Help! I'm starting to use the computer network at Yale for the first time, and there's just so much stuff. Is there any documentation to help me figure all of this out?
You're in luck! The Academic Computing Services Department at Yale provides an abundance of printed and online documentation to help you work with the university's network resources.
For a broad survey of network services - including a variety of tools to help you utilize Internet resources beyond Yale - you should take a look at the ACS Network Services booklet. This publication offers brief discussions of the major networking resources available at Yale and throughout the Internet, and provides "getting-started" tips for all of you who want to dive right in and try things out. It is available at the public computing clusters at Yale, through the Internet Information Center (located at the Yale Computer Center, 175 Whitney Avenue), and through the computing assistants at the residential colleges.
When you're at the computer clusters around campus, you should also keep an eye out for the many handouts ACS has printed, which offer quick guides to a wide array of network tools. The Internet Information Center strongly encourages you to visit its online documentation system, which is available through the World Wide Web. (See the next question for help getting started with WWW.) The Internet Information Center site will offer the most thorough and most up to date network documentation available on campus. The IIC's WWW address is:
<http://www.cis.yale.edu/iic>For those of you who use Minerva/Pantheon, the MinervaHelp WWW documentation also provides an invaluable resource. You can find it at:
<http://minerva.cis.yale.edu/~consult>The online documentation sounds great, but I've never used the World Wide Web. How can I access WWW, and how do I find a specific address?
To access the World Wide Web, you need to use one program within a family of programs that are called World-Wide-Web browsers. These browsers allow you to navigate and use the files on the Internet. ("World Wide Web" is, in one sense, a name for the information that resides on the Internet.) At Yale, the most common WWW browsers are Netscape (for people who use networked Macs and PCs) and Lynx (for people who use Minerva/Pantheon).
To use Netscape, simply double-click on the Netscape icon to start the program, then surf the 'Net by using the mouse to click on a highlighted text. Whenever you click on highlighted text, WWW will send you to another document that elaborates on the highlighted text. Surfing the 'Net is simply a matter of selecting one highlighted text after another until you arrive at the information you originally sought. Of course, surfing the 'Net often means there was no one piece of information you originally sought, so this process can go on and on and on. . . .
To find a specific address, such as the documentation sites for the Internet Information Center or MinervaHelp, start the Netscape program and then look under the File menu on the menu bar at the top of the screen. There you will find an option that says "Open Location". Select this and then enter the complete address you want in the dialog box Netscape provides. Very quickly, the page you want will appear on the screen.
Using Lynx is similar to using Netscape, with a few exceptions. First, you start Lynx by typing "lynx" or "www" (without quotation marks) at the Minerva/Pantheon prompt (minerva%, mercury%, or morpheus%). Also, instead of using the mouse to point and click, you must use the up- and down-arrow keys on the keyboard to move to the highlighted text you want to select. To select a highlighted text, you must use the enter key or the right-arrow key; and to go back to the previous document, you must press the left-arrow key. Finally, whereas Netscape allows you to view graphics or listen to sound images, Lynx only allows you to access text from WWW.
To find a specific address within Lynx, start the Lynx program and then type the letter "g" (without quotation marks). You will be asked to enter a URL. A URL is a Uniform Resource Locator, which is a fancy way of saying address. At this point, you should type the complete address of the site you're looking for. As was the case with Netscape, when you've completed this process, the page you want should appear on the screen very soon.
There's much more you can do with Netscape and Lynx, of course. To find out what you can do - and how - use the WWW to check out the online documentation sites listed above!
What happened to WEB? Everything around here was WEB-this, WEB-that last year. Then I leave for the summer, come back now, and all the WEB stuff is gone.
Yale used to call its networking facilities the WEB; but, because the World Wide Web has arisen as the centerpiece of the Internet, the university decided over the summer to stop using the word WEB to name its network resources. This, we hope, will do away with confusion that used to occur when users tried to figure out the difference between the World Wide Web and Yale's WEB.
As a result, some of Yale's commonly used network facilities have new names this year. WEB NEE (Nearly Everything Else), a repository of software and campus information, is now called "Essentials & Extras". WEB Instructional Computing, which maintained online resources for class use, has become "Instructional Computing". And WEB Shareware/Freeware, another software site, is now called "Shareware/Freeware".
Is there anyplace I can look for online information about New Haven?
Sure! Check out the following WWW sites:
<http://statlab.stat.yale.edu/cityroom/NHOL.html> <http://www.biology.yale.edu/NewHavenArea.html>Where can I go to get more help with all of this networking stuff?
If you don't find your answers in the online documentation discussed above, please contact the Internet Information Center. The IIC is located in the Yale Computer Center, 175 Whitney Avenue, and is open Monday-Friday, 1-5 p.m. Its telephone number is 432-5116. If you have a question that can be answered via e-mail, feel free to write the IIC at <ic@yale.edu>