Subject: mountable face servers?

From: [email-masked] (Steve_Kilbane)
Date: Tue, 6 Dec 1994 10:21:09 +0000

My site is shortly going to be connecting to the Internet properly (just
email via X.25 at the moment), and I'm planning to Face everyone here.
Since this'll take up a lot of room locally, I'm not necessarily going to
be able to keep a local copy of the Faces database I downloaded from
cs.indiana.edu.

Are there sites that provide this database in mountable form? This isn't an
ideal solution, since I imagine it doesn't help bandwidth to have lookups
occur every 30 seconds or so from hundreds of sites, but a a cacheing
server would be nice....

steve

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From: Axel Belinfante <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 09 Dec 1994 12:45:36 +0100

Steve Kilbane writes:
> Are there sites that provide this [indiana Faces]
> database in mountable form? This isn't an

It is probably most horrible, but what about the following...
Make a faces db accessable via a WWW (http) server, preferably
you send it the email address, and it returns the bitmap (pixmap?).
It probably keeps a cache with mappings email-address-to-facefile.
Write a small client program that is given an email address and returns a
face. It keeps its own cache, and only requests faces from the remote faces 
server if they are not yet in its own cache (or it uses the HEAD request?).
Or you maybe could put a HTTP caching server (proxy?) in between.

Why use http? Because it exists, and as a spin-off, it would make it easy
to use faces in arbitrary pages.

A similar chaching client scheme is used by someone who uses my Say...
'page' as a remote text-to-speech translater, and it seems to work.

Regards,
Axel.

<[email-masked]>     tel. +31 53 893774     fax. +31 53 333815
 University of Twente, Dept. of C.S., Tele-Informatics & Open Systems Group
       P.O. Box 217    NL-7500 AE Enschede      The Netherlands
     "ili ne sciis ke estas neebla do ili simple faris" -- Loesje

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From: Marc VanHeyningen <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 09 Dec 1994 14:21:31 -0500

> you send it the email address, and it returns the bitmap (pixmap?).

I've thought about doing this, and it would be pretty easy to implement.
However, it does have some serious scaling problems; if a nontrivial number
of people start hitting our server every time they read a mail message,
things could break down, which has sort of dissuaded me from encouraging
this sort of approach.

- Marc