Les Peters

Usenet newsgroups, once something to be browsed at one's leisure, have become both a indispensible resource and a unmanageable morass of noise clouding that resource. Graham Barr's article in The Perl Journal #4 gave me the kernel of knowledge necessary to write a tool to read the newsgroups in which you have interest, scan the messages with regular expressions that indicate what content/authors/subjects you would want to read, then sends you the articles via mail. I call it ngp, for newsgroup profiler.

As the volume of business increases, the number of system to administer tends to increase as well, and remembering all of them can become a daunting task. Based on a feature of the IRIX desktop utility toolchest, I have created a Perl/Tk interface with a tree widget to produce a list of hosts, grouped by their 'first initial', then by series name, and spawn a xterm-wrapped telnet/rlogin session to that host, where each grouping can be visible or invisible as the user wishes. I call this tktelnet.

As most of the world has noticed, there is a lot of EMail floating around the planet at any one time, and a good portion of it lands in our inbox on a regular basis. In an adaptation of Urlich Pfiefer's "Information Retrieval" article in The Perl Journal #6, I have written tools that allows you to index your past mailfiles, and gives you a useful method of searching them all for specific words, and retireving the source messages. This is named maildex.