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**** The Hebrew University of Jerusalem ****
**** Computation Center ****
News Bulletin #15
20-December-1990
Today's topics:
- User printouts and security.
- Hebrew on terminals.
- WHOIS service.
- New BMAIL installed.
o Printouts: All users' printouts that are sent to TAYLOR and to the
default print queue are accessible by everyone who is passing by the
printers room. If you have sensitive printouts please take this
into account.
o Hebrew: Using Hebrew on the various terminals is quite problematic.
I'll try to explain briefly the various Hebrew codes and how they
are used.
First, the Hebrew codes; there are three "types" of Hebrew codes:
Old code: This code was used mainly in the past, but it is still in
wide use today. In this code, the lower case English characters
were replaced by Hebrew characters when displayed or printed; the
important thing to note here is "when displayed or printed". The
computer stores them as lower case english and treats them so; it
has no idea that these are Hebrew characters and there is no way to
tell whether these are lower case characters which represent Hebrew
or English. Only the display terminal (or the printer) knows that
it has to display Hebrew instead of English. This has the advantage
that no special hadling for Hebrew is needed outside the
input/output devices. The main drawbacks are that there is no way
to differentiate between Hebrew and English, you have to setup the
terminal or the printer manually for Hebrew, and you can't use lower
case Latin characters.
The ASCII range of Hebrew in this code is 96 to 121.
In order to overcome the above problems something called "new code"
was introduced. In this new code the Hebrew characters come in
addition to the English ones, thus do not interfere with them and
easily distinguishable. This is a great advantage but has a few
drawbacks: Programs need to know to handle the additional
characters, and old printers or terminals can't handle this code.
Furthermore, there are two types of new code:
IBM new code: This code is used on PC's. The Aleph code is ASCII
128 and the other characters follow it. If you want to translate old
code to this new code you have to add 32 to the ASCII representation
of each Hebrew character.
ISO new code: This is the standard world-wide adopted new code for
Hebrew which is used also by Digital and other systems. Here the
Aleph ASCII code is at 224; In order to convert old code to new code
you have to add 128 to the ASCII code of the Hebrew characters.
We know how Hebrew is stored; but how do we control the input and
output devices to accept Hebrew? If you are using New code then
this is quite easy as Hebrew is distinguishable from English; there
are a few minor problems which will be described later. For the old
code we have to switch the terminal maunally to Hebrew. This is
done sometimes via the terminal's setup and sometimes by sending the
appropriate escape sequence to the terminal (consult the terminal's
refference manual for it). When you print old code documents on the
VAX you have to use the /FORM=HEBREW_OLD qualifier of the PRINT
command so the printer will be changed to use Hebrew.
When using New code there is one important problem: It uses a full
8-bit Ascii code while some communication equipment might pass only
7 bits. In order to use Hebrew new code (which is the recommended
code for new programs and documents) you have first to use a
terminal capable of displaying and entering them. all VT200 and up
(i.e. 300 and 400 series) support this code, and so are their
Visual compatibles (like Visual-600). A second thing to verify is
that your terminal is defined correctly at the computer side. In
order to verify it hit the command:
$ SET TERMINAL/EIGHTBIT
before you start working with Hebrew.
New code Hebrew can be printed on the default printer of the VAX.
All other public printers which are currently connected to the VAX
cannot print Hebrew new code.
A vt320 terminal will be placed soon at the user's room in Taylor
building. This terminal supports Hebrew in both old code and new
code and is intended mainly for Hebrew users.
Hebrew mail will be available also shortly. A separate announcement
will be sent when it is available.
o WHOIS service - Very often you are faced with the problem of finding
a hostname or an address of someone on the Internet. This job is
very complex, and a partial releif to it is available via the WHOIS
command. There is a large database which holds information about
the InterNet, and this command is used to search in it. The easiest
way is simply to hit:
$ WHOIS the-name-you-are-looking-for
A detailed explanation of how to use this command and its
capabilities can be found in GUIDES$:WHOIS.TXT; Note that not all
InterNet hosts are registered there, and sometimes the keyword
needed is different than the one you are trying. Usually, of the
insitute has a short-cut name (like HUJI for us) use this short
name.
If you still can't find the address you are looking for, try asking
us at VMS-ADVICE@VMS.
o New BMAIL installed - A new version of BMAIL has been installed.
The main new features are:
Hitting at BMAIL's prompt acts like VMS/MAIL now. Hitting it
after you finished viewing a message advances to the next available
message. In the future the user will have the option to choose the
old behaviour or the new one.
Code conversion: The messages are now stored in EBCDIC code if they
were received via BITNET. Code conversion is automatic, but you can
force it or disable it in special cases by adding the CONVERT or
NOCONVERT optional parameter to the READ, SAVE, APPEND commands.
Note that almost always the automatic conversion is correct, and the
usage of this parameter is discuraged.
Binary messages: Trickle and some other servers send you binary
files. In order to receive them in a way usefull for PC
downloading, add the parameter BIN to the SAVE command (do not use
NOCONVERT parameter in this case). The BIN option is like NOCONVERT
but also blocks the data records correctly. When you see in the
directory of BMAIL a file received from Trickle it is useless to use
READ command to make it the current message for saving. In this
case, use the command:
CURRENT message-number
Which has the same effect as READ but does not display the message
on the screen.
Saving range of messages: It is possible to save in one file a few
messages concatanated together. In order to do it, append to your
SAVE command the range of messages to save:
SAVE file-name messages-range
Note that the CONVERT/NOCONVERT/BIN options are not applicable here.
__Yehavi:
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