Re: How to reconstitute Computist posts?

[The Wizard of Oz <wizard@emeraldcity.gov>]

On Mon, 16 May 2005 17:42:06 +0000, ground.ecn AppleII Librarian wrote:

> In article <pan.2005.05.15.19.57.51.579994@emeraldcity.gov>,
> The Wizard of Oz  <wizard@emeraldcity.gov> wrote:
>>On Sat, 14 May 2005 20:59:10 -0400, Martin Doherty wrote:
>>
>>> Mike,
>>> 
>>> Would you mind posting a quick idiot's guide on how to turn your 
>>> postings on cba2 back into their original forms for viewing?
>>> 
>>> I have no idea what YENC is. As Schultz said, "I KNOW NOTHING!"
>>> 
>>> Martin
>>
>>	This isn't a "me too" post detailing the same information as the other
>>followups. I'll add some background so you can see the need for yenc or
>>uuenccode.
>>
>>	If you take a look at the posts directly you will see they are all in 7
>>bit ASCII. In simple terms all the characters you can type in at the
>>keyboard minus the control characters and the extended characters you can
>>get with the alt key and keypad. Depending on the computer you are using
> 
> Nice discussion of file encoding methods.  uuencode, binscii, binhex etc.
> use 7bit chars for encoding.  Thus, straight ASCII text coding.  yenc uses
> a larger charset with 8bit chars.  These yenc files get corrupted when
> passing through a server expecting 7bit chars.  Thus, yenc works OK for
> many users, but not for people on a 7bit newsfeed.  yenc was never
> guaranteed to work, it just happens to work in most installations.  Think
> of it as a binary file of encoded data.

	I did not know it was an 8 bit encoding. That would explain a lot. With
your permission I'd like to add the above paragraph to the article.

> Thus, my peeve, is that I have a 7bit newsfeed. yenc encoding is corrupt.
> uu, binscii, binhex etc. are fine.  Like, uuencoded, binscii, binhex
> files, yenc files need to be decoded to render the original binary file.

	Since the headers don't give me a clue to which computer you are running
my suggestion may or may not be relevant. There are a number of free
servers available. Unfortunately they usually have a limited number of
connections, a set download limit, or are very slow. They are slightly
less reliable than those of most ISPs. In my case they are more reliable.