Subject: Re: Making the picons database distributed

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 7 Sep 1998 10:02:18 +0100

On 06/09/98 07:39:47 David May, at a FreeBSD 2.2.6 site, somewhere in the
Outback wrote:
> 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.
Too true; I've recently had to move to a Notes system, and I miss my faces!
[pout pout]
> 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 The database gets more out of date each day as there does not seem to be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.
To be honest, I only used the normal database for the company/country
picons. Almost every real face displayed came from an X-Face header or
(more likely) my hand-assembled database snarfed from others' web pages.
I'm aware of exactly one instance where I received mail from someone who
was already in the database.
For distributed systems, HTTP is definitely the protocol to use, but I'd
question whether it should transform the address into a search path as was
suggested. The reason for this is that if someone's address is variable,
you might send out several requests to the server before finding a suitable
image. Think what effect spam would have...
We have a home-grown system where, which serves faces to Wintel users. They
run a program which scans their POP3 mailbox and retrieves addresses, and
sends these addresses verbatim to a CGI script on the faces server. The
server does the hunt for a suitable image, and returns it (in Windows BMP
format, for ease of display). The CGI script is guaranteed to return a
suitable image on the first try, so that the client only ever has to send
one request per address.
One advantage of using a CGI process rather than a simple fetch is that the
local server could pass the request onto a more suitable one, in DNS
fashion, always assuming that there was some way of deciding where to send
it.
The disadvantage, of course, is that it's more vunerable to run a CGI
process than just serving plain files.
Finally, in addition to fancy servers, I see nothing wrong with
distributing the faces database by the simple addition of a different
header:
X-Face-URL: http://www.example.com/faces/com/example/user.gif
steve
PS if you want to get bizarre, you could always have a faces.* USENET
hierarchy, with articles containing updates/additions to the database....

---

From: Daniel Glazman <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 08 Sep 1998 09:38:04 +0100

> X-Face-URL: http://www.example.com/faces/com/example/user.gif

In 1991, picons were only XBM and the compface algo was efficient enough
to allow picon integration in X-Face. In 1992, XPM icons stopped that and
the X-Face-URL has been proposed....and abandoned because it implies

	1) HTTP implementation in MUAs
	2) wait until you see the face of the sender

> hierarchy, with articles containing updates/additions to the database....

This is not bizarre, this is impossible. Articles are thrown to /dev/null
when they get too old ("too old" is a value set by the newsmaster).
Futhermore, such a call for discussion will never ever reach a consensus
allowing a call for vote !

</Daniel>

---

From: Brian Edmonds <[email-masked]>
Date: 08 Sep 1998 07:59:35 -0700

Daniel Glazman <[email-masked]> writes:
>> hierarchy
> This is not bizarre, this is impossible.

Actually, it doesn't strike me as either bizarre or impossible.  It
could be an entirely reasonable *update* mechanism, as the original
poster suggested.  Sites just have to feed faces.* into a bot that
recognizes faces in the article stream and updates the database.  The
biggest problem would be figuring out how to deal with authentication so 
that some vandal doesn't replace all the pics in the database with
Barney...

Brian.