[GreenKeys] Heavymetal

[gil smith]

Hi Bill:

Nice job on the PDP enclosure, by the way!  I just finished moving, so I
have not even started assembling the board.

I must admit haven't used HM lately, though I would love to get it running
with a machine again.  I went through my old emails regarding HM, to find
where I left off.  There were a few things that I wanted to do, but for
some reason or another, I ran into some hitch.  Some of the following is
cut-n-paste, if it looks familiar:

1) Automatic machine power:  I know you have an X10 feature for this, but
since HM activates the 232 port's RTS and DTR when invoked, I was thinking
of using one of those signals to drive a motor relay.  If HM would leave
the serial port RTS line inactive while it starts up and does something
like an email test, then only activate RTS a couple of seconds before
printing to the tty, that would be nice.  DTR could be activated for
program duration, as it is now.  Then either could be used to trigger motor
control.

2) News:  I had problems with ftp news for some reason.  It may have been a
firewall issue, so I need to try it again.

3) Email:  What I wanted, was to periodically get email from a specific
account (such as greenkeys), and print it to the tty.  But a couple of
problems came up.  First, was (optionally) deleting the mail after fetching
-- but you said that was not too difficult to do.  

Second, is that the tty should not print unnecessarily, when it fetches and
there is no email for example.  This too, is likely not too big of a deal
to change.  But then I realized that the email can have a lot of extra text
that would be a waste of paper and time, and would affect readability.  

In thinking about that, it seemed that there needed to be a way to print
selected header lines (date, from, and subject would be fine), send the
body text to a filter function, then print the filtered body text.  Maybe
combine the header info into one line, separate the header and body with a
single blank line, and put 2 or 3 blank lines after the message.  Short and
sweet, and minimal printing time and paper.  The filter routine could, for
example, discard text until it hit a specific string, keep text until
another string (or N number of lines), and discard the rest.  I don't
expect you to put all this filtering in, but it would be nice to have a
hook in HM to pass a file out to a program for filtering, then accept it
back for printing.

So there is a need to look at header contents to determine whether to
accept or reject a message for printing.  And messages should be archived
somehow on disk.  Now things are just getting messy, and it is sounding
more like a full-fledged email program.  Actually, it would be nice to be
able to set some filtering up in a full-blown email program, and send
selected text either to heavymetal, or perhaps directly to the serial port.  

It would also be nice to send selected stuff to a pop-up alert window on
the pc.  It all boils down to pulling the actual desired info out of all
the crap.  I think it would be great to have news headlines, weather
updates, and selected email, all stripped down to the bare info nuggets,
and sent anywhere I'd like.

4) Telnet session:  What is George running that lets telnet sessions join a
chat conversation?  It would be nice to use a real machine and HM to telnet
in.  That would be like rtty for us non-radio guys.

thanks,

gil


At 09:44 AM 12/23/02 -0800, Bill Buzbee wrote:
>
>A few requests:
>
>I'm in the process of digging through my Heavymetal teletype control program
>to fix the ASCII cr/lf problem that Jack ran into.  So, if anyone has any
>new features they'd like to see added or bugs fixed, now would be a good
>time to let me know.  I'll see what I can do.
>
>Secondly, does anyone have a stash of historical teletype bulletins, such as
>VE-day, JFK assasination, moon landing, etc?  I thought it would be nice to
>add a feature to Heavymetal to print those out both on demand, and
>automatically on anniversaries.  Perhaps I could even add an option to
>automatically list the printouts for sale on eBay :-).
>
>Finally, I have an ASCII art "12 Days of Christmas" listing.  Anyone have
>any other similar ones?  I remember when working at the newspaper that AP
>used to send Christmas greetings on the teletype feed each year, and if I
>remember correctly they were different each time.
>
>Thanks,
>...Bill Buzbee
>
>

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