CU Amiga Magazine CUCD woes
Hohum, Mat is off in sunny South Africa. Muggins here has been left to do
all the dogwork. Bloody typical, I call it. Driving the legendary "Bitch"
as Mat so poetically calls the office 4000T, is a nightmare. He has the
hardware patched together with bubblewrap and sellotape and the OS patched
with Arexx. Well don't blame me if the CD goes horribly wrong, blame Mat for
being on holiday.
Sorting this CD out has been quite an experience, as has attempting to run
Mat's nightmare mail system, which is all controlled by an artificial
intelligence called MATSERV. Matserv was originally written as a mail server
utility, but over the years Mat has been writing more and more little Arexx
routines for MATSERV to allow it to almost all of the dogwork of running the
mailer. It recognises people mailing stupid things to it and flames them;
it copes with corrupted (or corrupting) mails, and has an antispam
facility which it uses on anyone who tries to use the mailer for sending
junk mail. The problem is that with all those Arexx routines, MATSERV has
such a huge event recognition / behaviour matching subsystem, and such
powerful fuzzy logic control analysis, that it is bordering on sentience. In
the week I have been running it, it has so far sent me three E-mails telling
me it is feeling lonely, had a major flame war with a mailer daemon in
Arkensas, and has tried once to escape from the confines of the office 4000T
to run free amongst the datastreams of the internet.
One of the results of Mat's absence is that the CD is not as full as it
sometimes is. It isn't that we couldn't have filled it, it's just that we
couldn't fill it and keep the high level of quality you have come to expect
from the CUCD disks. Unlike many CDs, we actually try to get things to work
properly, and that takes time. Still, you've got the audio track and 450MB
of software, figure out how much that would cost you from your local PD
library if you have any complaints!
There is some really, really good stuff on this CD. The Demos draw is
massive, containing a huge chunk of the entries to the Party '96 demo
competition, including the massive 75Mb HC_Reality megademo, probably the
greatest demo ever. Tiny Troops and Directory Opus, the floppy disk
covermounts, are available from the root directory, but check out the demo
version of the amazing TurbpoPrint 5 in the CUCD/Previews draw for software
that can solve your every printer need.
Anyway, the index has finished writing, so I'd better get on and cut this
CD.
Andrew Korn. Staff Writer.
P.S. Mat, I've booby trapped your computer. Hehehe.