Artemis Project: January 1997 ECTC Status Report

THE ARTEMIS PROJECT
PRIVATE ENTERPRISE ON THE MOON

1997 ECTC Status Reports
Section 9.1.1997.

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January 1997 ECTC Status Report

January was another relatively slow month for the Electronic Communications Technical Committee, a trend we hope to turn around soon. The discussion about the new home page for the ASI web site continued without pause throughout the month, and we appear to be getting close to a final version of the new home page. There was a lot of activity on the mailing list front as well, with three new mailing lists being added. Plans were also laid for moving the venerable artemis-list mailing list to the ASI domain. One of the new mailing lists, art-gov, quickly set a record for the most active ASI mailing list as a massive discussion exploded on the list about political philosophies immediately after the creation of the list. And the long-awaited search for a search engine for the ASI web site was completed this past month, and the selected tool should be installed on the site in the next few weeks. January also saw the beta release of the CyberTeams TeamSite Lite product, which was installed in three private directories on the ASI web site.

For the first time since the founding of the ECTC, our membership shrank this past month, with one more person leaving than new members joining. Barry Haworth and Steve Jackson departed the list, while Marvin Ostrega and Kaylon Daniels were removed from the list when their e-mail addresses were discontinued with no forwarding address specified. On the new member front, we welcomed Mikhail Moldavskiy and Robert (Scotty) Gammenthaler to the team and Greg Bennett rejoined the team as a lurker (although he has actually been lurking for some time now). Charles Collier changed his e-mail address and Boise Pearson changed his subscription address due to the subscription address checking. You can find the complete ECTC membership listing at http://www.asi.org/adb/09/01/ectc.html. There were no changes to the ECTC task list this month, but there is still plenty of room for new volunteers for tasks that are already on that list. If you would like to join the ECTC and help with any of those tasks, you can use the form on the ECTC task list page at http://www.asi.org/adb/09/01/ectc_tasks.html.

Here is the latest status information from the individual work areas within the ECTC:

Help Desk

Nanci Brasket continued answering questions directed to the Comm and Info Center.

Listserver Mailing Lists

Halfway through the month, IO surprised us by upgrading the mailing list server that runs the ASI mailing lists as well as upgrading the Majordomo software that supports the lists. Some of the new capabilities of Majordomo are still being tested on a test ASI mailing list, but all of the ASI mailing lists are running normally. With the upgraded machine running the mailing lists, we should see better performance on the lists in the future and fewer unexplained mail server errors. Three new mailing lists were added this month, the now infamous art-gov list, the asi-hou list for the ASI Houston Chapter, and a private mailing list. The ASI mailing lists took another spam attack this month, but the attack was thwarted by the new subscription address checking feature that was turned on in November. But the spam attack succeeded on the artemis-list mailing list, which is run on a different server, and the attack prompted a discussion about moving artemis-list to the asi.org server. That move is now underway, and should be completed in the next few weeks. A transition period will take place to reduce the confusion over how to get to the list.

World Wide Web Server

The beta version of CyberTeams' TeamSite Lite product was released this past month and has been installed in three private directories on the ASI web site. A private directory for the ECTC was established at /adb/09/01/private to allow ECTC members to share documents within the group. When the software is released commercially, it will probably be installed in other directories of the ASI web site to support other ASI committees.

A lot of discussion took place on the asi-ecomm mailing list about the design of the new home page for the ASI web site. Several proposals for the new page were presented by Simon Rowland, Greg Bennett, David Brummel, and Tom Hopper. Several of those proposals have gone through several iterations and we seem to be close to reaching a consensus on the final version of the new home page. That new home page should be ready for installation on the site in the next few weeks.

Brian Cesar stumbled across a utility that would make thumbnail images from graphics files and he proposed installing it in the /images directory on the ASI web site. A lengthy discussion ensued that has not yet resolved how to best use that utility on the ASI web site. Brian also completed his search for a search engine for the ASI web site, selecting the WebGlimpse utility. This search engine will be installed on the ASI site in the next few weeks.