our last "thing" search, let's find a weather map. I'm pretty sure some of those exist on the Internet, and it would be nice to see what sort of weather we're having right now.
Bill: Why don't you look out the window?
Adam: Because it's dark.
Bill: Oh, right, you live in the 'burbs. There aren't many streetlights outside of the city.
Adam: Okay, let's see if we can figure out what sort of weather system is over the East coast, hammering on our parents.
Bill: For the reader at home, it's hard to tell, but this is taking a while. If you like, I could entertain you with my rendition of various pirate songs from Peter Pan while we wait.
Adam: No, wait! I've found a weather map. It wasn't as easy as I thought it should have been, though. I did a Veronica search on "weather map" but every one of the folders of weather maps that it found turned out to be a bum steer.
Bill: Interesting mental picture on that phrase. So that's what was happening when you were downloading that file for twenty minutes. I thought you were downloading Willard Scott himself for a while there.
Adam: Yeah, I didn't time it, but the file was almost two megabytes large and was a gorgeous satellite picture of the planet, complete with white parts that might have been clouds.
Bill: Oh, yeah, I see it. It's pretty, why don't we use that figure?
Adam: Because you can't tell from the picture what part of the planet you're even looking at.
Bill: Hmm. True. In fact, you can't even tell which planet it is. How do weatherbeings interpret this stuff? You might as well hand them a Picasso.
Adam: No kidding. But I did eventually figure out how to find a better map of the United States. I remember seeing something about weather once in a list of Internet resources maintained by Scott Yanoff. You can get a copy of this list from Scott's machine, and you can find out what machine that is by using Finger on Scott's address. I've done this before so my copy of Finger remembered it.
Bill: Lucky.
Adam: I prefer to think of it as foresight. Anyway, once I retrieved the entire Special Internet Services list, I found a site mentioned as having weather information, so I went there with TurboGopher, found the maps, and downloaded one (see figure 5.20).
Figure 5.20: Fifty percent chance of something in your area tonight.
Adam: Moving on to less concrete problems, here's a question that has always bothered me.
Bill: What's that?
Adam: What are the risks of buying gas at a gas station with a credit card from one of those automated pumps? I like using them since they're a lot faster than dealing with the cashier, particularly if they make you pay first and go back for change. But, at the same time, I've seen a bunch of receipts just lying around, which says to me that people don't particularly protect their credit card numbers.
There's a fabulous mailing list called Risks Digest that focuses on the risks of technology, and I'll bet this is the sort of thing that they've talked about at some point. I've noticed postings from that group come up when I search the Connection Machine Server via WAIS, so let's see if there is anything (see figure 5.21).
Bill: That's one thing I like about WAIS, the ability to use real English sentences as you did there, "Tell me about using a gas pump and a credit card." But I've never seen anything in that "Which are similar to" box before. What's that for?
Adam: Glad you asked. That box provides a truly interesting part of WAIS called "relevance feedback." Relevance feedback is a phrase that basically means: "Show me more like this one." So, in the example above, I first searched for the search phrase alone and found a few articles that matched what I wanted, but there were also some that were far from the subject. By asking WAIS to find more like the article, I dropped in the relevance feedback box, I narrowed the search and found more articles that were on the topic I wanted. You can do that with either an entire article, as I did above, or with just a part of an article.
Bill: Clever. That would allow you to narrow the search, as you did, or broaden it by loosening the original parameters while allowing the relevance feedback to keep the answers on track.
Adam: Relevance feedback requires a good WAIS program on the Mac or PC, though, and although you can search through a WAIS database from within Gopher or the World Wide Web, clients for those two generally don't support WAIS's fancier features, like relevance feedback, quite as well. That's why I generally prefer to use MacWAIS whenever I'm searching in WAIS. The same principle applies elsewhere, so, for instance, although you can retrieve files stored on an FTP site with TurboGopher, it's not as good at doing so as Anarchie or Fetch from Dartmouth College. Similarly, even though the World Wide Web servers can show you the contents of Gopher sites, Mosaic isn't nearly as slick as TurboGopher when it comes to navigating through Gopherspace. There's always a right tool for the job.