_____ _____ _____ ______ ___ ____ | __ \ / ____|/ ____|\ | /| ____/ _ \ / __ \ | |__) | | __| | __ \|/ | |__ | |_| | | | | | ___/| | |_ | | |_ |--o--| __|| _ | | | | | | | |__| | |__| | /|\ | | | | | | |__| | |_| \_____|\_____|/ | \|_| |_| |_|\___\_\ Frequently Asked Questions for Project Galactic Guide FAQ Mk. II Release 1.1 18 September 1994 This is the Mostly All-New FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) information file for the Usenet group alt.galactic-guide. This file is intended to provide you with answers to your frequently asked questions and is 97% fat-free with no preservatives or artificial flavours. Contents -------- 1.0 What is this newsgroup? 2.0 Who's in charge around here? 2.1 So who do I send articles to? 3.0 Format of the articles 3.1 Article content and legal stuff 3.2 So where can I get article ideas then? 3.3 The article lifecycle 4.0 The PGG Mothership 4.1 Mothership mirror sites 4.2 Supported computer platforms 4.3 Other ways to get PGG materials 5.0 World-Wide Web (WWW) sites 6.0 Miscellaneous questions 1.0 What is this newsgroup? ---------------------------- This newsgroup was created for the sole purpose of allowing uninterrupted communication between people involved in Project Galactic Guide. What is this project, you ask? It all started back in, oh, November of 1991 in the alt.fan.douglas-adams newsgroup. For the uninformed, Douglas Adams is the author of a series of humourous s/f books centering on the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In these books, the characters write for and frequently consult a sort of electronic encyclopedia which has an entry on just about everything. Paul said, "Hey, why don't we create a REAL guide to the galaxy?" and everyone else said, "Sounds good, let's do it!". So, with great fervor we started working on the skeletal structure of Project Galactic Guide, although at that time, we often called it "The HitchHiker's Guide the Known Galaxy." It was originally supposed to be about REAL things (as opposed to made-up things), but we eventually broke down and decided to incorporate EVERYTHING. So, now we'll take humorous entries about fictitious things (done in the Douglas Adams style, of course), and humorous entries about real things (also done in the Douglas Adams style, of course). 2.0 Who's in charge around here? --------------------------------- Well, not anyone, really. Er, actually, I suppose there *are* a couple of froods who tend to have a bit more input about things than others, but really it's mostly chaotic. Well, not actually *chaotic* but instead maybe something a bit more like recess or something. The aforementioned Paul Clegg is one of PGG's Founding Fathers. He is easily identifiable by his "...Paul" signature. Today, Paul's an Editor and has many Wise Things to say about topics, issues, concerns, thoughts, ideas, problems, suggestions, and comments. His action figure should be available this holiday season (along with the PGG Mothership playset), and he is available via email at: cleggp@rpi.edu Steve Baker helped get the project rolling with his "The Guide!" software for IBM/MS-DOS machines in the spring of 1992. Steve usually answers to the nom de plume "Stevadelic." Today, Steve's an Editor, the Librarian, Pilot of the PGG Mothership, and actively avoids doing required updates and bug fixes to the TG! system. (He claims to be too busy working on Klingon language translation software.) You can send email to Steve at the address: swbaker@vela.acs.oakland.edu Roel van der Meulen joined the project in the fall of 1993, and is an active PGG Field Researcher Recruiter (he finds new articles and authors for PGG, in addition to his own work). He also maintains the PGG archives contents file and one of the fine WWW sites. Roel's Internet email address is: vdmeulen@strw.leidenuniv.nl Jeff Kramer is compiling the "PGG Report," a regular newsletter with lots of great information about the Project and its activities. He also admin's one of the PGG WWW sites. Jeff is available at: lthumper@bga.com Ryan Tucker provides articles, ideas, and crazy text art (like the FAQ logo), as well as up-to-date Iowa weather reports (as long as there's a tornado). Ryan's available at: rtucker@worf.infonet.net There's a lot of others out there who have contributed t-shirt designs, press card information, articles, ideas, suggestions, comments, et al... but to avoid this becoming one of those "Hi guys"-type things, I'll just leave it at that. 2.1 So who do I send articles to? ---------------------------------- Paul is available from September until April or May (during the college school year), and Steve is on-line and available year-round. Both Paul and Steve also have America Online accounts, so they're available there as well. Now that I think about it, Steve actually collects email accounts (he's up to six different active, on-line email accounts, which is quite a lot of passwords to get straight). To answer the question, however, let's just say that you should send articles to one of the PGG Editors: cleggp@rpi.edu -- Paul swbaker@vela.acs.oakland.edu -- Steve We also have a third editor, Michael Bravo, who handles articles written in the Russian language. If you have written an article in Russian, please send them to Michael (mbravo@octopus.spb.su). 3.0 Format of the articles --------------------------- The articles that are accepted are organized by category and compiled in article "archives." Each archive file contains 25 accepted Guide entries. These archives are stored and available for download from the PGG Mothership. We've decided upon a simple ASCII text format for the article entries. The specs on the format are contained in the "article.new" file. It's really pretty simple, with just a few header token-type things that define useful stuff. The fine folks at PGG spent about a year discussing, debating, formulating, postulating, configuring, finalizing, and neglecting a nifty but complex text format. It was complete with crazy text formatting things and lots of other fun and wonderful features, but it never really caught on. Oh well. We're currently investigating the possibilities of porting the article archives into HTML (HyperText Markup Language) for use with html and WWW viewers. For now, however, standard ASCII files are just fine! 3.1 Article content and legal stuff ------------------------------------ You're welcome to write about anything. Yes, no matter how bizarre or crazy, please write about it. Really. Anything. Er, except, we don't want you to regurgitate Adams' material. Not only is this very unoriginal, it's also known as plagiarism. (Unless DNA himself decides to write it for us!) In general, please do NOT copy other people's work or ideas. We don't want the project stopped because we violated some silly copyright law! 3.2 So where can I get article ideas then? ------------------------------------------- We have a PGG Idea Bank, chock full of great ideas that beg for exploring. They're frequently posted to the alt.galactic-guide newsgroup, and all are available on-line at the Mothership. When posting an idea, be sure to include your name and email address for proper credit down the road. Conversely, when using an idea, just go ahead and write your article and credit the idea's originator in the header information. 3.3 The article lifecycle -------------------------- This describes what your Friendly Neighbourhood PGG Editor does and presents "a day in the life of an article" so to speak. Erm, actually, the articles themselves don't really speak much; that's just an expression, so let's carry on. 1) A young, up-and-coming comedian/researcher/student/author/human/whatever stumbles across, gets hit with, becomes infected by, is arrested in, or otherwise has a great idea for an article (or consults the Ideabank, which is sometimes less painful). She/he/it/they then write an article about the person/place/thing and send the article to an editor via email. (Please see Section 2.1, above, for info on who the editors are and where to send stuff.) 2) The editor send a message back to the author, stating something like "blah blah, thanks for the article, blah blah blah, I'll edit it for format and stuff, blah blah, you'll get it back soon for author confirmation, blah blah, give me all your money, etc. etc." This message is the author's "receipt" that the editor received the article submission. If you don't get one of these, then the editor hasn't received your article yet! 4) The editor edits the article and performs routine grammar and spell- checker things on the article. Note: if the editor thinks that the article (1) violates a copyright law, (2) is a copy of other work, or (3) is hopelessly lame, the editor may nix the article for good. 5) Assuming that everything is fine with the article, the editor then sends it back to the author for "author confirmation." (This is often times abbreviated as A/C. Humm, if the author and the editor had a Direct Connection, would this be AC/DC?) 6) The author reviews the modified article, and then lets the editor know that things are alright. If the author has additional changes with the article, they go back to step one and start over. 7) Once the article is approved, the editor assigns the unique Article ID information and sends the article to the PGG Librarian. The Librarian adds the approved article into the article archives and posts the article to alt.galactic-guide. 4.0 The PGG Mothership ----------------------- The Mothership is an Anonymous FTP site where you can download PGG info, articles, programs, t-shirt images, reports, and other great stuff. To get to the PGG Mothership, FTP to the following site: Lexical: vela.acs.oakland.edu Numeric: 141.210.10.2 URL: ftp://vela.acs.oakland.edu/pub/galactic-guide When you connect, use the [ anonymous ] user ID and specify your full Internet email address as the password. The Mothership is [ pub/galactic-guide ], which is actually just a link to [ pub/swbaker ]. Thus, if you're using an FTP server which doesn't show the logical links, go into the [ swbaker ] directory. Anyway, beneath this directory are additional directories for each of the particular computer programs and general Hitchhiker's Guide fan stuff. There is a separate FAQ file on the PGG Mothership which describes these directories and the files they contain in more detail. 4.1 Mothership mirror sites ---------------------------- If having all of the PGG archives, programs, gif files, and other goodies at one centralized location isn't good enough for you, you may be pleased to know that it isn't! That is to say, the stuff is available from more than one Anonymous FTP site. The PGG Mothership is mirrored at: Lexical: ftp.cs.city.ac.uk Numeric: 138.40.91.9 URL: ftp://ftp.cs.city.ac.uk/pub/galactic-guide 4.2 Supported computer platforms --------------------------------- While having the articles themselves is pretty fun, actually being able to do something with them is even better. The following computer platforms are supported with PGG article reader systems: o Acorn Archimedes Author contact: Alex McLintock (alexmc@biccdc.co.uk) o Amiga o Atari ST o IBM/MS-DOS (also works within Windows, OS/2, DESQview, etc.) Author contact: Steve Baker (swbaker@vela.acs.oakland.edu) o Macintosh Author contact: Rickard Andersson (rickard@softlab.se) o Unix Author contact: Dave Gymer (dpg@cs.nott.ac.uk) o X Windows Author contact: David Squire (squizz@cs.curtin.edu.au) Each of the programs is available in its own subdirectory on the Mothership. Questions about a particular program's use or functionality should be directed to the program's author or posted to alt.galactic-guide. 4.3 Other ways to get PGG materials ------------------------------------ There's a lot of BBS systems that carry Project Galactic Guide stuff. Honestly -- I'm positive there's a lot of them... although the FAQ file doesn't really reflect this. Yet. Just give us some time and soon this list will have a lot of numbers. Really. Area/Region BBS Name Number --------------- ------------------------------ ---------------- Mass., USA Sea of Noise +1 203 886 1441 In addition, you may contact one of the following hoopy froods who have volunteered to distribute PGG materials in their local countries: Country Contact --------------- ------------------------------ Denmark Christian Moensted Almindingen 66 2860 Soeborg (email: moensted@diku.dk) 5.0 World-Wide Web (WWW) sites ------------------------------- For those who can view html documents (including users of Mosaic, Cello, and WinWeb), there are a number of froody WWW sites: URL: http://www.strw.leidenuniv.nl/~vdmeulen/index.html or http://www.strw.leidenuniv.nl/~vdmeulen/VESSEL/exterior.html Operator: Roel van der Meulen URL: http://web.cs.city.ac.uk/pgg/guide.html Operator: Nick Williams URL: http://www.realtime.net/~lthumper/ Operator: Jeff Kramer URL: http://www.willamette.edu/pgg/ Operator: James Tilton These all have links to the Article Archives, the PGG Mothership, format and article information, and many have on-line archive search and article retrieval capabilities. 6.0 Miscellaneous questions ---------------------------- Q: What's with 42, who is Douglas Adams, and why should I carry a towel? A: Please see the alt.fan.douglas-adams Usenet group; they'll be happy to supply you with amplitudes of answers. Q: How can I get a PGG Press Card? A: As soon as they're finished, you'll be able to get an Official PGG Press Card from Jason Kohles (jason.kohles@m.cc.utah.edu). Q: What good are the PGG Press Cards? A: They may actually get you in some places, and besides they look cool. There's an article on what to do with your Press Card; check it out! Q: What's up with the PGG t-shirts? A: Among others, Stephane Lussier (stef@phoque.info.uqam.ca) has come up with some great graphics and motif ideas for the Official PGG t-shirt. They're available for review on the Mothership. As soon as we decide on how the shirts will look, and as soon as someone makes the shirts, then you'll be able to order them! For more information, just follow the t-shirt threads on alt.galactic-guide. Q: Do you need more editors? A: Not really. How can you become an editor? Well, lots of money would definitely help (just kidding). Anyway, until the project completely consumes both Paul and Steve to the point of exhaustion, we're probably all set. Q: Is there a Microsoft Windows-based Guide Reader? A: Sorta. It's being developed. Under construction. Something like that. Q: Is this the end of the PGG FAQ? A: Yes. Q: Really? A: I mean it this time. Q: Are you sure about that? A: Absolutely. ============================================================================= And now a bit of old stuff about the ftp-site (adapted from the old FAQ): How to reach and use the FTP site: ---------------------------------- >From your favorite FTP/Internet gateway (once you're on-line, etc.): 1) Connect to Oakland University's Vela system: Lexical: [ ftp vela.acs.oakland.edu ] Numeric: [ ftp 141.210.10.2 ] (you only need to use one of these methods; some people can't use the lexical address and need the numeric ID instead...) 2) If you can not connect, or do not have FTP access, then email me your email address and what you want, and I will (try to) send it to you (i.e., the uuencoded versions of program files, and/or the PGG article archive files, etc). Login to the system: Syntax: [ login anonymous ] and then enter your full email address as your password. 3) Go to the desired directory (see below for a detailed listing): Syntax: [ cd ] Once you're in the desired directory, display a file listing: Syntax: [ dir ] 4) Be sure you are in BINARY mode: a lot of folks have been sending me email complaining of corrupt .ZIP files, etc... it's because they are trying to get the binary file in ASCII mode (which is the default, unfortunately). You only need to type this once, but you MUST type this EVERY TIME you login to the FTP system. Syntax: [ binary ] In summary, ALWAYS TYPE [ binary ] BEFORE YOU [ get ... ] ANYTHING!!! 5) Get the file(s) you want: Syntax: [ get ] Note that you can always change into another directory (detailed above) and get more stuff if you want. 6) When you're satisfied, logout of Oakland's FTP system: Syntax: [ bye ] Directories on the PGG Mothership: ---------------------------------- pub/galactic-guide This is the place to look for the latest and greatest in articles and other important Project Galactic Guide stuff. NOTE: The directory /pub/galactic-guide is a "link" or pointer to the physical directory /pub/swbaker. I happen to think that a directory named galactic-guide seems to make more sense than one named swbaker, so that's why the link is there. If you don't see /pub/galactic-guide with your FTP server or WWW system, try /pub/swbaker instead. Currently, the following article archive files are on-line, each containing up to 25 articles (the current quantity standard): REAL01.NEW "Real" articles (i.e., fact) REAL02.NEW REAL03.NEW REAL04.NEW REAL05.NEW REAL06.NEW REAL07.NEW SREAL01.NEW "Semi-real" articles (i.e., muddled reality) SREAL02.NEW SREAL03.NEW UREAL01.NEW "Unreal" articles (i.e., fiction) UREAL02.NEW UREAL03.NEW UREAL04.NEW pub/galactic-guide/information This directory contains general PGG information files, like the alt.galactic-guide Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) file, and info on formatting your own text articles for submission to PGG. pub/galactic-guide/archives Here's where you'll find all of the article archives in PK-ZIP format. Everything is in ARTICLES.ZIP, and monthly updates (which are included in ARTICLES.ZIP) are available for convienent upgrades. pub/galactic-guide/articles This directory has the pure ASCII copies of recently-approved PGG articles. If you're interested in an article on a specific topic, this is the place to look! pub/galactic-guide/theguide The Guide! for DOS is one of the pioneer reader systems of PGG lore. Requirements are an IBM-compatable 286/386/486/Pentium? system, and Ega/Vga color and hard drives are recommended but not required. A mouse is supported but is also not required. This sub-directory contains The Guide!-specific files, like the latest .ZIP file, the complete archives pre-processed and ready for use, all of the article archives, icons for OS/2, and other support and dox files. pub/galactic-guide/Xguide The X Windows Project Galactic Guide article reader system. In this sub-directory are installation files as well as text readme information files. NOTE: This stuff is the source code which needs to be compiled on a unix system which has X, and, most importantly, the Modif widget libraries. pub/galactic-guide/tug This is the sub-directory containing The Unix Guide (TUG!), code, dox, and support information. A new alpha release of TUG! (version 2.1.1pl1) is available in the /pub/galactic-guide/tug/alpha subdirectory. pub/galactic-guide/stguide This contains another cool Project Galactic Guide system, The Atari Guide (TAG!). The files here are 'stgde101.zoo' (the binary archive file containing the programs and documentation) and 'stgde101.zoo.UU' (the ASCII uuencoded version of the file). pub/galactic-guide/amigaguide A new addition to PGG lore, this is a scripting system to use the AmigaGuide-based system with PGG articles. Both the binary .lha archives and the ASCII uuencoded versions of the .lha files can be found in here. pub/galactic-guide/amiguide This is where you will find an article-reader system for the Amiga computer systems. Both the .lha archive and the uuencoded version of the .lha file can be found here. pub/galactic-guide/archimedes If you're an Acorn Archimedes user, this directory is for you. In this directory you will find your article reader system in the ever-popular .uue format, ready for transfer. Enjoy! pub/galactic-guide/tshirt This directory contains information and illustrations for the Project Galactic Guide T-Shirt design. Many different ideas and images are stored here. Come and see what we may look like when we're "out in the field!" pub/galactic-guide/ideas Want to write a PGG article, but don't have any ideas? Check out this directory! In here are a wealth of article concepts and thoughts, ready for the picking! pub/galactic-guide/fan Here's where you will find all the general Hitchhiker's Guide fan stuff. In here is a sub-directory containing the "complete" index of almost every topic in the first four books (called INDEX.HHG), the two THHG/Star Trek cross-over scripts, gif pictures, and more! I will keep adding to this as I discover more cool files, gifs, lists, etc. (Anybody have things to add to the "library"?)