Re: Making the picons database distributed

David May, at a FreeBSD 2.2.6 site, somewhere in the Outback (mayd@cygnus.uwa.edu.au)
Sun, 06 Sep 1998 14:39:47 +0800

I am glad you said this and I entirely agree. The Internet has become too
serious in recent times. Faces do make it more enjoyable (and that is one
reason why I use the exmh mail agent).It would be nice if faces were more
widely supported.

I downloaded the entire faces database a few years ago. That was a rather
large amount of data to FTP. It occupies a sizeable chunk of disk space too.
The database gets more out of date each day as there does not seem to be a
convenient way for me to keep it current.

It would be nice to be able to get updates to the picons database from
time-to-time, e.g. via mailing list or CVSUP. Even better, would be the
ability to retrieve faces in the same way that PGP public keys can be retrieve
as needed from public online databases via HTTP protocol, or via finger
protocol from a .plan file.

-- 
David May            |  mailto:mayd@cygnus.uwa.edu.au   | Finger for
                     |  finger:mayd@cygnus.uwa.edu.au   | PGP Public Key
                     |  http://cygnus.uwa.edu.au/~mayd  | 


``We are so used to thinking in terms of the `progress' of science that 
it is hard for us to remember that certain matters were better understood 
one hundred years ago.''
                                       Robert Hermann, in introduction to
              Felix Klein, Development of Mathematics in the 19th Century.