Frequently Asked Questions
You can FTP any of my free/shareware programs from:
French versions of some of my programs may be available from:
Les versions françaises de certains de mes programmes sont disponibles à :
and German version of some programs may be available from:
Die deutsche Version einiger meiner Programme gibt es auf:
If you click on the support@stairways.com.au in the About box of many of my programs,
it launches your "mailto" helper as defined in Internet Config. If you've set this
to Eudora, then what will probably happen is that Eudora will launch and no message
will be created. This is because version 1 & 2 of Eudora do not support the URL suite
(the GURL event in particular). The solution is to specify a different mail program
as your mailto helper, to complain to Qualcomm and ask them to support it, or to
find a script or application that will accept the GURL event and pass it on to Eudora in
a form it can understand (such a script should be available with Internet Config
1.2 when it is released).
To use Anarchie Guide you must first have System 7.5 or later or AppleGuide version
2.0 or later and Anarchie Guide must be in the same folder as Anarchie. Then launch
Anarchie and choose "Anarchie Guide" from the Guide menu (formerly the balloon help
menu). Watch out for stupid inits that disable the balloon help menu (in particular,
there are shipping commercial inits that disable the menu by default!).
When setting up default directories in FTPd, remember that the string you type in
to FTPd Setup is the directory path as seen by the user
. So if you have a shared folder "/harddisk/folder", and the user can only see the
folder, not the harddisk, then the path should be "/folder". The owner can usually
see the entire volume, and so you would set the owner path to "/harddisk/folder".
Your Talk address and Email address are often not the same. On a Mac, your talk address
is anything@YourMacsName or anything@YourMacsIP, where YourMacsName might look something
like mac57.myuni.edu and YourMacsIP might look like 12.34.56.78. Note that unless your Mac has a name, you will not be able to talk with anything except other Macs.
Note also that IP addresses and names are assigned and controlled by your network
administrator, you can't affect them from your Mac. MacTCP Watcher will tell you
your Mac's name and number (you can get MacTCP Watcher from my FTP sites listed in FAQ 1).
If you are on a Unix machine, your Talk address is LoginName@MachineName, where
LoginName is your username on the machine, and MachineName is the name of the machine
you telnet to. Try talking from your Mac to your Mac, if you can't get that working,
nothing else will work. On some SLIP/PPP systems, it will not work - upgrading MacTCP
and your SLIP/PPP driver will normally fix that. Talk 1.1.1 is not compatible with
Open Transport.
You are probably fingering your Unix account or your Email address. See FAQ 5 for
details, since the problems are the similar for Talk and Finger. If you are on a
Unix machine, your Finger address is LoginName@MachineName, where LoginName is your
username on the machine, and MachineName is the name of the machine you telnet to. If you
want to see Daemon's plan, you must finger your Mac, not your Unix machine.
The Archie protocol is a braindead UDP protocol. None of the firewalls Anarchie supports
allow UDP packets through, so you usually cannot use Anarchie's Archie facilities
through a firewall. You can use the FTP facilities, including the index feature
which allows you to find files on an FTP site if it supports the SITE INDEX command.
This is often faster and more reliable than Archie anyway.
Anarchie only supports Unix-like FTP servers. The servers must have a hierarchical
file structure using the / character as a separator, and must have a Unix-like directory
listing. Fetch is much better at dealing with these servers. Some servers (like
the NT server) have a switch to make it behave in a Unix-like manner. My feeling is
that FTP servers should all look the same to users, and should not look machine specific
(you shouldn't need to know the type of machine you are FTPing to), plus I simply
don't have the time to support every different kind of server.
You can use any of these techniques to quit faceless background-only applications:
Use ProcessWatcher.
Use AppleScript: 'tell application "whatever" to quit'.
For Finger or Talk, hold the option key down and quit.
For ObiWan, hold down all the modifier keys and click ObiWan's close box.
Note that the Finder has a bug that leaves the application's icon grey after you quit
background only applications. Use ProcessWatcher to tell what is really running.
Hold the command (clover leaf) key down and press the up-arrow key. This is the same
as in the Finder. Alternatively hold the command key down and click in the listing
window's title bar (again, just like the Finder). For more control, hold the control
key down and double click any entry, then edit the path manually - make sure to set
the Fetch/List radio buttons appropriately.
Use the Register program to fill out the form and pay my US distributor "Kagi Shareware".
Register comes with the latest versions of most of my applications, or is available
from my FTP sites (see FAQ 1 for a list of my FTP sites).You can pay by US cheque, any cash, credit card, via email, snail-mail or FAX.
You can get my Pascal sample code from my FTP sites(see FAQ 1 for a list of my FTP
sites).
You can also get the source code for NewsWatcher (the best code to look at), Eudora
and NCSA Telnet.
The interfaces and documentation for MacTCP are available from ftp://seeding.apple.com//ess/public/mactcp/.
Eric Scouten maintains a web site with information for MacTCP and Open Transport
programmers. There is a frequently-asked questions (FAQ) and a collection of publicly-available
source code libraries at this site.
I started off Canadian, and then became Australian. As a consequence, I'm completely
confused as to whether to use English or North American spellings. So I tend to
use half and half just to make sure everyone else stays just as confused as I am.
Sometimes I decide that English in general (all flavours) is just too stupid for words and
make arbitrary decisions that I am going to ignore everyone and spell certain words
(like thru, rong, and license) in a particular way, just because no one can stop
me. Add to that the fact that I consider Email and News to be a communication medium akin
to telephone or conversation, and that I type very quickly but using only three fingers
and I rarely proof read what I post/mail so I make a lot of mistakes. Some people
may think less of me because of this - personally, I can live with that :-)
That said, if you find particular spelling errors in my programs or documentation
(remembering that they are written in Australian English, not North American English),
then please let me know and I'll fix them.
I have never written for the New York Times. Peter H Lewis is the New York Times' foreign
correspondent for the Internet, and his articles appear in various places like on
AOL. And unfortunately, some people don't realise the confusion that is caused by
dropping his (or my) middle initial. Please feel free to badger any online services
that are not clear on this point (they certainly aren't going to listen to me complaining,
and besides it doesn't confuse me). Peter and I actually met in Austin in May, 1995 at a party hosted by Don W Strickland (thanks Don!).
Find yourself (in order of necessity):
- a Macintosh
- a good compiler (I recommend CodeWarrior).
- a CD-ROM drive
- at least 16 Meg of RAM
- the New Inside Mac CD
- the Apprentice CD
- an Internet connection
- time to read the comp.sys.mac.programmer newsgroups
- a subscription to MacTech Magazine
- a subscription to Develop Magazine
Now you can start writing. It takes about a year of writing code to really get up
to speed writing Macintosh applications. You can cut this down by using a framework,
but I'm dubious as to whether this is a better long term solution. No matter what
you do, one of the most important things is to develop your own set of reusable modules
and routines that you can build upon. Any time you find your self writing the same
chunk of code a few times, package it up in to a routine and call it instead of duplicating the code - that way you can reuse it in multiple projects and if there are any
bugs, you can fix it in one place.
Booragoon is a suburb of Perth, the remote capital of Western Australia. If you start
out from Perth and drive 1000kms, the closest major city will be Perth. Nonetheless,
Perth is quite a large city (with a population a little over a million people), and
is still the best place to live IMO, although I've found some quite nice places to
live during my travels around the USA, Seattle and Austin being among the nicest.
Stairways Software Pty. Ltd. is the company I formed to distribute my programs. Note
that there is a Stairways Software, Inc in Virginia, which makes Word Perfect addons
and has been around for many years - there is no connection between these two companies except the name. To avoid any confusion, I will be modifying my trading name slightly,
probably to something like Stairways Shareware.
Stairways Software Pty Ltd will distribute my shareware programs, and possibly other
peoples. It is unlikely it will distribute any commercial software, I certainly
have no intention of "going commercial" at this time - I intend to continue on with
shareware for as long as people continue supporting me.
If your preferences aren't saved, this usually indicates that the preferences file
is corrupted. Trash it and try again. You will lose whatever settings you had.
Trashing the preferences file is often a good idea when you have any problems (with
my software or other peoples). It might also be a good idea to save the invalid preference
file and mail it to me if deleting it solves your problem.
Make sure you have installed MacTCP 2.0.4 or later (preferably the latest version).
Anarchie 1.6.0 has possible incompatibilities with RAM Doubler, Express Modem software,
and Virtual Memory.
The problem is that the Macintosh connects two modem pins together, the result of
this being that when the modem's buffer fills up, the modem is told to hang up. Putting
&D0 in your modem init string stops the modem from doing this.
This is possibly related to an incompatibility with AutoDoubler or other similar hard
disk compression utilities.
Under certain unknown circumstances, Anarchie and RAM Doubler are incompatible and
may cause the machine to freeze. A GV Mercury Duo internal modem (a GV Mercury)
and ARA will crash with long TCP transfers even without Anarchie, so this may be
related to the problem.
This is a sure sign that your Users & Groups file is corrupt. Trash the file, restart
and reset your AppleShare privs. FTPd Setup uses an API library from Apple to get
the list of users from the Users & Groups file, and this library is less than robust.
Unfortunately, there is not much I can do to fix the problem, and I don't really
expect Apple to fix it either.
This is a known bug. The solution is for me to rewrite Talk from scratch, which I
started doing, but have yet to finish.
This may be caused by a corrupted preference file. Delete the Talk Preferences file
and try again.
Daemon seems to have mild incompatibilities with the Thread Manager on some machines
resulting in noticeable slow down of the machine, and lots of disk accesses. The
solution is for me to rewrite Daemon.
Daemon 1.0.0 doesn't support NTP. This functionality should be included in Daemon
1.0.1
Yes. When using personal file sharing, FTPd works better with System 7.5.1 (or later
versions).
© copyright 1995 Peter N Lewis. All Rights Reserved
Webmaster: webmaster@stairways.com.au