Next, we come to a loose category of programs that are dedicated to helping you find some specific piece of information, be it a file via Archie, the current time, the latest weather forecast, your mother, or perhaps merely the answer to the question of whether or not a friend is currently connected. Unless mentioned otherwise, these programs live in:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/tcp/
People with MacTCP-based access can use an elegant program from Peter Lewis, called Finger, which is an implementation of the Unix Finger program. It enables you to finger other people to see if they are logged on, or to read information they have put in their Plan files. I find Finger useful for accessing certain types of information over the Internet, checking to see what someone's userid on my local machine might be, and checking domain name information via Finger's support for Whois.
After launching Finger, simply select Finger from the File menu (see figure 27.12).
Figure 27.12: Finger dialogs.
Type the username you want to finger in the User text entry box, and below that type the machine name in the Machine entry box.
Note: You can simply type the entire address in either one of the boxes, and it works just fine.
If you want to access a Whois server (a different Unix program that looks up information about machines), check that box, enter the name of the machine you want to learn about in the User field, and enter rs.internic.net in the Machine field. Then click the Whois button to have Finger go out and execute your request. That's what I've done in the second window in figure 27.12.
Finger saves requests in a hierarchical Finger menu, and you can select an item such as yanoff@csd4.csd.uwm.edu to finger that address immediately (see figure 27.13).
Figure 27.13: Finger hierarchical menu.
Now, assuming that the remote machine is up and running, you should see the results of the Finger search appear onscreen. You can print the results window or copy information from it, if you so choose. After you finger someone, you can save that entry in your Finger Preferences file by selecting Save Finger Menu from the File menu. That's how I created the list you see in figure 27.13, and it makes it easy to finger the same person or service at a later time.
Finger has only two options. If you choose Preferences from the File menu, you can decide whether you want to see the IP number (which is the number corresponding to the machine name) in the title bar of the Finger results window; or decide whether you want the Finger window to open on startup. (Using the Set Default button in the Finger window, you can choose which service or person should appear by default.) A third checkbox in the Preferences window lets you set whether or not you've paid your $10 shareware fee.
I like Finger a lot. It's small, sweet, and to the point. As long as people continue to store useful bits of information in Plan files, Finger will remain an essential part of your MacTCP software kit. I haven't run into any problems with Finger, other than some sites not responding, but that's not Finger's fault. Sometimes a machine may be down, or the person updating the information may have gone on vacation. Finger is $10 shareware, payable in either U.S. or Australian dollars, and you find the latest version in:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/tcp/
Peter Lewis's free Daemon program is a generalized server program that can provide services to the appropriate clients. Hmm, that doesn't make a lot of sense, does it? Basically, if you want to provide a Finger server, a Whois server (a variant of Finger that is generally less personal), an Ident server (fairly useless on a single-user Macintosh), and both a Daytime and an NTP (Network Time Protocol) server, Daemon is the program for you. Of course, any program like Daemon that is designed to provide information about you to others on the Internet all the time, is of dubious use if you have a SLIP or PPP account that isn't active all day long. Daemon is a background-only application, so there's no interface -- you configure what it does through a Plan file.
HyperFinger Pro is a HyperCard stack that provides a simple interface for regularly fingering the same addresses. You can click the Finger button to finger an arbitrary address, but if you want to finger the same address later on (and you're using a real version of HyperCard instead of HyperCard Player), you can modify the script for one of the eight specific buttons. That's about all there is to HyperFinger, although the Copy button places the contents of the scrolling window into the clipboard for pasting into another program. HyperFinger Pro was written by Frank Tito, and I suspect it's free, since he says in the background script's comments that he modified someone else's original stack.
Hytelnet isn't a communications application at all. Instead, it's a HyperCard-based database of Telnet sites. The HyperCard front end uses a large set of cryptically named text files to present a menu interface to a large number of primarily character-based Internet resources. Hytelnet does offer descriptions of the specific sites when you finally work your way through the menus, and the program makes it easy to launch NCSA Telnet, TN3270, or TurboGopher to connect to the site in question. Hytelnet 6.7 was written by Peter Scott; Charles Burchill created the HyperCard front end, which requires HyperCard 2.1 or later.
ftp://ftp.usask.ca/pub/hytelnet/mac/
The Ph protocol (which was created in part by Steve Dorner of Eudora fame) is in relatively wide use, especially at universities around the world, as an electronic campus directory system. It's excellent for looking up someone's email address or phone number, but you do have to know what university they attend or work for. The prolific John Norstad has created a free Macintosh client for the Ph protocol called Mac Ph. Of course, you can use Eudora to look up information via Ph, but John's stand-alone client is easier to use. If you choose the Northwestern Ph server, as I did, and then make sure your site list is updated (Update Site List in the File menu), Mac Ph brings in a huge list of sites running Ph. I could even find my Mom.
I'm extremely fond of Christopher Kidwell's $10 shareware MacWeather. You tell MacWeather what city you want to see the weather for, and it retrieves the current data for you, displaying it in either digital or analog form. MacWeather has preferences for each of the weather items it reports on, so you can have the temperature display in Fahrenheit or Celsius, the barometer display in inches of Hg, millimeters of Hg, or millibars, and the wind speed display in miles per hour, knots, or meters per second. You can also get the forecast, climatic data, or marine forecasts in a separate window. If you're constantly connected to the Internet from a room with no windows to the outside world, you can have MacWeather update automatically. I'd like to see a few minor enhancements, such as the capability to have more than one city onscreen at the same time, and an easier way to switch between cities. But these are quibbles, and MacWeather is neat -- highly recommended.
The maX.500 program is a specialized client program for searching the X.500 Online Directory, which can be thought of as a world-wide distributed electronic telephone book. X.500 stores information about people, organizations, groups of people, documents, and services, and maX.500 provides an interface for searching that information. Unfortunately, as promising as X.500 sounds, there doesn't seem to be all that much information actually available in it, which makes it somewhat a hit or miss in terms of finding anyone. Still, it might be worth a look if you're really trying to find someone on the Internet.
ftp://terminator.rs.itd.umich.edu/x500/max500/
I'm no longer as retentive about time as I used to be, but it's still nice to know whether your VCR is accurate when taping TV shows. That's why I like Network Time, a $5 shareware control panel from Pete Resnick. Network Time synchronizes your Mac's clock with a network time server, which is a program running on an Internet machine that talks to other time servers. A number of hops on down, one of the machines gets its time from an atomic clock. To manually set your clock, open the Network Time control panel, enter the IP name of your network time server (ask your Internet provider, or guess at one of the machines run by your provider), and click the Set Time button. For automatic updating, drop Network Time in your Control Panels folder, making sure to set it to "Wait for MacTCP" if you use PPP or SLIP. Network Time has some elegant touches, such as a note about the last time it set your clock, and excellent balloon help. Network Time is definitely the way to go for people wanting to synchronize clocks.
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/tcp/network-time.hqx