9.4 IMAGINE THAT -- DOWNLOADING PICTURES
As you play with Lynx, you'll notice that some pages will have entries
that look like this: [IMAGE]. If the word is the same color as the other
text on your screen, you won't be able to download it. If it's a
different color or somehow highlighted, you should be able to put your
cursor on it and hit enter. You'll get one of two messages. One says
something about how the "client" can't display an ISMAP image. In that
case, there's not much you can do, except hit your left arrow key to get
back to the previous page -- Lynx at this point can't handle this
particular system for displaying maps.
The other message also looks potentially frustrating: "This file cannot
be displayed on this terminal. D)ownload or C)ancel." This is actually
good news, however, because it means it's an image you can retrieve. If
you hit a lower-case d, you'll be asked if you want to save the image to
your host system, or if you want to use Zmodem to download it directly to
your own computer. If you're using a communications program with Zmodem,
selecting the latter will immediately start the process of transferring
it to you. The file names will always look something like: L23015.HTM.
In most cases, the files will be GIF images, occasionally JPEG images,
and, rarely, TIFF images. You'll need a GIF/JPEG viewer on your computer
to view these. If you don't have Zmodem, save the image to your host
system. Interestingly, when you do this, you'll get a more descriptive
file name, OLDBONES.GIF instead of L2015.HTM, for example. In either
case, when you're done transferring the file, hit your left arrow key to
get back to the previous page. Before you actually download the file,
you'll see a message indicating how large it is -- handy to know if
you're using a relatively slow modem.
Sometimes, instead of the above message, you'll get a more forbidding
looking one:
showpicture -viewer xv /tmp/L229787.html
This message contains a picture, which can currently only be
viewed when running X11. If you read this message while running
X11, and have your DISPLAY variable set, you will then
be able to see the picture properly.
Yikes! Ignore this and look for the prompt asking if you want to save
this to a file. Hit a lower-case y and you'll be prompted for a name.
Type in whatever you want to call the file and hit enter. You've just
saved a copy of the file to your home directory on your Internet host,
which means that, when you're done with Lynx, you can download it to your
home computer.
A related function to downloading is retrieving a copy of a document. To
do that, hit p within a document. You'll be given several choices as to
how to retrieve it, including sending it to yourself via e-mail or saving
it to a file in your home directory on your public-access site.
9.5 LYNX, MEET GOPHER
One of the nice things about Lynx is that you can also use it to reach
non-Web resources, from FTP and telnet sites to gophers. This means that
you can use it as your one-stop interface for Internet information
services.
Recall earlier how you have to type "http://" as part of the URLs for Web
sites. There are similar prefixes for other types of services, for
example: gopher://, ftp:// and telnet://.
Telnet is the easiest to use. Say you want to connect to the Electronic
Periodic Table of the Elements at camm57.caos.kun.nl. In Lynx, hit a
lower-case g and then type:
telnet://camm57.caos.kun.nl
and hit enter, and you'll be connected. The one caveat with telnet sites
is that many have their own user interfaces, so keys may do different
things than they would if you were connected to a Web site. If you're
ever stuck on a telnet site and can't get out, hit control-] (your
"control" and "]" keys at the same time) to return to Lynx.
Connecting to an FTP site works basically the same: for example, to get
to ftp.uu.net, type a lower-case g and then
ftp://ftp.uu.net
You won't have to log in, though, which is nice. And once you're in,
you'll be able to navigate by making selections off a menu, rather than
having to type any Unix commands. If you already know a particular
file's name and path on a site, you could even go to it directly, by
hitting a lower-case g and then typing in site name and path, like this:
ftp://ftp.uu.net/systems/ibmpc/msdos/simtel/zip/pkz204g.exe
Getting to a gopher works basically the same, except you'd substitute
"gopher://" for "telnet://" or "ftp://." Where it does get tricker with
gophers, however, is if you want to get to a specific document or
directory on a gopher. This is because gopher administrators usually
mask their Unix directory names with natural-language titles, for
example, "Sports and recreation" rather than "sports_rec." But URLs use
the Unix paths, so that if you're used to being told "Connect to
gopher.site.com, select 'Society' and then 'Sports and recreation'" you'd
have to translate that into URL-ese as something like:
gopher://gopher.site.com/11/soc/sports_rec. How to find these? Connect to
the top-level gopher address, for example:
gopher.std.com
Then make selections until you get to the document or directory you want.
Now either hit a lower-case a to add the path to your bookmark list, or,
if you want to write it down, hit an equal sign, which will show you the
path.
9.6 FINDING THINGS ON THE WEB
Like Gopher, the Web is a fascinating place to explore -- just keep
following links to see where they take you. In fact, Lynx and other Web
programs are often called "browsers" for just this reason. Eventually,
however, you might want to find something specific on the Web and you
might want to find it now.
Unlike with Gopher and Veronica, there is no single way to search the Web.
Instead, several organizations around the world have developed different
types of databases that let you find Web documents and hyperlinks. The
ones that follow are all fairly powerful yet relatively easy to use.
Because they all seem to use different methods for finding things, it can
sometimes be worthwhile to try several of them as part of your search --
you'll find different resources with each. An added bonus is that
often, the people who maintain one search "engine" will provide quick
links to the others, making it easy for you to get from one to the other.
One of the more useful systems is EINet Galaxy, run by the
Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corp. in Austin, Texas, both
because it's easy to use and because it lets you search for both Web and
Gopher resources.
To get to it, hit a lower-case g within Lynx and then type:
http://galaxy.einet.net
When you connect, you'll actually see what looks an awful lot like a
table of contents or index for the entire Internet -- dozens of entries
on broad topics from architecture to sociology. If you're not in a hurry,
these entries can prove an interesting introduction to just what's
avaialable these days. But today, we are in a hurry, so keep hitting
enter until you see something that looks like this:
Search for: ____________________ Search Clear selections [40 hits_]
( )Galaxy Pages ( )Galaxy Entries ( )World-wide Web ( )Gopher
( )Hytelnet
Up - Home - Help - Search - Top -- EINet Galaxy
First, notice the "Search" in the bottom list of options. If you moved
your cursor to that and hit enter, you'd be given a list of links to
other searchable databases of Web resources. But for now, move your
cursor (with the down-arrow key) until it's on the dashes. Here is where
you type in the word or words you're looking for (don't worry about
capitalization). Now it gets slightly tricky (because the system was
designed with mouse users in mind). Hit your down-arrow key until you
get to the space before "Galaxy Entries." Hit enter, and you'll see an
asterisk appear. As you might surmise, you're telling the system to
search for your keyword among "Galaxy Entries" (which are those indexed
listings we just passed over). Hit your down arrow again to move to the
"World-wide Web" entry and hit enter again. Do it once more for Gopher.
Now use your up key to move backwards, until the word "Search" is
highlighted. Hit enter.
EINet Galaxy now starts a search of its database, looking for any
potential matches in both Web and Gopher documents. Let's say you were
searching for information about the King, ol' Elvis himself. Had you
used "Elvis" as your search word, something like this would come back:
Galaxy Entry Results - for `` elvis''
4 documents found
* ELVIS+ WWW server from RUSSIA - Score: 1000 Size: 29
* Elvis Aron Presley Home Page - Score: 1000 Size: 28
* Elvis Aron Presley Home Page - Score: 1000 Size: 28
* The Elvis Costello home page - Score: 1000 Size: 28
World-wide Web Results - for `` elvis''
28 documents found
(Option list) Hit return and use arrow keys and return to select option
Each of the lines starting with an asterisk turns out to be a hyperlink
to a particular Web server. Curious about the first one, you move your
cursor there and hit enter -- and discover that a group of Russian
computer programmers have set up a software company they've decided to
call ELVIS+. OK. So you hit your left arrow key to get back to the
EINet Galaxy search results. Try the next one, and you find yourself
reading about the King. The "score" represents the database's attempt to
show you how relevant a particular item is to your search. If the word
you're looking for appears in a document's title or first paragraph, for
example, it will score higher in the databases 1-to-1000 ranking than if
it did not appear until the very last paragraph.
Another good Web info-searcher is David Filo and Jerry Yang's Yahoo server
at Stanford University (it stands for something along the lines of "Yet
Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle"). It'll remind you of EINet
Galaxy -- it, too, provides a table-of-contents type of interface to Web
(no Gopher) services, along with a more specific search tool. You'll
want to connect to:
http://akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo
One of your choices in a menu bar across the bottom of the screen will be
"Search." Select it, and you'll get a small form similar to EINet
Galaxy's. Although Yahoo will let you find all sorts of resources, it
really shines in the area of online businesses and the services they
offer.
Lycos at Carnegie-Mellon University is a third search system, which is
interesting in part because of the way new entries are added to its
database. Part of Lycos consists of an automated "web crawler" that
periodically, well, crawls around the Web looking for new servers and
documents. It then adds the information to the database. Connect to
http;//lycos.cs.cmu.edu. You'll be given a choice of searching Lycos1,
Lycos2 or Lycos3. These are different computers, but each contains the
same database, so it doesn't really matter which one you choose (unless
one doesn't work, then try one of the others). You'll then get a page
with these choices:
Lycos Search Language description
Form-based search with options (same database)
Register your own URLs with Lycos or Delete your own URLs
Lycos: Frequently Asked Questions
Select the second one and hit enter, which will bring up the search form.
It will then return a list of potentially relevant documents -- along
with snippets from those documents to help you decide whether you want
to look at them. By default, the computer will only respond with the
first 10 matches it finds. You can change that via a setting in the
search form.
9.7 SLIP: BUT I WANT TO USE MY MOUSE!
OK, so you have a Windows computer or Macintosh and you want to use the
Internet via a point-and-click interface. You can. Many Internet
providers now offer Serial Line Internet Protocol (SLIP) or Point to
Point Protocol (PPP) connections. Among other things, this sort of link
will let you run a growing number of programs that let you fully
integrate everything from e-mail to the Web into the interface with which
you're familiar -- you can use your mouse, drag and drop things, etc.
IBM now includes such software as part of its OS/2 operating system,
while Microsoft Corp. has similar plans for its Windows 95 operating
system. There are also several companies that offer complete graphical
Internet starter kits. For example, O'Reilly and Associates sells an
"Internet in a Box" kit for Windows users. And two Internet providers,
Netcom and Pipeline, offer their own, proprietary graphical user
interfaces for the Internet.
Although using these programs can be easy, setting them up is sometimes a
pain (it gets even more complex if you decide to download free and low-
cost software from the Internet that provides the same features). First,
check with your provider to see if they do offer SLIP or PPP access, and
if so, at what price (some may charge extra). If they do not, ask if
they will allow the use of The Internet Adapter, software that lets
Macintosh and Windows users use graphical programs via a standard dial-up
connection.
9.8 MORE ON SLIP
Computers tied directly to the Internet communicate with each other using
a standard known as Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol
(TCP/IP). This standard allows for direct interaction between these
computers -- so that, for example, you can tap into a database halfway
around the world over the Net (it also deals with such issues as routing
information from A to B).
This is NOT what you are doing when you dial into a public-access site
with, say, Procomm. Once your computer and your host establish a link,
your computer basically goes to sleep and you interact with the network
via programs on your host. That terminal emulation you always have to
remember to set is merely a way to tell the host system what kind of
keyboard to pretend you'd be using if you were actually at the host
computer sitting at one of its terminals. All of the programs you need to
run to interact with the Net, from mail and Usenet readers to Gopher and
Lynx, are actually running on your provider's computer (or network); the
only time your computer wakes up is when you do something like download a
file (and even then, you're not using any particular Internet program).
SLIP makes your computer an active participant on the network (PPP
essentially does the same thing). With a SLIP account, it's essentially
your host that goes to sleep, acting only as a sort of doorway to the
rest of the Internet for you and your computer. Now your computer has
direct access to TCP/IP message packets (which can be anything from e-
mail to World-Wide Web images). Of course, this also means you'll need
all the software to do things sitting on your hard drive. Think of it as
the difference between renting an apartment, where the landlord takes
care of the maintenance, and owning your own house, where you gain the
freedom to do things the way you want.
9.9 HTML: BUILDING YOUR OWN
A growing number of Internet providers let users set up their own Web
home pages. If your providers is one of these, and you want to tell the
world your story, you'll need to know the HyperText Markup Language
(HTML). Fortunately, this is tedious rather than difficult to learn, and
there are HTML "authoring" programs out there that can help reduce the
burden.
The basic idea behind HTML is to embed codes within a standard ASCII text
document that tell the computer displaying the document to do something,
whether that's to put a word in bold, display an image, or jump to
another document. Here's what a simple HTML command looks like:
Web Intro
HTML commands are always between such brackets. The first instruction
tells the computer that what is to follow is a document title and to
display it at the top of the page (in Lynx, that's actually the top right
hand corner of the screen). The ending command, again in brackets, tells
the computer that that's the end of that instruction. The user doesn't
see these commands.
There are similar HTML commands for paragraphs, italics, inserting
graphics, creating lists, etc. The command for linking to another
document elsewhere on the Web looks like this:
Boston Online
Note that the URL is in quotation marks. The "a" (or "anchor") command
tells your Web browser that a link is about to be displayed. "Boston
Online" will be highlighted when a user calls up the page. The "" at
the end tells the browser to go back to normal type.
To build a Web page, you'll need at least two things. First is
permission from your provider and instructions relating to your specific
site (for example, where to put the documents you create). Second is a
guide to HTML (see FYI below) and a word processor capable of creating
ASCII or text documents. Third, and optionally, is an HTML authoring
program that can help relieve you of the drudgery of typing in all those
HTML commands (again, see FYI below).
9.10 SOME INTERESTING WWW SERVERS
AREA CODES
http://www.xmission.com/~americom/ Ever wondered what the area code is
for Watertown, NY, or the country code for Andorra? Help is now as near
as your keyboard. AmeriCom, a long-distance company, has created a Web-
based server with info on some 80,000 cities around the world.
ART
http://www.wimsey.com/Pixel_Pushers/ The Electronic Art Gallery in
Calgary is exactly what it sounds like.
BOSTON
http://www.std.com/NE/boston.html An online guide to the city that
modestly calls itself the Hub of the Universe, from restaurant and movie
listings to car-repair recommendations and neighborhood profiles.
CALIFORNIA
http://www.research.digital.com/SRC/virtual-tourist/California.html This
is your basic tourist-info center just over the state line on the
Information Highway. It offers everything from traffic and road-
condition reports to maps and pictures of tourist attractions.
CHINA
http://www.ihep.ac.cn:3000/ihep.html This is the People's Republic's
first Internet connection, run by the Institute for High Energy Physics
in Beijing, providing everything from e-mail addresses of Chinese
scientists to information on Chinese regions and a directory of foreign
companies in Beijing.
DINOSAURS
http://www.hcc.hawaii.edu/dinos/dinos1.html Look here for images of
dinosaur skeletons.
DUBLIN
http://www.dsg.cs.tcd.ie/dsg_people/czimmerm/pubs.html This is "the
definitive review of Dublin's watering holes.''
ENVIRONMENT
http://www.econet.apc.org/lcv/scorecard.html See how your local
congressman/woman is ranked by the League of Conservation Voters.
http://polyn.net.kiae.su/polyn/manifest.html A group of researchers at
the Kurchatov Institute for Atomic Energy in Moscow have created a World-
Wide Web resource devoted to the Chernobyl melt-down.
GAMES
http://wcl-rs.bham.ac.uk/GamesDomain The Games Domain is the place to go
for information on dozens of computer games. Resources include lists of
hints for specific games and an online games magazine.
GOVERNMENT
http://www.fedworld.gov FedWorld is a gateway to dozens of federal
information services in the U.S., some free, some requiring a fee to use.
http://thomas.loc.gov The Library of Congress's Thomas (as in Thomas
Jefferson) service lets you look up pending bills by keyword and read
the Congressional Record (back to January, 1994).
LAW
http://www.law.cornell.edu/lii.table.html Cornell University's Legal
Information Institute provides a variety of law-related documents,
including information on specific legal issues and copies of U.S. Supreme
Court decisions.
http://venable.com/vbh.html Venable, Batejer, Howard and Civiletti is a
Washington, D.C. law firm. Its Web server includes online newsletters on
various legal topics.
LEGOS
http://legowww.itek.norut.no/catalog/index.html Yes, it's a set of
documents (with pictures) all about the little plastic blocks with the
pegs on top.
MOVIES
http://www.cm.cf.ac.uk/Movies/moviewquery.html You can search for
filmographies for particular actors and directors here.
http://bvp.wdp.com/BVPM/ The Buena Vista Pictures Web server has
information and photos of current Disney and Buena Vista Pictures movies
-- even some QuickTime loops for Macintosh owners (caveat: those are
large files).
MUSIC
http://www.music.indiana.edu/misc/music_resources.html This resource at
Indiana University will help you find Web sites devoted to virtually
every type of music and band.
NEW ZEALAND
http://www.cs.cmu.edu:8001/Web/People/mjw/NZ/MainPaige.html Your personal
guided tour of New Zealand, complete with pictures of its cities, scenery
and people, begins here.
PATENTS
http:/town.hall.org/patent/patent.html. This database, run by the
Internet Multicasting Service, lets you search for U.S.-issued patents
from 1994 on.
REAL ESTATE
http://www.gems.com/realestate/ Real-estate listings from several
cities around the U.S.
SLOVENIA
http://www.ijs.si/slo.html Learn more about the former Yugoslav republic
in words and photographs.
SMALL BUSINESS
http://www.sbaonline.sba.gov The U.S. Small Business Administration uses
its Web site to provide tips for businesses and lists of available
resources.
SOUTH DAKOTA
http://www.state.sd.us All you ever wanted to know about the state, from
tourist attractions to pending legislation, can be found here.
SPACE
http://sspp.gsfc.nasa.gov/ Look here for info on discount space flights
from NASA, like the "Get Away Special" -- only $27,000 to launch a
90-pound cannister aboard a space shuttle.
TIME WASTERS
http://www.primus.com/staff/paulp/useless.html It's amazing what some
people are using the Web for. There's the guy in California who's
connected his hot tub and refrigerator, so you can check the temperature
in both; people who let you send messages to their cat; digital cameras
that take periodic snapshots of coffee pots. Paul Phillips has assembled
links to them all.
WINE
http://augustus.csscr.washington.edu/personal/bigstar-mosaic/wine.html
Look for information about the grape beverage here. Besides links to
other Internet resources, it also lets you leave tasting notes for other