Column 73, PCW Plus 92, May 1994
CAUGHT IN THE NET
You've probably puzzled over many newspaper articles on electronic mail, computer nets and the Internet. Perhaps friends have started quoting irritating `net addresses' with @ signs swarming in them like horrid bacteria. (Me, I'm ansible@cix.compulink.co.uk.) Very recently British journalists became `net-aware', largely because more newspapers and magazines are accepting articles via e-mail: journalists, being lazy, have delightedly realized that they needn't print stuff out or use that old-fashioned fax machine....
I can't resist novelties, and have duly experimented with the net. As usual, the real thing has quite a different flavour from the reports of newspaper hacks trying to make it sound exciting by their standards. At risk of boring you rigid, let's correct some current misinformation.
• "You can't use computer nets with a PCW." This is true in the same sense as "You can't do desktop publishing on a PCW." Yes, an IBM is more convenient, but patience and a bicycle can get you there as effectively as a car. Stumbling blocks for PCW users are that you need a serial interface and a modem, and that their extra cost makes communications software look uninviting: "I have to buy these boxes before your wretched program will work?" Cheaper than an IBM, still.
• "It's too expensive for home users." Britain has two economical routes into Internet. CIX -- Compulink Information eXchange, with over 10,000 subscribers -- is a full-fledged net costing a minimum £6.25 plus VAT monthly, being an advance payment against £2.40/hour off-peak connection charge. I can just about stay within the £6.25, except sometimes. For heavy users, the bare-bones service called Demon offers unlimited Internet access for a flat £10 plus VAT monthly. Either way, much of my large overseas correspondence goes via Internet for a fraction of a penny per message, rather than air mail at 41p.
• "The phone bills are ruinous!" Personally I stick to cheap-rate periods and weekends. But the pleasant surprise here is OLR or Off-Line Reader software. Instead of clocking up connection charges while typing e-mail messages and reading those received from the net, you let this software transmit and receive everything in one automatic burst. Reading messages and writing replies can wait until you've safely hung up. I hardly dared believe that anyone had written such software for PCWs, but all knowledge is on the net: my CIX query brought responses from proud PCW users. I boggled at the chap who was connecting to CIX via a 9512, from Brunei! Margolis & Co. offer a communications program called COMM+ which comes with CIX offline-reader facilities; they also produce PCWfax, whose special serial interface supposedly allows data transfer to and from the net faster than my IBM will do it....
• "I've read articles about Internet (what is it? Why do some people say Usenet?) and it sounds full of incomprehensible jargon." Right. The world is full of nets like CIX or the American biggie CompuServe: a combination of virtual-reality chatlines, mailboxes and libraries. Internet is a system of global connections, joining thousands of nets via what SF writers call cyberspace: from CIX, I can post an electronic letter which goes through the Internet link to any net address on the planet. Usenet is a gigantic bulletin board that comes with the Internet territory: a flood of information and chat running to tens of megabytes a day. I couldn't possibly read all that, and just stay connected to a few SF topics (`newsgroups') that interest me -- these have only about 100,000 readers as opposed to Internet's overall total of twenty or thirty million. The Usenet technical newsgroups feature a lot of jargon, but other subjects are discussed in plain(ish) English -- and there's a newsgroup for almost any subject you can imagine. Including Terry Pratchett.
• "What about those stupid abbreviations and smiley faces?" They're not compulsory: I dislike them and don't use them. Some net-addicts are computer nerds with no sense of humour who can't recognize a joke (let alone difficult stuff like sarcasm) unless warned by a little sideways smiley face ... :-). And it's true that writing something funny on CIX will cause at least one acronymic response of "ROFL!", for Rolls On Floor Laughing. After studying this, a friend of mine moodily suggested "ROFV": Rolls On Floor Vomiting. News reports always seize on these cranky and eccentric aspects for the sake of an amusing story, and play them up at the expense of more ordinary (and more interesting) electronic chatter.
• "I hear it's full of filth!" That's the trouble with free, uncensored communication: a very few people use it to send digitized naughty pictures. The way politicians react seems comparable to demanding a ban on all magazines, including PCW Plus, because some feature the kind of recreational exercise enjoyed by Cabinet Ministers. (I confess to wondering what exactly is in the Usenet "alt" or "alternative" newsgroups called alt.sex, alt.sex.bondage, and worse -- but CIX tactfully screens these out.)
If PCW Plus readers are interested I'll write again about the net; it's far more fascinating than its current public image. I won't forget the thrill of requesting some free software through Internet and realizing that it was coming straight from a friendly computer at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore -- and no international phone charge either....
Column 72 for PCW Plus 94, July 1994
IN THE BEGINNING
"Nothing much was happening." "He felt like a nice cup of tea." "It was quite dark." "Statistical analysis indicated a slight upward market trend at the 0.1% significance level, she thought excitedly."
No, as opening sentences these are duds. As so many PCW users are hopeful writers, I keep returning to the mysteries of writing here -- and once revealed the dark secret that most neatly printed submissions aren't read beyond page one. When your editor is jaded, decisions can be based on the first few lines; if there's nothing there to hold attention ... tough luck.
The temptation is to throw all one's efforts into an irresistible opening sentence that grabs readers by the, er, by very tender parts and forces them to read on:
"As the reactor meltdown alarms shrieked OVERLOAD and hordes of rabies-infested mutant wombats closed in, Felicity wrested the stolen Crown Jewels from the snarling Archbishop and hoped her zeppelin's fading buoyancy could drift beyond range of the gunfire from Stonehenge to reach higher ground before the tidal wave hit...."
At this point, groaning at the chapters of flashback required to justify such excitement, the editor may take an aspirin instead of reading on.
What makes a good opening line? Think which fictional first lines you can remember (even approximately) without thumbing through books. I tried this thought experiment and betrayed a misspent youth by recalling lots of SF....
"I always get the shakes before a drop." Robert Heinlein was famous for zappy openings: here in Starship Troopers the narrator is about to be dumped from orbit to fight on a hostile planet. The book irritates with its glorification of war -- but it's dismayingly readable.
"Today we're going to show you eight silent ways to kill a man." Another military SF novel, this time highlighting the folly and horror: Joe Haldeman's The Forever War. You read on with guilty curiosity, wondering what the eight ways are; you don't find out, but the story has you gripped.
Are violence and tension the keys? Not necessarily. Puzzlement can be enough: "He doesn't know which of us I am these days, but they know one truth." What's going on here? Alfred Bester's short "Fondly Fahrenheit", one of the most compulsive SF stories ever, dances to this crazy tune of shifting pronouns from start to end. A tour de force ... meaning, not an act for anyone else to follow.
"The idiot lived in a black and grey world, punctuated by the white lightning of hunger and the flicker of fear." Really an idiot? (Yes and no.) This teasing question and the short, vivid phrases suck you into Theodore Sturgeon's idiosyncratic More Than Human....
"to wound the autumnal city." (Lower-case T, not a capital.) This is the Mystification and Irritation Gambit, in Samuel R.Delany's very strange Dhalgren. You read on, if at all, out of interest in exotic style or to find why on earth it opens in mid-sentence. Answer: 900 pages later the closing sentence wraps around to the beginning. James Joyce did it first.
Straight description can carry menacing promise: "The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel." In the cyberspace future of William Gibson's Neuromancer, even natural things like sky are routinely described in high-tech metaphor.
Quieter still: "When I was quite small I would sometimes dream of a city ..." Simple and haunting, especially when it emerges that in the post-holocaust opening of John Wyndham's The Chrysalids there are no cities....
Excite the readers. Tantalize them. Dazzle them with imagery. An effective opening does one or more of these things and lures the sucker into your story with the promise of goodies to come. Note the word "promise": the opening hook is a request for credit, for an investment of the reader's time and attention, and the rest of the story has to deliver. (My wildly exciting imaginary paragraph, above, makes too many promises for credible delivery.)
And at the end, of course, comes the entirely different skill of writing a good last line. How many closing lines can you remember?
"For a moment I thought I knew where I was, but when I looked back" ... yes, this ends in mid-sentence with no full stop. It looks placid, but as the end of Christopher Priest's The Affirmation it packs a hefty punch because the line has appeared earlier, and it was unfinished the first time too, and in a twisty way this hallucinated book has become its own sequel.
"This much we have learned. Here is the race that shall rule the sevagram." This judgement on humanity by some passing aliens at the close of A.E.van Vogt's The Weapon Makers has boggled generations of sf readers for the simple, disorienting reason that the mysterious word "sevagram" appears here for the first time in the book! As with the Bester opening, this is not a trick to imitate.
Last comes the unforgettably apocalyptic but often misquoted punchline of Arthur C.Clarke's short "The Nine Billion Names of God". Let's see if my failing memory can recall it: "Overhead, without any fuss, the PCW monitors were going out...."
Column 74 for PCW Plus 96, September 1994
NETTED AGAIN
The meshes of Internet are closing around me ... my PCW Plus piece on computer nets (May) led to the kind of response expected from tossing a rare steak into a piranha tank. Electronic mail arrived from many PCWs (my address is still ansible@cix.compulink.co.uk). Questions were asked, and here are some answers.
• `You recommended Britain's CIX net but didn't print the address!' CIX can be reached at The Sanctuary, Oakhill Grove, Surbiton, KT6 6DU, or cixadmin@cix.compulink.co.uk on e-mail. I chose it because it's cheap if used in moderation -- and it's possible to access CIX from a PCW. The rival lot Demon may be a better bet for heavy use, since they charge a flat monthly fee rather than per minute (but you still pay BT charges): Demon Internet Services, 42 Hendon Lane, London, N3 1TT. The cheapest solution is to be one of the countless academics, students or businessfolk who have free net access ... lucky swine.
• `Where can I find PCW-relevant stuff on the net?' On CIX, the PCW is mentioned regularly in the conferences `amstrad' and `cpm', whose names I shouldn't need to explain -- also occasionally in another called (alas) `obsolete'. Conferences are designated areas of CIX where people place messages and swap chat on particular topics; on the world Usenet bulletin board they're called newsgroups, but the principle is similar. The only Usenet newsgroup that seems even slightly relevant to PCWs is `comp.os.cpm' -- under heading COMPuters, subheading Operating Systems, and specific topic CP/M. If Usenet can offer alt.sex.bondage, why not alt.grump.alansugar?
• `How do I get PCW communications software for CIX?' People use all sorts of things. Commplus comes from Margolis & Co, 228 Alexandra Park Road, Wood Green, London, N22 4BH, and has its own support conference on CIX to deal with queries. Qterm is public domain CP/M software; a version specially adapted for the PCW is available in the above-mentioned `cpm' conference ... er, find a friend who uses CIX? Both Commplus and the modified Qterm come with script files -- preset instruction sequences which help automate getting into CIX, sending and receiving messages, and signing off as fast as possible.
Other PCW netfolk use Kermit 4.08 (public domain) or the comms bit of Mini Office Professional. I've yet to hear of anyone happily connecting via that famous software equivalent of two cocoa tins and a string, MAIL232.COM. One negative recommendation comes from a chap struggling with PCWCOMMS (`part of PCWWORKS') who can fleetingly read incoming e-mail on the PCW screen but can't transfer it to disk files for reference, and implies that this product is poorly supported. H'mm.
Remember that you also need an interface box and a modem, and that no PCW comms software is as `friendly' as, say, LocoScript.
• `What is the Information Superhighway?' Seemingly it's a US government hype phrase bearing the same relation to today's Internet as 1980s `Star Wars' defence plans had to real guns and missiles. Think of it as a catchall term for numerous vague ways in which the net could evolve....
• `Tell me some things to do on Internet.' Connect to Coke machines in American universities, what else? No joke: many bizarre objects have been attached to Internet, and it is awesomely possible for anyone on the world net to `finger' certain Coke machines and check their stocks -- also, I believe, whether the cans are properly chilled. Last Christmas one US company put its Xmas tree on line, allowing worldwide monitoring of which sets of pretty lights were flashing at any time. The mind reels.
• `How do I do that?' I'll spare you the Coke machines. The real ways to learn about Internet's colossal resources are to use it or to read some of the guidebooks appearing in ever-increasing numbers. One introduction, `Zen and the Art of the Internet', comes free on the net: if you're able to download it you may not need it, which is very Zen.
Two quick `finger' examples. First you need to reach the Internet prompt -- on CIX type `run internet', which produces a prompt like CP/M's: `ip>'. Now you can request information on any net user, vending machine, Xmas tree or toaster on Internet, by typing `finger' and the appropriate net address. Try:
finger quake@gldfs.cr.usgs.gov
This returns a mass of free electronic text from the US National Earthquake Information Service computer, reporting on earthquakes all over the world. Another:
finger nasanews@space.mit.edu
... which, as you guessed, produces voluminous news bulletins about recent NASA space activity.
• `What have you got against using smiley faces :-) to warn that a net message is meant to be funny?' Nothing at all! The style police have had a long talk with me, and I now agree that smileys are infinitely easier than taking the trouble to write something that's actually funny. I have also learned to laugh heartily at my own jokes while digging listeners forcibly in the ribs. That way, there can be no mistake.
Column 75, PCW Plus 98, November 1994
DATED INFORMATION
Whenever I write a little computer program to make life easier, cans of worms begin to pop relentlessly open and wriggle all over my working hours. This time it's the fault of a writer pal whose current novel uses dates in the 19th century. Which days were Mondays in July 1882? No trouble, I said, dimly remembering that somewhere I had an equation that always gives the date of Easter Sunday....
Mere hours later I found the page in T.H.O'Beirne's pop-maths book Puzzles and Paradoxes (Oxford University Press, 1965, another monument to my habit of never throwing books away). Oh dear. It wasn't just a handy equation. To locate Easter there were ten operations to perform, involving fourteen variables, many represented by Greek letters. Here they are, de-Greeked: I bet you can hardly wait.
(1) Divide the year number (e.g. 1994) by 100, calling the quotient B and the remainder C. The `div' and `mod' operators in my favourite programming language Pascal are handy here.
(2) Divide (5B+C) by 19, giving remainder A (ignore the quotient).
(3) Divide 3(B+25) by 4, giving quotient D and remainder E.
(4) Divide 8(B+11) by 25, giving quotient G.
(5) Divide 19A+D-G by 30, giving remainder H.
(6) Divide A+11H by 319, giving quotient M.
(7) Divide 60(5-E)+C by 4, giving quotient J and remainder K.
(8) Divide 2J-K-H+M by 7, giving remainder L.
(9) Divide H-M+L+110 by 30, giving quotient N and remainder Q.
(10) Divide Q+5-N by 32, giving remainder P.
Actually the book gives two sets of instructions: the above is the easy one for slower pupils (me). I shudder at doing all this on a calculator, but it's straightforward to program. And the answers are P and N: Easter Sunday will be the Pth day of the Nth month. Other weekdays in the year are then easy to calculate. It works!
Well, it works if you get the leap years right. The calculation depends on the Gregorian calendar introduced in 1582, where century years are only leap years when they divide exactly by 400: 2000 will be leap but 1900 wasn't.
I titivated the program to display or print a calendar for any selected year, and my grateful pal responded, `What about Pepys?' Samuel Pepys recorded Sundays in his famous 1660s diary: `30 September. Lord's Day. Up betimes. Did commit great naughtiness with our serving-maid, and was mightily pleased.' Unfortunately the calendar program gave these Lord's Days as Thursdays....
This was because the Protestant countries of Europe dragged their feet over Pope Gregory XIII's calendar reform -- saying they'd prefer to be `wrong with the sun rather than right with the Pope'. Most countries gave in around 1700-1701, but two lots of anti-Catholic diehards hung grimly on for another half century: the Swedes and us. Britain changed over in 1752, when Wednesday 2 September was excitingly followed by Thursday 14 September and anguished cries of `Give us back our eleven days!' (Not just the ignorant response of peasants who didn't understand calendar reform: landlords collected a full quarter's rent despite the shorter time.)
So the acid test of any perpetual calendar program is how it displays September 1752. Mine now smugly skips from 2 to 14 without blinking, and confirms Pepys's 17th-century record of Lord's Days. Because the Easter calculation that gives those weekdays is based on the Gregorian calendar, you also need extra corrections for leap years in the Julian calendar used in Britain before the famous eleven days. This treated century years as ordinary leap years ... so 1600 was the same in both systems but February 1700 had 28 days in the Gregorian calendar, 29 in the Julian.
Obviously this program isn't universal: all those special cases like the September 1752 changeover make it highly specific to Britain. And not all of Britain all the time, because I'm too lazy to research what differences there used to be between the Latin and Celtic churches' Easter algorithms until they sorted things out at the Synod of Whitby in AD 664. Nor can I be bothered to calculate back to the Council of Nicaea, AD 325, which defined Easter and gave rise to my favourite useless mnemonic: `There need be no error the whiles we do recall / That Easter on the Sunday after the full moon on or following the vernal equinox doth fall.'
Cans of worms, as I said. An intended hour's work swelled into days of groping through obscure reference books and dusty almanacs, and my brain hurts. Somehow computer programming always turns out like this.