Subject: Re: mountable face servers?

From: [email-masked] (Ivan Judson)
Date: Fri, 9 Dec 1994 08:22:58 -0600

At 12:45 PM 12/9/94 +0100, Axel Belinfante wrote:
>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.

The same could be said of having a single faces distribution live in
'AFS-space'.  I might install one there today, who knows.  This might not
solve the general case, but as time goes on I bet it solves more and more of
the problem.

--Ivan

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From: Axel Belinfante <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 09 Dec 1994 15:56:06 +0100

> solve the general case, but as time goes on I bet it solves more and more of

Only, i do have, or can easily build, a client to access a http-faces
server. I don't have AFS (as far as i know).
I have the idea that installing AFS is less easy than installing
a faces-http client program (correct me if i'm wrong).
I would guess that using http makes things much more 'accessable'.

Axel.

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From: Axel Belinfante <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 09 Dec 1994 16:38:04 +0100

Ok. For the sake of the experiment, i extracted the faces lookup part
of Marc VanHeyningens finger gateway, which is part of the plexus http
daemon. (i slightly hacked it).

I don't have space for the complete faces database, so all you can
find are the faces we locally made. Try them at

	<URL:http://www_tios.cs.utwente.nl/faces/>

Enjoy,
Axel.