Mail Bag
Mail Bag is the place where you can express your thoughts, ideas and opinions. These messages should be small when possible and should be limited to MWM and M. MWM will not print flammatory messages unless the full name and e-mail address of the person sending it will also appear with the message.
Entries may be edited. Unless you specifically specify, we will not print your details.
Send your e-mail to mwm@mcenter.com.
If you would like to answer/comment on any of the mail listed here please write to mwm@mcenter.com.
Fractal Viruses
How exactly do you send out fractal viruses? I'd like more information.
MWM: We do not think that saying how to go about propagating such code is ethical.
M Questions
I'm new to M. I work at a V.A. hospital as a pharmacy technician, and I've returned to college to study information systems. However, they don't offer courses in Mumps. What's the best way for me to learn M? Which books should I read on it? Do you know of any M courses anywhere? Should I download M from your site? If so, which version? Any other info you can provide will be most helpful.
I have a project to recover archived data stored on several pdp11 systems using DSM-11, ver. 3.3 (Digital Standard Mumps). Unfortunately, the companies’ manuals are long gone and we're unsure where to find the command lists we need to proceed! Are you aware of anyone still using/maintaining a pdp11/83 system using DSM-11? Dec said they no longer maintain the software, and that they sold the software some years back to Mentek (Mentek can not help - as they to no longer maintain DSM).
Any help in the right direction will be greatly appreciated!
Do you know of any online M tutorials? I can't buy a book but want to study.
Have you heard of a language called Comet? I believe it was some form of MUMPS. Any information would be grateful.
Thanks for the info on Mumps - I am now better informed. Can you please provide some inf. on S/MUMPS and M/MUMPS?
Can you please tell me when M Tutorial will be going into I/O functions of M?
MWM: We hope to get to this 3 issues from now
Suggestions
In the Opinion About page you should add a Don’t Know option.
MWM: You’re right.
Comments
Your JavaScript is cool.
Your M related site looks good. I'm glad a tripped over it!
Another fantastic issue. Thanks.
Problems
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the counter on your page has been reset.
The counter on all pages is showing a different number. Are you aware of this new development (or have you worked it too much ;-)?
MWM: Until e-mails such as yours started coming in I didn’t notice it. At the moment I am trying to see what is happening and hope to have it fixed soon.
One very annoying thing about some of your pages is a Geocities advertising page that appears for a few seconds. It doesn’t seem to happen all the time. It only happened twice to me.
MWM: The latest I heard about this was that Geocities are experimenting with a new form of advertising but according to them this will not apply to Geoplus sites such as this one. We will dig deeper into this topic.
I would like to view your pages but 8 times out of 10 my Netscape stops working whenever I attempt to load your page. Netscape says "Starting Java" and then stop working and this program must be killed off using CTRL+ALT+DEL. My computer is running Windows 95 and Netscape version 4.03. Can you help me please.
MWM: Netscape has a bug in this respect. Geocities requires sites to put in some Java code for the top banner. While the majority of e-mails seem to be coming from Netscape users, I did receive on e-mail from a person sunning Microsoft I.E. version 3. MWM reported this bug to Netscape as soon as we were informed about it. The good news is that Netscape has released version 4.04 of its browser, which amongst other things seem to have addressed this problem. Users using I.E. version 4 don’t seem to have a problem either.
One thing that bothers me is that you split up the tutorial section into three parts. Do you do it for advertising purposes?
MWM: No. This page is split up because:
- It is difficult to manipulate in Microsoft FrontPage. This product does not yes seem able to handle large documents efficiently.
- It shortens the amount of time necessary to load into a browser. On not so fast connections waiting for all the data to download can be tiring and we prefer to therefore have 3 faster loading pages than one slow loading page.
I have been trying to look up the back issue sited on Fortune City but unfortunately have never managed to view these pages satisfactorily because they are very slow. Is there anywhere I can download all the pages.
MWM: Fortune City has shifted server from the UK to the US. Their quoted reason for changing was that the UK lines were slow. For a period during the shift, pages were unavailable or very slow. Last time we checked the site was operating quite satisfactorily even in heavy times. Please try again.
