Missing administrator account

Once you have created regular user accounts, the default Administrator account vanishes from the Welcome screen, which you see when the computer starts up. Press Ctrl-Alt-Delete twice at the Welcome screen to retrieve the standard logon dialog. You can log on as Administrator from here. To switch among accounts, just click the Log Off button on the Start menu. You'll then see the Log Off Windows dialog box. Click the Switch User button, and you'll be taken to the Welcome screen where you can select and log on to other accounts.

Linux Tips and Tricks?

 Tips

Speeding up your hard drive (#1)
Get faster file transfer by using 32-bit transfers on your hard drive

Just add the line:

hdparm -c3 /dev/hdX

to a bootup script.

If you use SuSE or other distros based on SYS V,

/sbin/init.d/boot.local
should work for you.

This enables 32-bit transfer on your hard drive. On some systems it can improve transfer performance by 75%.

To test your performance gain, type:

hdparm -t -T /dev/hdX

Protecting yourself from being a spam base(#2)
Sendmail allows for someone to telnet to port 25 and do an expn (expand) to see what users and aliases are on your machine. Also, vrfy (verify) means someone can get legal e-mail addresses from your box and send spam through your machine.

Don't want that, so look in your /etc/sendmail.cf file for a line that looks like this:

###############
# Options #
###############

Now cut and paste these next few lines below that:

# turning off the expand option and requiring a helo from
# a remote computer
Opnoexpn,novrfy,needmailhelo

Now there is no expansion, no verify, and sendmail requires a helo with a legitimate DNS in order to use the mailer.

Then look in your /etc/mail/aliases file and ensure you have only your own boxen and/or subnet in there as OK or RELAY. That will help cut down on spammers' ability to find relay machines to do their dirty work for them.

Cleaning up Netscape crashes(#3)
You have a tip about Netscape leaving copies of itself running below, but you can make a general shell script to clean up a Netscape crash like this:

#!/bin/sh
#kill.netscape
killall -9 netscape
rm ~/.netscape/lock

Then all your users can use it and clean up the dreaded hundred instances of Netscape running when it crashed. Change netscape to netscape-communicator or netscape-navigator as appropriate

More DOS-like commands(#4)
Many people are moving to Linux because they miss the stability of good old DOS. In that light, many users are typing DOS commands (which originated from UNIX in the first place) that look fine but cause errors. The command "cd.." in DOS is perfectly valid, but Linux balks. This is because "cd" is a command, and any parameter for that command must be separated from the command by a space. The same goes for "cd/" and "cd~". A quick fix is here.

Use your favorite text editor in your home directory to edit the file ".bashrc". The period is there on purpose, this hides the file from normal ls display.

Add the lines:

alias cd/="cd /"
alias cd~="cd ~"
alias cd..="cd .."

And I usually add these...

alias md="mkdir"
alias rd="rmdir -i"
alias rm="rm -i"

and my first and still favorite alias...

alias ls="ls --color"

alias is a powerful tool, and can be used in the .bashrc script as well as from the command line. You can, if you want to spend the time, create your own group of shell commands to suit how you work. As long as you put them in your .bashrc file, they'll be there everytime you log in. Note that if you frequently log in as root, you might want to copy /home/username/.bashrc to /root/.bashrc to keep yourself sane.

Resurrecting corrupted floppies(#5)
Here's how to make a floppy disk with "track-0 bad" reusable again:

If the track zero of a floppy disk is found to be bad, no DOS or Windows utility is going to do anything about it--you just have to throw it in your unrecycle bin.

This tip cannot recover the data, but can make the disk carry things again, at least for the time being (moments of desperation).

How to:

(A) Format the disk with Linux. Build a Linux file system (don't use mformat). I did this some time before by invoking the makebootdisk command (in Slakware) and stopped after the formatting was over. There should be better ways to do it in RedHat 5.2 or other recent versions.

( Reformat the disk with Windows. Use the DOS window and the /u option while formatting.

Using DOS-like commands(#6)
There's a package called mtools which is included with most of the distributions out there.

There are several commands for basic DOS stuff. For example, to directory the floppy drive, type mdir a:. This is rather handy--you don't need to mount the floppy drive to use it.

Other commands are: mattrib , mcd, mcopy, mdel, mformat, mlabel, mren (rename), mmd, mrd, and mtype.

This doesn't work for reading from hard disks. In that case, you would add entries to /etc/fstab, drive type msdos for fat16 partitions, and vfat for fat32.

Copying files from Linux to Windows 98 or 95B (FAT32)(#7)
It's as easy as installing the program explore2fs. It uses a Windows Explorer interface and supports drag-and-drop. I have found it reliable and useful for migrating files from my RedHat 6.1 partition to my Win95B partition quickly and with a minimum of fuss.

It's available free--as all software should be--from this URL:
CODE
http://uranus.it.swin.edu.au/~jn/linux/explore2fs.htm


Installing in partitions(#8)
I am using SuSE Linux, which has some interesting options (I don't know if RedHat or other distributions offer you this, too).

1. You can install Linux on a single file in your Windows Partition. Nice to try it out, but I guess it is not that fast then. You can load it then with a DOS program, loadlin.

2. Use Fips or Partition Magic. Defragment your hard drive (you should do this for Point 1, too) and split it up. I guess most users just have one partition, which you should split up into at least three: one for the Linux files, and a smaller swap partition (take about 32 to 64 MB, depending on your RAM--less RAM needs bigger swap partitions). If you decide later to deinstall Linux you can always delete both partitions and create one big one for Windows again.

Fips is a stupid command line program, but if you're too lazy to read at least a little bit, then you should stop thinking about Linux anyway...

Command Pipelines(#9)
Pipes are easy. The Unix shells provide mechanisms which you can use them to allow you to generate remarkably sophisticated `programs' out of simple components. We call that a pipeline. A pipeline is composed of a data generator, a series of filters, and a data consumer. Often that final stage is as simple as displaying the final output on stdout, and sometimes the first stage is as simple as reading from stdin. I think all shells use the "|" character to separate each stage of a pipeline. So:

data-generator | filter | ... | filter | data-consumer

Each stage of the pipeline runs in parallel, within the limits which the system permits. Hey, look closely, because that last phrase is important. Are you on a uni-processor system because if you are, then obviously only one process runs at a time, although that point is simply nitpicking. But pipes are buffers capable of holding only finite data. A process can write into a pipe until that pipe is full. When the pipe is full the process writing into it blocks until some of the data already in the pipe has been read. Similarly, a process can read from a pipe until that pipe is empty. When it's empty the reading process is blocked until some more data has been written into the pipe.

What is IP masquerading and when is it of use?(#10)
IP masquerading is a process where one computer acts as an IP gateway for a network. All computers on the network send their IP packets through the gateway, which replaces the source IP address with its own address and then forwards it to the internet. Perhaps the source IP port number is also replaced with another port number, although that is less interesting. All hosts on the internet see the packet as originating from the gateway.

Any host on the Internet which wishes to send a packet back, ie in reply, must necessarily address that packet to the gateway. Remember that the gateway is the only host seen on the internet. The gateway rewrites the destination address, replacing its own address with the IP address of the machine which is being masqueraded, and forwards that packet on to the local network for delivery.

This procedure sounds simple, and it is. It provides an effective means by which you can provide second class internet connections for a complete LAN using only one (internet) IP address.

Setting UTC or local time(#11)
When Linux boots, one of the initialisation scripts will run the /sbin/hwclock program to copy the current hardware clock time to the system clock. hwclock will assume the hardware clock is set to local time unless it is run with the --utc switch. Rather than editing the startup script, under Red Hat Linux you should edit the /etc/sysconfig/clock file and change the ``UTC'' line to either ``UTC=true'' or ``UTC=false'' as appropriate.
Setting the system clock(#12)
To set the system clock under Linux, use the date command. As an example, to set the current time and date to July 31, 11:16pm, type ``date 07312316'' (note that the time is given in 24 hour notation). If you wanted to change the year as well, you could type ``date 073123161998''. To set the seconds as well, type ``date 07312316.30'' or ``date 073123161998.30''. To see what Linux thinks the current local time is, run date with no arguments.

Setting the hardware clock(#13)
To set the hardware clock, my favourite way is to set the system clock first, and then set the hardware clock to the current system clock by typing ``/sbin/hwclock --systohc'' (or ``/sbin/hwclock --systohc --utc'' if you are keeping the hardware clock in UTC). To see what the hardware clock is currently set to, run hwclock with no arguments. If the hardware clock is in UTC and you want to see the local equivalent, type ``/sbin/hwclock --utc''


Setting your timezone(#14)
The timezone under Linux is set by a symbolic link from /etc/localtime[1] to a file in the /usr/share/zoneinfo[2] directory that corresponds with what timezone you are in. For example, since I'm in South Australia, /etc/localtime is a symlink to /usr/share/zoneinfo/Australia/South. To set this link, type:

ln -sf ../usr/share/zoneinfo/your/zone /etc/localtime

Replace your/zone with something like Australia/NSW or Australia/Perth. Have a look in the directories under /usr/share/zoneinfo to see what timezones are available.

[1] This assumes that /usr/share/zoneinfo is linked to /etc/localtime as it is under Red Hat Linux.

[2] On older systems, you'll find that /usr/lib/zoneinfo is used instead of /usr/share/zoneinfo. See also the later section ``The time in some applications is wrong''.


Zombies(#15)
What are these zombie processes that show up in ps? I kill them but they don't go away!

Zombies are dead processes. You cannot kill the dead. All processes eventually die, and when they do they become zombies. They consume almost no resources, which is to be expected because they are dead! The reason for zombies is so the zombie's parent (process) can retrieve the zombie's exit status and resource usage statistics. The parent signals the operating system that it no longer needs the zombie by using one of the wait() system calls.

When a process dies, its child processes all become children of process number 1, which is the init process. Init is ``always'' waiting for children to die, so that they don't remain as zombies.

If you have zombie processes it means those zombies have not been waited for by their parent (look at PPID displayed by ps -l). You have three choices: Fix the parent process (make it wait); kill the parent; or live with it. Remember that living with it is not so hard because zombies take up little more than one extra line in the output of ps.


How do i give users an ftp only account (no telnet, etc).(#16)

give them shell which doesn't work, but is listed in /etc/shells
for example /bin/false...


How to do backup with tar?(#17)
You can mantain a list of files that you with to backup into a file and tar
it when you wish.

tar czvf tarfile.tar.gz -T list_file

where list_file is a simple list of what you want to include into the tar

i.e:

/etc/smb.conf
/root/myfile
/etc/ppp (all files into the /etc/ppp directory)
/opt/gnome/html/gnome-dev-info.html


How to keep a computer from answering to ping?(#18)

a simple "echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/icmp_echo_ignore_all" will do the
trick... to turn it back on, simply
"echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/icmp_echo_ignore_all"

Customizing your directory colors.(#19)
I know a lot of you know the command ls --color. Which displays your directory with colors. But, a lot of people may not know that those colors are customizable. All you need to do is add the following line to your /etc/bashrc file.


eval `dircolors /etc/DIR_COLORS`


And then all of the color configuration can be found in the file /etc/DIR_COLORS



Frozen Xwindow(#20)
If your Xwindow freezes sometimes, here are two ways that you may try to kill your server. The first is the simple simple way of killing your X server the key combination: Ctrl+Alt+Backspace

The second way is a little more complicated, but it works most of the time. Hit Ctrl+Alt+F2 to startup a virtual console, then log in with your user name and password and run:



# ps -ax | grep startx



This will give you the PID of your Xserver. Then just kill it with:



# kill -9 PID_Number



To go back to your first console, just hit Alt-F1



Converting all files in a directory to lowercase.(#21)
#!/bin/sh
# lowerit
# convert all file names in the current directory to lower case
# only operates on plain files--does not change the name of directories
# will ask for verification before overwriting an existing file
for x in `ls`
do
if [ ! -f $x ]; then
continue
fi
lc=`echo $x | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]'`
if [ $lc != $x ]; then
mv -i $x $lc
fi
done

Wow. That's a long script. I wouldn't write a script to do that; instead, I would use this command:


for i in * ; do [ -f $i ] && mv -i $i `echo $i | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]'`;
done;

on the command line.


Script to view those compressed HOWTOs.(#22)
From a newbie to another, here is a short script that eases looking for and viewing howto documents. My howto's are in /usr/doc/faq/howto/ and are gzipped. The file names are XXX-HOWTO.gz, XXX being the subject. I created the following script called "howto" in the /usr/local/sbin directory:

#!/bin/sh
if [ "$1" = "" ]; then
ls /usr/doc/faq/howto | less
else
gunzip -c /usr/doc/faq/howto/$1-HOWTO.gz | less
fi

When called without argument, it displays a directory of the available howto's. Then when entered with the first part of the file name (before the hyphen) as an argument, it unzips (keeping the original intact) then displays the document.
For instance, to view the Serial-HOWTO.gz document, enter:

$ howto Serial



Util to clean up your logfiles.(#23)
If you're like me, you have a list with 430 subscribers, plus 100+ messages per day coming in over UUCP. Well, what's a hacker to do with these huge logs? Install chklogs, that's what. Chklogs is written by Emilio Grimaldo, grimaldo@panama.iaehv.nl, and the current version 1.8 available from ftp.iaehv.nl:/pub/users/grimaldo/chklogs-1.8.tar.gz. It's pretty self explanatory to install(you will, of course, check out the info in the doc subdirectory). Once you've got it installed, add a crontab entry like this:

# Run chklogs at 9:00PM daily.
00 21 * * * /usr/local/sbin/chklogs -m

Handy Script to Clean Up Corefiles.(#24)
Create a file called rmcores(the author calls it handle-cores) with the following in it:

#!/bin/sh
USAGE="$0 "

if [ $# != 2 ] ; then
echo $USAGE
exit
fi

echo Deleting...
find $1 -name core -atime 7 -print -type f -exec rm {} \;

echo e-mailing
for name in `find $1 -name core -exec ls -l {} \; | cut -c16-24`
do
echo $name
cat $2 | mail $name
done

And have a cron job run it every so often.

Moving directories between filesystems.Quick way to move an entire tree of files from one disk to another (#25)
(cd /source/directory && tar cf - . ) | (cd /dest/directory && tar xvfp -)

[ Change from cd /source/directory; tar....etc. to prevent possibility of trashing directory in case of disaster.]

Finding out which directories are the largest.Ever wondered which directories are the biggest on your computer? Here's how to find out.(#26)
du -S | sort -n

How do I stop my system from fscking on each reboot?(#27)
When you rebuild the kernel, the filesystem is marked as 'dirty' and so your disk will be checked with each boot. The fix is to run:

rdev -R /zImage 1

This fixes the kernel so that it is no longer convinced that the filesystem is dirty.

Note: If using lilo, then add read-only to your linux setup in your lilo config file (Usually /etc/lilo.conf)

How to avoid fscks caused by "device busy" at reboot time.(#28)
If you often get device busy errors on shutdown that leave the filesystem in need of an fsck upon reboot, here is a simple fix:
To /etc/rc.d/init.d/halt or /etc/rc.d/rc.0, add the line

mount -o remount,ro /mount.dir

for all your mounted filesystems except /, before the call to umount -a. This means if, for some reason, shutdown fails to kill all processes and umount the disks they will still be clean on reboot. Saves a lot of time at reboot for me.

How to find the biggest files on your hard-drive.(#29)


ls -l | sort +4n

Or, for those of you really scrunched for space this takes awhile but works great:

cd /
ls -lR | sort +4n

A script for cleaning up after programs that create autosave and backup files.(#30)
Here is a simple two-liner which recursively descends a directory hierarchy removing emacs auto-save (#) and backup (~) files, .o files, and TeX .log files. It also compresses .tex files and README files. I call it 'squeeze' on my system.

#!/bin/sh
#SQUEEZE removes unnecessary files and compresses .tex and README files
#By Barry tolnas, tolnas@sun1.engr.utk.edu
#
echo squeezing $PWD
find $PWD \( -name \*~ -or -name \*.o -or -name \*.log -or -name \*\#\) -exec
rm -f {} \;
find $PWD \( -name \*.tex -or -name \*README\* -or -name \*readme\* \) -exec gzip -9 {} \;

How to find out what process is eating the most memory.(#31)
ps -aux | sort +4n

-OR-
ps -aux | sort +5n

How do I find which library in /usr/lib holds a certain function?(#32)
What if you're compiling and you've missed a library that needed linking in? All gcc reports are function names... Here's a simple command that'll find what you're looking for:

for i in *; do echo $i:;nm $i|grep tgetnum 2>/dev/null;done

Where tgetnum is the name of the function you're looking for.

I compiled a small test program in C, but when I run it, I get no output!(#32)
You probably compiled the program into a binary named test, didn't you? Linux has a program called test, which tests if a certain condition is true, it never produces any output on the screen. Instead of just typing test, try: ./test

mIRC commands

If you would like to keep a particularly interesting chat that has scrolled by but is still in your buffer there is a way to save it! Type "ALT -" (alt minus) to enter the system menu under the top left little icon thingy above every channel or private conversation. In this menu select the Buffer/Save As/ entry and save your buffer to a file. Succes!

The LOCK feature in mIRC allows you to minimize mIRC and lock it with a password for strange eyes. If you control-minimize mIRC (keep the Ctrl-key pressed down while minimizing mIRC), it will be locked with your password. If no password was set previously mIRC will ask you for one. Later when you want to maximize mIRC you need your password to activate it. An extention of this feature in the /File/Options/General/Lock/ menu can be used to lock mIRC or certain channels for your children!

Shift+Mouse on Switchbar Did you know that you can 'fast-close' a window in mIRC by clicking its button on the Switchbar while holding the SHIFT key pressed down??

/uwho Ever wondered who you're actually speaking with? The /whois {nick} command shows you a lot of cryptic info in the Status window but the /uwho {nick} command will open a clear and informative User Central. Give it a try! You can also store address info of your friends in the User Central for future reference.

ALT + Minus Press the key combination ALT and 'minus' simultaneous to access the windows' System Menu's (found under that little horizontal bar in every top left corner of ANY window in mIRC and windows). Here you can set the fonts you like, the logging options, save the buffer and set various other things for private and channel conversations.

/clear Use the /clear command to flush away all old text you dont want to read again. /clearall clears all text in all windows!

Remember that old doskey feature under DOS? mIRC has it too! Use the arrow up/down keys, eventually combined with SHIFT, to recall old commands and text lines.

/channel The /channel command will open the Channel Central that displays all modes and bans set on your current channel.

/pdcc Use the undocumented /pdcc [on|off] command to speed up your DCC sessions! It will pump a certain amount of your data packages away to the reciever, ahead of the confirmation of their arrival. Try it, it works  .

Quick reference to mIRC's commands:


If you need more info on any command listed here, type /help {command} in mIRC. The list here is far from complete!
/ Recalls the previous line entered in the current window.
/! Recalls the last command typed in any window.
/action {action text} Sends the specifed action to the active channel or query window.
/ame {action text} Sends the specifed action to all channels which you are currently on.
/amsg {text} Sends the specifed message to all channels which you are currently on.
/auser {level} {nick|address} Adds a user with the specified access level to the remote users list.
/auto [on|off|nickname|address] Toggles auto-opping of a nick or address or sets it on or off totally.
/away {away message} Sets you away leave a message explaining that you are not currently paying attention to IRC.
/away A plain away sets you being back.
/ban [#channel] {nickname} [type] Bans the specified nick from the curent or given channel.
/beep {number} {delay} Locally beeps 'number' times with 'delay' inbetween the beeps. /channel Pops up the channel central window (only works in a channel).
/clear Clears the entire scrollback buffer of the current window.
/clearall Clears all text in all open windows.
/ctcp {nickname} {ping|finger|version|time|userinfo|clientinfo} Does the given ctcp request on nickname.
/ctcps [on|off] Sets the Tools/Remote/ section (not) to listen to CTCP commands. Or checks its status.
/closemsg {nickname} Closes the query window you have open to the specified nick.
/creq [ask | auto | ignore] Sets your DCC 'On Chat request' settings in DCC/Options.
/dcc send {nickname} {file1} {file2} {file3} ... {fileN} Sends the specified files to nick.
/dcc chat {nickname} Opens a dcc window and sends a dcc chat request to nickname.
/dde [-r] {service} {topic} {item} [data] Allows DDE control between mIRC and other applications.
/ddeserver [[on [service name] | off] To turn on the DDE server mode, eventually with a givem service name.
/describe {#channel} {action text} Sends the specifed action to the specified channel window.
/disable {#groupname} De-activates a group of commands or events.
/disconnect Forces a hard and immediate disconnect from your IRC server. Use it with care.
/dlevel {level} Changes the default user level in the remote section.
/dns {nickname | IP address | IP name} Uses your providers DNS to resolve an IP address.
/echo [nickname|#channel|status] {text} Displays the given text only to YOU on the given place in color N.
/enable {#groupname} Activates a group of commands or events.
/events [on|off] Sets the Tools/Remote/ section (not) to listen to ON .. Events. Or checks its status.
/exit Forces mIRC to closedown and exit.
/finger {nick|address} Does a finger on a users address.
/flood [{numberoflines} {seconds} {pausetime}] Sets a crude flood control method.
/flush [levels] Clears all nicknames from the Remote/users list that are currently not on your channels.
/font Activates the font selection dialog.
/fsend [on|off] Shows fsends status and allows you to turn dcc fast send on or off.
/fserve {nickname} {maxgets} {homedirectory} [welcome text file] Opens a fileserver.
/groups [-e|d] Shows all (enabled or disabled) groups defined in the remote sections.
/guser {level} {nick} [type] Adds the user to the user list with the specified level and address type.
/help {keyword} Brings up the Basic IRC Commands section in the mIRC help file.
/ignore [on|off|nickname|address] Toggles ignoring of a nick or address or sets it on or off totally.
/invite {nickname} {#channel} Invites another user to a channel.
/join {#channel} Makes you join the specified channel.
/kick {#channel} {nickname} Kicks nickname off a given channel.
/list [#string] [-min #] [-max #] Lists all currently available channels, evt. filtering for parameters.
/load {-apuce} {filename.ini} Loads Aliases, Popups or Remote items into mIRC.
/log [on|off] Shows the logging status or sets it on or off for the current window.
/me {action text} Sends the specifed action to the active channel or query window. Also see /describe and /ctcp action.
/mode {#channel|nickname} [[+|-]modechars [parameters]] Sets channel or user modes.
/msg {nickname} {message} Send a private message to this user without opening a query window.
/names {#channel} Shows the nicks of all people on the given channel.
/nick {new nickname} Changes your nickname to whatever you like.
/notice {nick} {message} Send the specified notice message to the nick.
/notify [on|off|nickname] Toggles notifying you of a nick on IRC or sets it on or off totally.
/onotice [#channel] {message} Send the specified notice message to all channel ops.
/omsg [#channel] {message} Send the specified message to all ops on a channel.
/part [#channel] [message] Makes you leave the specified channel.
/partall Makes you leave all channels you are on.
/ping {server address} Pings the given server. NOT a nickname.
/play [-cpqmrlt] [channel/nick] {filename} [delay/linenumber] Allows you to play text files.
/pop {delay} [#channel] {nickname} Performs a randomly delayed +o on a not already opped nick.
/protect [on|off|nickname|address] Toggles protection of a nick or address or sets it on or off totally.
/query {nickname} {message} Open a query window to this user and send them the private message.
/quit [reason] Disconnect you from IRC with the optional byebye message.
/raw [on|off] Sets the Tools/Remote/ section (not) to listen to Raw commands. Or checks its status.
/raw {raw command} Sends any raw command you supply directly to the server. Use with care!
/remote [on|off] Sets the Tools/Remote/ section (not) to listen to CTCP or Raw remote commands and Events. Or checks its status.
/rlevel {access level} Removes all users from the remote users list with the specified access level.
/run {c:\path\program.exe} [parameters] Runs the specified program, evt. with parameters. Also try /run h**p://w*w.mirc.com etc.
/ruser {nick[!]|address} [type] Removes the user from the remote users list.
/save [-apuce] {filename.ini} Saves remote sections into a specified INI file.
/say {text} Says whatever you want to the active window.
/server [server address [port] [password]] Reconnects to the previous server or a newly specified one.
/sound [nickname|#channel] {filename.wav} {action text} Sends an action and a fitting sound request.
/speak {text} Uses the external text to speech program Monologue to speak up the text. Better use /gtalk with mIRC's Agent support.
/sreq [ask | auto | ignore] Sets your DCC 'On Send request' settings in DCC/Options.
/time Tells you the time on the server you use.
/timer[N] {repetitions} {interval in seconds} {command} [| {more commands}] Activates a timer.
/timestamp [on | off] Sets timestamping on or off for all your conversations.
/topic {#channel} {newtopic} Changes the topic for the specified channel.
/ulist {level} Lists all users in the remote list with the specified access levels.
/url [on|off|show|hide] [address] Opens the URL window that allows you to surf the www parallel to IRC.
/uwho [nick] Pops up the user central with information about the specified user.
/splay {c:\path\sound.file} Locally plays the specified sound file.
/who {#channel} Shows the nicks of all people on the given channel.
/who {*part.of.address*} Shows all people on IRC with a matching address.
/whois {nickname} Shows information about someone in the status window. Also try /uwho.
/whowas {nickname} Shows information about someone who -just- left IRC.
/write [-cidl] {filename} [text] To write the specified text to a .txt file.

mIRC supports lots, lots and a lot more commands... Especially the commands that are used in scripts, with lots of options, are not included in this list. Therefore this list should be seen as a suggestion to get you going

MindVox

                               Voices In My Head
                             MindVox: The Overture

       First Light
       -----------

       A long time ago, in a thoughtspace far away, an event that  would
       forevermore alter the shape of human interaction took place . . .

       But we're not here to talk about that, instead we're  gonna  dis-
       cuss  computers  and how a couple of guys named Ward Christianson
       and Randy Seuss wrote a program that would allow them to  be  set
       up  as  a  kind of store-and-forward messaging system designed to
       allow their circle of friends to interact with one another by us-
       ing  these  things  called  modems . . . and how this event would
       prove to be the first truly accessible step  into  the  uncharted
       territory of what was to become Cyberspace.

       From this empowering turning point in  the  late  seventies,  the
       ideas,  dreams and fantasies that would transmute and amplify hu-
       man potentials and evolutionary possibilities, broke  loose  from
       the  shackles that primitive technology had imposed upon them and
       began to spin the electronic universe into existence.

       Still in the very early stages of its development, Cyberspace, or
       the  "modem  world" as it is sometimes called, has until very re-
       cently remained a largely untapped forum unique within the histo-
       ry  of our world.  It is a rapidly shifting microcosm that in the
       early part of the 1990's seems poised to engulf the reality  from
       which  it  was born, weaving together the threads of tens of mil-
       lions of diverse dreams, into one mercurial tapestry that  encom-
       passes the collective consciousness of humanity and frees it from
       all constraints.

       The non-space of Cyberspace is a place where global changes  that
       would  take years or even centuries outside of the online domain,
       can occur in weeks or months.  It is a place  where  participants
       from  all  over  the  world share a unique common-ground based on
       nothing less nor more, than a belief in the same vision of possi-
       bility.   It is a land where people who scoff at "The Elements of
       Style" frequently write paragraphs, pages, and even novels,  full
       of big words, huge concepts, and absolutely gargantuan amounts of
       emoting -- while actually saying nothing tangible.  In  a  little
       over a decade, the online microcosm has managed to experience the
       equivalent of hundreds of years of evolution.  Not to mention the
       creation of hundreds of words which have found their way into the
       online lexicon despite the fact that nobody is  quite  sure  what
       they mean in the first place.

       During this turbulent period of rapid change the half-dozen  sys-
       tems  of 1978, had grown to 45 or 50 electronic villages by 1980.
       These were the original outposts of Cyberspace, running on hacked
       together  systems, hooked into industrial 8" drives, and network-
       ing at the blinding speed of  110  baud.   To  be  honest,  there
       wasn't  really  a whole lot of high level philosophizing going on
       regarding the brave new world that had dawned.  Actually, most of
       the  conversation  tended  to focus on things along the lines of,
       "How do you hook an 8" drive onto an Apple ][?"  and  "ANY  idiot
       can  see  that  setting  the  7th bit high on the xdef reg is the
       WRONG thing to do, OF COURSE it'll make the  program  crash,  are
       you  stupid  or  something?"  It was a technological triumph, but
       one that was for the most part, still lacking  many  of  the  key
       participants that would shape the technology into designer reali-
       ties.

       As the seventies drew to a close, the  sterility  and  bare-bones
       functionality that had predominated, began to make way for places
       created by people who truly  wanted  something  unique  and  dif-
       ferent.   The mere existence of the technology was no longer that
       exciting, and as a greater number of people gained access to  the
       hardware  needed to jack in, the first electronic tribes gathered
       and began erecting monuments to their own ingenuity.

       By the time the eighties were upon us,  the  handful  of  systems
       that  had  thrived  during the latter half of the previous decade
       had multiplied rapidly, giving birth to new systems on an  almost
       daily  basis, and by 1982 there were close to a thousand outposts
       on the frontier.  Hardware prices were  falling,  1200bps  modems
       were  actually within the reach of many people who wanted to pur-
       chase them, and the online domain was beginning to attract a wide
       variety of participants from outside the technocratic elite.

       A second pivotal point came during the summer of  1983  when  the
       movie  WARGAMES  was  released.   Within several months the modem
       world literally doubled in size.  An  entire  new  generation  of
       people  were  about to take the plunge into electronic wonderland
       and set off an explosive growth rate that has  not  slowed  since
       then.  It was a major and irreversible nexus point that would be-
       gin the abrupt transition from taking Cyberspace from  the  realm
       of underground sub-culture to the forefront of mainstream media.

       In retrospect the early eighties were the "golden age" of  Cyber-
       space.  There truly was a new frontier just over the horizon, and
       we were standing at the edge.  This period in the history of  the
       electronic universe was unruly and chaotic, the first settlers on
       the frontier wouldn't arrive for another decade or  so,  and  the
       only  people  here  were a small collection of explorers eager to
       embark on the next adventure.

       Of course one of the problems with "standing on the edge" of any-
       thing,  is  the  trail that led up to it.  You are there for some
       reason, or usually a very complex series of  reasons,  that  have
       shaped  your  life up until that point in time, and caused you to
       become disenchanted with -- or feel limited by -- whatever situa-
       tion  you  are  locked into in the consensual reality that we all
       physically inhabit at present.  In other words, the "real  world"
       isn't making you happy, and you want outta there.

       Led by a an oddball contingent of misfits,  dropouts,  acidheads,
       phreaks,  hackers,  hippies, scientists, students, guys who could
       say "do0d, got any new wares?" with a straight  face  and  really
       mean  it -- and quite often -- people who managed to combine many
       of these attributes; the 1980's saw the rise of the first empires
       and kingdoms of Cyberspace.

       As romantic and wonderful as this seems, and was . . . a  lot  of
       the people involved had been brutalized by life, and much of this
       new reality was borne out of a tidal wave of pain  and  dissatis-
       faction.  When I first became an active participant in this elec-
       tronic nervous system that was just beginning to  experience  its
       awakening;  I  was  a little over ten years old.  My early under-
       standings of what this "place" was, were shaped by a  handful  of
       people  whose  skills  I admired and sought to emulate, yet whose
       lives I felt great pity and sadness for.

       There were of course exceptions, people who were so high  on  the
       potential  of  this  technology  and  the completely new level of
       reality it could bring, that nothing more than a  love  of  their
       creation drove them onwards.  But these people were pretty uncom-
       mon, most of the pioneers were guys who were simply unhappy . . .
       or to be more exact, so unhappy that they had given up on finding
       joy in the "real world"  and  were  constructing  a  rocket  ship
       called Cyberspace to get them out of here as fast as possible.

       "Peace, love and happiness" was not  exactly  the  driving  force
       behind the rise of the electronic domains.  A more realistic ral-
       lying cry was one of "Gee this technology is neat, and I'm  gonna
       use it to make a whole new world where I can be happy and none of
       you can ever bother me again.  You'll all be sorry, just wait and
       see!"   They  were  building  the  cult of high technology in the
       hopes that it would somehow save them from whatever they  thought
       had prevented them from attaining happiness anywhere else.

       Sadly enough "they" were not THOSE PEOPLE, "they" had become "us"
       and  while the first steps into this place had been made possible
       by the phone phreaks and misfits of yesterday, the  online  world
       was exploding and changing at an incredible velocity, the rest of
       society was about to take notice in a big way, and a  handful  of
       disenfranchised  teenagers  had seized the reigns and were in the
       early stages of walking into the spotlight and taking the  status
       quo for a big ride . . .


       The Fall
       --------

       Everything really was this big beautiful game, and here  we  were
       with an overview of the whole jigsaw puzzle, and the sudden power
       to do anything we wanted to do with it.  For the  first  time  in
       recent  history you COULD reach out and change reality, you could
       DO STUFF that effected EVERYTHING and EVERYONE, and you were sud-
       denly  living  this  life  that was like something out of a comic
       book or adventure story.  In a place filled  with  magical  lands
       and  fantastic  people  who you had only read about, and suddenly
       you WERE actually talking to Timothy Leary,  or  Steven  Wozniak,
       and some guy who was just on the cover of a magazine was speaking
       with you and thought that YOU were cool,  and  then  finally  you
       were  IN  the  magazines  and  at the forefront of an entire sub-
       culture that was being  rapidly  assimilated  into  the  cultural
       mythos.

       It was a VERY interesting time and place in which to grow up.

       Of course the problem is a lot of us didn't grow up.  At  a  cer-
       tain  point in time having power that can have real and immediate
       effects upon all society, can do very strange things to your per-
       spective of the world.  Instead of learning to deal with the nor-
       mal barriers that most teenagers in western  culture  find  them-
       selves  faced  with, you discover that you can blow right through
       all of them without even slowing down.  In this way you miss much
       of the growth and acclimation that people go through during their
       teenage years.  Which is where a lot of old friends  parted  ways
       with  reality  and  ceased to be explorers, becoming caught up in
       the real world implications of the power that was  now  at  their
       disposal.   In  effect,  they  lost sight of the underlying theme
       that all our actions had been based upon, that of exploration and
       pushing  the  boundaries,  and  merely  focused on the short-term
       end-result of what their abilities could bring them;  in the pro-
       cess  becoming  the criminals that the Secret Service and FBI had
       said we all were.

       What had begun with the best intentions, as the  ultimate  exten-
       sion  of  human  curiosity, had devolved into a cultural movement
       that had very little to do with the ideals that had inspired  it.
       The term "hacker" had become synonymous with "criminal", and tak-
       ing a look around at the state of the underground, it  looked  as
       if  much  of  it  had  in  fact  degenerated  into  crime cartels
       comprised of angry teens who  had  little  understanding  of  the
       underlying  mechanisms  they were employing to play with reality.
       It was no longer the exhilaration of knowing that you could actu-
       ally  reach  out  and touch a satellite . . . it had come down to
       the negative power trip of fucking with something for the sake of
       pissing  people  off or just showing the world how much power you
       really have at your disposal if you ever decided to throw a  tan-
       trum.

       By 1988 what had replaced our outlook, was a  mindset  where  the
       new  generation saw two things:  one of them was the potential to
       take advantage of holes in the system for personal  gain.   There
       was  no  longer any quest for knowledge, desire to learn, or need
       to push the boundaries of what was possible for the sake  of  ex-
       ploration.   Instead  there were a lot of people who couldn't get
       past making free phone calls, stealing things, and causing  trou-
       ble  by  following  an already well-established pattern of action
       and reaction.

       The second -- and perhaps biggest -- motivating factor had become
       the   desire   for  personal  attention  in  the  form  of  self-
       aggrandizement: the ultimate hack had become  the  media  machine
       itself.  What was originally a by-product of our experiences, had
       become a goal in and of itself.  And here is where things  became
       REALLY twisted.

       The media in the latter half of the twentieth century has  become
       a very strange distortion of reality instead of the reflection it
       was intended to be.  Since this is not an essay on the  evils  of
       manipulation  through  the use of media, I will stick with a very
       simple outline of how events occur in the real world.

       A reporter, journalist, writer -- SOME PERSON who has  their  own
       desires and ambitions, wants to do an exciting story on something
       that will garner him or her  a  lot  of  attention  and  acclaim.
       Really  they  are operating from a point of view that has much in
       common with the "hacker's," which is the mindset  of  "I'm  gonna
       get  mine."  So this journalist looks around at the headlines and
       realizes that there is a mounting wave  of  hysteria  surrounding
       viruses  and  hackers  and  invasion  of  privacy  and . . . gee,
       wouldn't it be a nice career move to do a  story  that  will  mix
       their  name  into whatever the hot topic of the next five minutes
       happens to be.

       If the journalist is attached to any  even  marginally  important
       publication,  they  will  then  get  their  pick  from one of the
       current four or five "names" doing  the  rounds.   On  the  other
       hand,  if  the  journalist  is just starting out and connected to
       something much smaller, then the chances  are  they  will  simply
       show up at some user's group meeting, find the nearest thing they
       can to a "computer nerd," do an interview, and then write  it  up
       expressing  whatever  the  current  publicly-sanctioned viewpoint
       happens to be (the usual slant has become: hackers are  evil  and
       can look at your credit rating, fear them).

       I have been interviewed on many  occasions  and  I  know  roughly
       twenty  people  who  have  done  the interviews that comprise the
       basis of about 90% of all media that exists in  relation  to  the
       underground;  be it in newspaper, periodical, television segment,
       or book format.  WITH *VERY*  FEW  EXCEPTIONS,  there  have  been
       countless  solicitations  to perform illegal acts in the presence
       of journalists, these solicitations move all the way  into  coer-
       cion  in some cases.  There are reports containing sentences that
       were never spoken, quotes taken out of context, information  that
       was  invented  .  .  . there's simply no end to it.  The reporter
       profits first by stroking the hacker's ego  and  giving  him  the
       spotlight that he thinks he wants so badly, and then continues to
       profit as the hacker rides a bigger and bigger wave of  publicity
       that  in  every case leads to a very unhappy ending if the hacker
       in question doesn't have the foresight to get off the ride before
       it derails.

       In any case, whatever happens, the reporter  always  wins.   When
       the  hacker's  ride reaches its date with fate, the journalist in
       question can now write the closing chapter in the  hacker's  saga
       and  tell  the  public how this nefarious evil-doer is being pun-
       ished by the long arm of justice.  This is  followed  up  by  the
       journalist  taking  on  the "official" mantle of "hacker expert,"
       doing the lecture circuit, perhaps writing a book, and then going
       out and finding a new horse to beat to death.

       Obviously nothing can ever be this black and white, there must be
       a need for both parties to play their roles.  The reporter is not
       THE EVIL BAD MAN who has corrupted the INNOCENT  ANGELIC  HACKER,
       nor  does this scenario apply to all journalists equally, off the
       top of my head; Bruce Sterling, John Markoff, and Julian  Dibbell
       come to mind as extremely ethical exceptions to the norm.

       Usually the reporter who isn't quite so ethical is just  somebody
       who  is presented with a situation that can easily be twisted and
       misused if the desire for fame and fortune takes precedence  over
       everything  else.   The  reporter  by  the very nature of his job
       tends to be quite "slick" and worldly-wise, whereas the hacker in
       question  is  usually highly knowledgeable about computer systems
       while managing to retain an oblivious naivety about the  workings
       of  human  beings  in that elusive place called "the real world."
       This sets the stage for what transpires.

       And you see a lot of people who used  to  be  your  friends,  get
       ground  up  in  this  endless cycle as it repeats itself over and
       over again until one day you wake up and  come  to  realize  that
       you're  seventeen  or  eighteen going on 90.  You understand that
       everything in the whole world is comprised of bits and pieces  of
       lies  and  half-truths, everyone is inherently corrupt, including
       you; a lot of kids who used to be your friends are now all  grown
       up  with  no  place  to  go and getting busted for such things as
       fraud and grand larceny; and you have  utterly  lost  touch  with
       anything  even remotely "real."  And yet, you're still a teenager
       and have another 70 or 80 years  left  to  hang  around  on  this
       planet.

       This is right around the time that you're back in the media, only
       this  trip  around you're at the receiving end of law enforcement
       who have been prodded into a state of near-hysteria by the  dawn-
       ing  realization  that  a  bunch of kids really can dismantle the
       building  blocks  of  the  infrastructure  that  makes  most   of
       present-day  society  possible.  Naturally enough they're scared,
       and they're in the process of doing what  people  have  done  for
       ages when they are afraid: going on a witch-hunt.  Guess who gets
       to play witch...

       So one day you find yourself wondering why you should bother buy-
       ing  another  computer  system  and trying to figure out what the
       point of it all was anyway; to glimpse  the  limitless  potential
       and  then  fall  back  and  only  see your own flaws amplified to
       cartoon-like proportions.

       The 1980's were a time that saw the birth and death of the  first
       dynasties  of  Cyberspace.   Travelling  through  the  electronic
       landscape of this period in time, was like traversing  this  sur-
       real  range  of mountains, where amongst the sheer outcropping of
       rock, lush valleys, and snow-capped peaks, a collection of rather
       obsessive  dreamers  had built some of the most beautiful castles
       that were ever created and opened their doors to  a  populace  of
       pioneers.   It was absolutely transporting and timeless . . . and
       unfortunately -- in the short term -- doomed.

       This has been an abbreviated summary of the atmosphere and events
       that  started  a  kind  of mass exodus out of the modem world for
       about twenty of us.  We had spent our  entire  childhoods  jacked
       into  this alternate electronic universe, locked into playing our
       overly-developed personas, and almost no time figuring out who we
       were  and  what  we  wanted  out of life beyond "further, better,
       more."  This is nothing new or unique in and of  itself,  it  was
       however  something  that gained a very tangible and immediate im-
       portance to many of us when we found  that  the  thoughtspace  in
       which we had lived a large portion of our lives had disintegrated
       and the people we had  known  and  called  friends,  had  largely
       disappeared and been replaced by every negative quality they pos-
       sessed.

       A lot of us dumped the remnants of this reality into a  stack  of
       boxes  and  took off for parts unknown.  Whether college, work, a
       new circle of friends that didn't know who  you  were  in  Cyber-
       space, or even know what Cyberspace was; just about anywhere were
       we could start over and try to regain what had somehow been lost.


       Transformation
       --------------

                     "Ya live your life like it's a coma,
                      so won't you tell me why we'd wanna?
                         With all the reasons you give,
                          it's kinda hard to believe;
                      But who am I to tell you I've seen,
                        any reason why you should stay;
                Maybe we'd be better off without you anyway..."
                                             --Guns N Roses(*2)

       After coming to the realization that visiting The Tunnel for  the
       fourteenth  time  in  three weeks was not going to change my life
       for the better, and having no idea what I wanted to do  with  my-
       self,  I  dropped it all and got on a plane for the middle of no-
       where New Mexico.  Where I proceeded  to  cycle  through  all  my
       negative  tendencies  at  an  accelerated  pace,   first becoming
       utterly obsessed with bodybuilding, to the point of five  hour  a
       day  workouts,  insane  diets,  steroids,  and a silly-putty like
       transformation of myself to 6'2" 215 pounds and 6% bodyfat.

       This was good for about ten months, before I found myself in  the
       same mindset I had thought I could escape.  Looking in the mirror
       and seeing a parody of who I used to be, wondering  where  to  go
       from  there.  The answer was obviously to buy a Porsche and begin
       re-stocking my wardrobe with everything by  Armani  and  Versace,
       yes  I  had it now, this WAS the right answer, I only had to look
       around at all the people I knew doing just this to see that . . .
       well,  actually  they  were  all  pretty miserable, but again, it
       lasted for about nine or ten months.

       Around this time I realized that aside from the fact that I was a
       pretty  fucked  up person who probably needed a lot of therapy --
       which had never quite worked out the right  way  when  I  had  it
       thrust  upon  me  as a teenager -- I had become completely out of
       touch with my feelings.  Not out of  touch  that  I  didn't  have
       them,  I  had  over a thousand pages of them sprayed across mega-
       bytes of disks where I wrote out all the things inside of  myself
       driving  me crazy;  but out of touch in the sense that when I be-
       gan taking things apart and  analyzing  reality,  I  had  stopped
       listening  to  anything  I  felt inside and just tuned in to what
       seemed logical.

       The problem being that the more you try to act out of logic,  the
       more you find yourself applying logic to utterly emotional issues
       in an completely crazed and  self-destructive  way.   When  logic
       should  be  asking: "Why do I want to weigh 215 pounds of muscle?
       What the hell am I doing?" it suddenly finds itself in the  posi-
       tion  of  contemplating "Ok, so if I want to gain 5 pounds in the
       next 2 weeks, how many CC's of Deca do I mix with X mg.  of  Ana-
       var,  with what ratio of carbs/fat and what is the minimum PER of
       the protein I am going to consume in order to remain in an  anti-
       catabolic state?"

       Welcome to real-life Alice in Wonderland, taking  place  in  your
       head.

       At the age of twenty-one I had managed to attain a place where  I
       possessed everything that I ever thought I wanted.  Life is funny
       that way, you really do get whatever you desire.   Endless  hours
       spent  reading  thousands  of books; the mix and match regimen of
       combinations of new nootropics and longevity agents; and the  fi-
       nal  combination  of steroids and obsessive workouts had resulted
       in my achievement of the goal I had subconsciously  been  working
       towards  for  most  of my life.  I had succeeded in my efforts to
       become absolutely untouchable by anyone or anything.

       When you are no longer in the middle of a situation and have  the
       comfort of hindsight it's very simple to deduce what the underly-
       ing problems behind anything happen to be, and why you are acting
       in a way that is physically, mentally and spiritually destructive
       to yourself.  While there is nothing inherently  wrong  with  any
       action  I  might have taken, it all comes back to the question of
       why are you doing something?  And looking back upon  my  life,  I
       had actually lived very little of it in an attempt to make myself
       happy.  Almost everything had been some sort of reaction to those
       around me, and how I felt I had to respond to them.

       Despite my intellectual understanding of  how  brief  moments  of
       stimulus-response  can  shape  a person's existence, like so many
       endlessly-referenced frames  of  film  forever  etched  in  their
       brain.   Long-gone  fragments  of  time that refuse to relinquish
       their hold on the present, telling people who they  are,  setting
       their limitations, and defining the boundaries of what they allow
       their lives to mean.  In truth I had never managed to  apply  any
       of  this knowledge to myself and had lived most of my life in ac-
       cordance with the patterns of self-destructive  programming  per-
       petually repeating a loop in my head.

       From childhood onwards I have been through  a  seemingly  endless
       variety of extremes in my life; moving from levels of comfortable
       opulence, to near-poverty and back again, more times than I  care
       to  count.   What  I  had  learned  from this was that being poor
       wasn't that much fun, and could really suck, therefore logic dic-
       tates  that  I must always have a lot of money and do whatever it
       takes to get it.  In fact I'm going to be so unconcerned with mo-
       ney  that  I will start to feel anxious if I'm not wearing a $300
       dollar haircut and a $400 dollar shirt.  I have  felt  controlled
       by  situations  beyond my reach in the past, therefore I am going
       to learn as much as I can about everything, so that  nobody  will
       ever  be  able  to  fuck  with  my head and attempt to control me
       through misrepresentation of the  truth.   I  have  been  out-of-
       control  with  various  addictions and done such stupid things to
       myself that through combinations of downers and alcohol I have at
       one  point  weighed  over 300 pounds; therefore I will understand
       every fucking piece of biochemistry that is known about the human
       body,  I  will  do  whatever it takes to look into the mirror and
       gain my own approval even if it means working out with such  fre-
       quency that a pleasant sport becomes a daily torture session that
       leaves me nauseous and physically incapable of performing  simple
       movements  because  everything  hurts  all the time.  I will look
       like someone has spray-painted skin onto a statue no  matter  how
       difficult  it  is to maintain this state constantly, I will force
       myself to eat 6,000 calories of protein and 400 calories of  car-
       bohydrate,  and  if I can no longer think or move and my ultimate
       fantasy has become sleeping 18 hours a day, then that's what caf-
       feine and amphetamines are for.  I live in hell therefore I shall
       use drugs to escape my hell by taking week-long vacations on opi-
       ates,  but  I will never be controlled by anything, so on the 8th
       day I will walk away from heaven and live  through  a  couple  of
       days  of  pain  that  hurt  a little bit more than the rest of my
       life, but I will never be some fucking junkie, because I not only
       can  do  anything,  I  WILL  do  it,  and I just dare the fucking
       universe to try and prove otherwise, because I can quit anything,
       I  can  conquer  anything, I can do anything to prove anything to
       anyone and you can't stop me, because the entire world is full of
       weak,  soft and stupid motherfuckers who talk much and do little;
       praise George Bernard Shaw and pass the Nietzsche.

       Coming down off the adrenalin and testosterone rush the  memories
       I  used  to write that paragraph with have triggered, I'd like to
       take this moment to borrow a  quote  from  one  of  the  greatest
       poet-philosophers of our time: "Happy happy! Joy joy!"

       After endless repetitions of this cycle I had finally  reached  a
       state  in  which  my  internal  programming ceased to function --
       there was simply nothing left I could  apply  it  to.   Over  the
       years  I  had  overcome most of my psychological barriers through
       direct mental or physical actions, that  had  brought  with  them
       physical  rewards  that I was utterly incapable of applying to my
       life at that time.  Welcome to oblivion.

       Hitting absolute nothingness was the beginning of a very personal
       catharsis  for me that finally led to turning inwards to see what
       was wrong, since externally, everything looked okay.  I  had  at-
       tained  a  physical state that "corrected" everything my subcons-
       cious had said was "wrong" with me, yet for some bewildering rea-
       son  I  was  not  deliriously  happy.  A series of steps followed
       which eventually led to various experiments in the world of thea-
       tre and film, where I had the chance to re-connect with emotions,
       and get them back into some kind of perspective from the comfort-
       able vantage point and attitude of: "they're not really mine, I'm
       only playing them."  All of which reached a pinnacle when I began
       experimenting with LSD for the first time.

       If you have never experienced what it is like to be  on  an  acid
       trip,  it  will  be  difficult for me to convey the kaleidoscopic
       depth of experience you are presented with.  It does nothing less
       nor more, than strip away every preconceived notion that you have
       ever had regarding what "reality" is.   Beyond  the  special  ef-
       fects,  intellectual  realizations,  and  creative opportunity it
       presents, it leaves you imbued with one very basic truth  of  the
       universe:   No  matter  what  the actual outcome of your actions,
       what matters is your intent.  If what you are doing  --  whatever
       it  may be -- is being done out of any reason other than a desire
       to bring happiness to people; to help humanity as a  whole  reach
       some greater level of understanding; to uplift and inspire people
       to reach for something that is within everyone's grasp . . . then
       you are wasting your time.

       This is not exactly news, I mean it is the  basic  belief  system
       that every religion on earth is founded on (with the possible ex-
       ception of Satanism, and a few other offshoots of this system  of
       thought).   The problem with religion getting such a bad rap most
       of the time is largely due to the fact that most people  who  act
       as  spokesmen  for  any  given religious cause, are only mouthing
       words they comprehend on an intellectual level.  They are not ac-
       tually  living  in this state of internal alignment, so what they
       have to offer can be very suspect . . . how is  someone  who  has
       not  attained  what  he speaks of, supposed to help you attain it
       for yourself?  While dogma may help a limited few, it will  never
       reach  most  of  those  who posses the ability to think for them-
       selves.  Nor is standing at a pulpit or in front of a camera  and
       ranting  about  damnation, going to help anyone reach any kind of
       positive state.

       I obviously cannot speak for everybody, but from my own  perspec-
       tive  I had read the holy books of most religions on earth when I
       became interested in psychology and the theories of Carl Jung  --
       who  crosses  over into mysticism and religious experience, going
       as far as the concept of "karma" with his theory of  Synchronici-
       ty.  Yet I never got anything from them other than an intellectu-
       al high of understanding how groups of people could be programmed
       to behave in certain ways . . . which isn't what it's about.  The
       EXPERIENCE is what all religions are based on, how you choose  to
       interpret it is entirely up to you.  But a very simple thing that
       becomes apparent is the basic truth that wherever  your  inspira-
       tion  is  coming  from, if it fills you with the need to motivate
       large groups of people to do SOMETHING, be that something in  the
       name  of  "God" or anybody else . . . then somewhere, you got the
       wrong message.  Because there really isn't all that much  to  say
       beyond  the  very simple and obvious, "give love and you will get
       it."  The only thing that needs to be changed  is  your  attitude
       and outlook on life.  Making group_of_people(x) move twenty paces
       to the left while wearing black hats and reading  from  the  Holy
       Book  of  the  Arboreal  Tree Sloth, isn't gonna make the world a
       better place.

       While this discourse is tangential to some of the issues at hand,
       in  a  great  sense  it  is the underlying cause for all of them.
       Once you have seen the light as it were, or understood the bigger
       picture . . . it becomes very hard to go back to living life with
       blinders on regarding your  own  actions.   Until  it  eventually
       reaches  the  place where I found myself.  The point at which the
       only things I'm going to talk about are those that matter to  me,
       things  I  believe  in . . . things I believe will help people in
       some manner.  Along with the realization that I cannot do  a  lot
       of  things  I  used  to  do  anymore.  I cannot lie to people and
       present them with some image they want to see  in  order  to  get
       something  from  them  --  because I mean, WHAT is there to "get"
       anyway?  I can no longer be a politician or figurehead for causes
       that I do not believe in, and I will no longer waste my time tak-
       ing part in meaningless drivel that serves to do nothing but  en-
       trench me in bullshit without end; I had already spent most of my
       life taking apart the rules and winning at whatever game I  tried
       to  play.   What  I never bothered to examine was the fact that I
       didn't "win" anything that ever brought me any happiness  .  .  .
       what is the point in playing if you don't want the "prize?"


       Stagnation of the Electronic Frontier
       -------------------------------------

       Moving forward in time by about two years, this was the  attitude
       that  I  had managed to retain as I returned to New York.  Every-
       thing was the same, yet completely different.  What had been per-
       vaded  by  Nihilism  and vacuity only a short time ago, was now a
       pathway of infinite potential and limitless possibility.  For the
       first  time  in  almost  six years I actually felt completely in-
       spired and excited by the possibilities that life in general  and
       Cyberspace in particular had to offer.

       The summer of 1991 was a kind of "class reunion" for many of  us.
       For  the  first  time  in almost half a decade we found ourselves
       back in New York City, the place where all of  this  had  started
       for us such a long time ago.

       What happened was pretty much the expected; an endless stream  of
       jokes  and  self-depreciating  humor regarding who we used to be,
       the three-letter acronyms we used to affiliate with  or  have  in
       revolution around us, the state of the universe and everything in
       it, and a general time of catching up on who had done  what.   It
       was  a strange situation, since we really had disappeared, to the
       extent that most of us had not talked with one another in  years,
       it  was almost as if picking up the phone and speaking with some-
       one from back then would bring back all the bad things  you  were
       trying to get rid of.

       Out of this gathering, I found about a  dozen  people  who  I  no
       longer  knew.   People who had become submerged in drugs, and be-
       come lost in different sub-cultures where  they  could  live  out
       reasonable facsimiles of their childhoods forevermore; people who
       had completely lost touch with what they used to be,  and  become
       stereotypical  examples  of  what  people  tend to term "computer
       geeks," the sum total of their interest in life having been  nar-
       rowed  down  to that new bug in X windows client-server architec-
       ture and what it would mean to the future of the OSF; people  who
       hadn't  changed  at all and were still busy "getting over" on so-
       ciety   in   general;  but   perhaps  most  surprising,  I  found
       that about ten people I used to know had gone  through  a  growth
       process very similar to my own, and actually succeeded in solving
       their quest and winning the prize we had all sought so badly.

       The correct solution to the "quest," is of course, that there  is
       no  solution.   There  is nothing you are looking for, except for
       you, and once you realize this, you win the big prize,  you  find
       yourself, and get to live happily ever after.

       After re-discovering that a group of us seemed to thoroughly  en-
       joy  each other's company, we eventually ended up having a weekly
       meeting where we'd  get  together  and  discuss  various  topics.
       Foremost  amongst them was one that sprung up with increasing re-
       gularity as the weeks went by:  getting back  onto  the  frontier
       from  a  completely different angle.  As years went by many of us
       had started completely different lives;  some  were  in  college,
       others  had  started companies or gone to work for companies they
       had once laughed at, and still more had started careers complete-
       ly unrelated to anything they had been doing in the past.  But it
       had became clear that what we really wanted to do  was  take  the
       incredible  promise  that  had  been shown to us during our youth
       when we had walked along the edge of a new reality unfolding, and
       channel  it  into  a positive direction that would benefit every-
       body.

       As we found out, the hacker underground had  continued  with  its
       headlong  dive  into  oblivion.   The  underground  had basically
       ceased to exist after the Operation Sun Devil sweep.  Just  about
       the  only "hacker systems" still in existence were those catering
       to the teenagers whose priorities focused on  ripping  off  phone
       companies, collecting VMB codes and pirating software.

       While this was slightly depressing, it was also a  foregone  con-
       clusion  and  didn't  cause too much surprise.  The main focus of
       our interest was what had become of the mainstream telecommunica-
       tions nets -- given half a decade to evolve, something really ex-
       citing must have happened by now.  The hardware that we ended  up
       sitting  in  front  of,  would have made possible an undreamed of
       variety of possibility when taken  into  context  with  what  was
       available in the past.  We were used to 64K Apple ][+ systems, or
       maybe tricked out //e's with 128K and PC's with 640K, and now  we
       were  sitting  at  a friend's house in front of a NeXT and an SGI
       Indigo.  When you thought about the fact that 7 years ago you had
       paid about $8,500 for a 4.5megabyte Corvus hard disk, and now you
       could buy an entire NeXT with that . . . it was, fantastic.

       Before taking off on our expedition of present-day Cyberspace, we
       had  spoken  with  some of our friends who were familiar with the
       terrain, and received somewhat  tepid  responses  and  a  general
       dismissal  of what was going on right now.  Thinking the attitude
       was one of standard arrogance which we had all gone  through,  we
       didn't  pay  too  much attention to it and set out to explore the
       new electronic nervous system of the world.

       A couple of hours later it became shockingly apparent  that  most
       of  the potential of the bright new technology that now existed .
       . . that could have been used to create and house an infinite ex-
       panse  of  innovation, communication, and pooling of thought, lay
       dormant.  Thus far it had seemingly been  utilized  to  construct
       gigantic file servers that advertised their existence by digitiz-
       ing porno magazines and  editing  their  dialup  lines  into  the
       resulting scan.

       All those wonderful places that we had travelled in the past, and
       had  dominated  the landscape only half a decade before . . . had
       indeed been razed, paved over, and replaced by an  endless  elec-
       tronic  expanse  of  snap-together tract houses that littered the
       landscape with numbingly identical  systems.   The  frontier  had
       packed  up  and moved back into labs where people like our friend
       with the workstations were working on applications that  wouldn't
       see  the light of day for another decade.  And what was out there
       right now, was strikingly similar to a generic suburb of AnyTown,
       USA.

       Objectively a suburb is not a bad thing, it's planned out,  logi-
       cal, it works, it doesn't need to be any different from any other
       suburb . . . in short, it's functional.  It's also very different
       from  the  environment we had grown up in, where everything was a
       new step further out into the unknown, where anything could  hap-
       pen, and nobody had ever been there before.

       From our vantage point it looked as if the explorers  had  indeed
       gone  back to their ivory towers (or haunted dungeons as the case
       may be), and a lot of used car salesmen had set up shop  cranking
       out the snap-together tract houses, when they realized they could
       make more money doing that, than say, selling used cars.

       It was truly a mind blowing experience to witness for  the  first
       time,  systems that actually advertised themselves based upon how
       many lines they had, or how much storage.  Attitudes  that  would
       have  garnered  a great deal of scorn and derision -- and in gen-
       eral made your advertisement the brunt of a lot of jokes --  were
       suddenly the accepted way in which systems chose to differentiate
       themselves from one another.  Looking at them, it  came  down  to
       the  fact  that the only difference between system (A) and system
       (B) was that one might have 16 lines while the other had 24,  and
       system (C) was inherently superior to both (a) and (b) because it
       had 32 lines and 4 gigabytes of storage  (used  to  house  10,000
       programs,  out of which the same 200 are downloaded over and over
       again, as the rest of the junk sits there gathering dust).

       Even more frightening, on a system that had  10,000  messages  on
       it,  an  average  of  9,800  will be echoes of FidoNet or RIME or
       whatever-net, leaving a grand total of about  200  messages  from
       the  actual members.  And frequently those 200 messages date back
       a year and a half . . . a couple of years ago a BAD one line sys-
       tem  had that many messages in a week.  A good one in a couple of
       hours.

       To a lot of people Cyberspace has become one big file server .  .
       .  strikingly  similar  to what television has devolved into.  An
       entirely passive place where you press  buttons  and  get  enter-
       tained, no thought required, no input necessary.

       Realizing that we were merely skimming the surface, and might not
       know  the  whole story, we spent a couple of weeks becoming fami-
       liar with what had happened, and what the situation  really  was.
       Based  upon several hundred conversations with various people who
       were involved with the current scene, we arrived at a  couple  of
       very basic conclusions.

       In order to run a system in the  present  environment,  and  have
       users,  you  needed to have a pile of hardware, many phone lines,
       some sort of marketing and bookkeeping ability, a  lot  of  spare
       time, coupled with infinite patience to put up with people, since
       they are now your customers, not just your friends, and  if  they
       call  you  up asking the same goofy questions you cannot take the
       phone off the hook or tell them to go away.

       Where running a system in the  past  had  meant  giving  up  your
       second phone line, it presently involved a great deal of interac-
       tion with the department of Red Tape, and  Bureau  of  Tasks  You
       Really  Aren't Interested In.  This opened the door to the "used-
       car salesmen" people, since these were things they were  used  to
       doing  every day.  Conversely, it has almost universally been our
       experience that the guy who is a Unix wizard and can  work  magic
       with networking and programming, lives in deathly fear of signing
       paperwork, filling out his tax returns, or figuring out where  he
       parked  his car.  And finally, the creative person whose main in-
       terest is making fantastic places, lacks the time and patience to
       write  the  code, and certainly has no interest in administrative
       duties.

       In effect, most people with the desire to  do  something  better,
       did  not  have  the  necessary $25-30k laying around, and even if
       they did, they would never act on it because they'd be forced  to
       spend  a great deal of their time doing a hundred things they had
       no interest in doing.  So the online world had begun to  be  dom-
       inated by the file servers, who didn't really have much of an in-
       terest in being anything other than file servers, since that made
       the  most  money  with the least effort, and anybody with $25,000
       could toss up a snap-together MeSsyDOS  based  system  with  very
       little technical ability required.

       Thus began the era of the "tract-houses"  where  advertising  and
       atmosphere  consisted  of  rattling  off  hardware statistics and
       number of phone lines, along with the number  of  shareware  pro-
       grams  available  for  downloading (an extremely amusing concept,
       considering that there are literally TERABYTES of  free  software
       available  for  the  taking  on  ftp sites all over the Internet,
       which cost NOTHING to download from).

       With the exception of two of three bright  lights  that  had  the
       right idea and were trying to do something different, most of the
       electronic frontier had indeed vanished.  And it isn't so hard to
       see  where  a couple of years from now the same advertising agen-
       cies that sell brain-dead ads designed to induce you to crave one
       brand  of beer over another, will be pushing SYSTEM X, because IT
       HAS 10,000 phone lines!  Call now and  leave  your  mind  at  the
       door!


       Transcendence
       -------------

       It has generally been our experience that people are neither stu-
       pid,  nor shallow.  Everyone has the potential to think for them-
       selves, to overcome adverse situations, and contribute  something
       to this world.  When placed in situations that offer these possi-
       bilities, people tend to come through with surprising regularity.
       In  a fairly short amount of time you end up with a group of peo-
       ple doing something they themselves would have deemed improbable,
       if  not  downright impossible, if you had asked them at any other
       point in their lives.

       Virtual Reality has the potential to become the single  most  im-
       portant  development  in the history of human evolution.  It is a
       technology that holds the promise  of  absolute  liberation.   It
       also  holds  the possibility of turning the world into the rather
       grim one that is the basis of  much  Cyberpunk  fiction,  a  dark
       place where technology is used to oppress and suppress people.

       By its very nature, it is very  difficult  to  ever  imagine  the
       latter.   In  order  to  have a police state, you need to amass a
       certain amount of power, yet Cyberspace is the ultimate  equaliz-
       er.   It  is  a place where one person can wield as much power as
       100, 1,000, or 100,000 people.   Physical  limitations  are  cast
       off,  and in the event of conflict the playing field becomes that
       of mind vs. mind.  Sheer numbers and a mob rules mentality  cease
       to have any meaning when you can create infinite numbers of elec-
       tronic organisms to do anything you want them to do.

       The hope is that it will never sink to such a level of stupidity.
       Games  are  wonderful,  but  there  is  no need for conflict, all
       struggle tends to be internal conflict that has become  external-
       ized.   When  you  want  to convert the sinners, or prove you are
       right, all you're doing is having an argument with yourself.  The
       beautiful  thing  about  Virtual Reality is the fact that you are
       free to do that, for as long as you need, to work out  that  par-
       ticular set of problems -- without harming anybody.

       There is only one ultimate truth, which is BEING  HAPPY  and  ex-
       periencing LOVE.  How you choose to perceive it is a very indivi-
       dual matter.  While it might mean blue to you, orange to that guy
       over  there,  and  silver to me, it's all the same thing.  In the
       real world if we held fast to those beliefs and behaved as people
       have  been classically shown to behave, then we'd be killing each
       other over who has the right idea about love . . . Cyberspace al-
       lows  everyone  the  freedom  to  co-exist without harming anyone
       else's world-view or belief system.  And if you truly  are  given
       the opportunity to live in an environment conducive to you happi-
       ness, then if that heretic who thinks orange is the  answer  were
       ever to show up at your front door, chances are you would be able
       to tolerate him, and even, "God" forbid,  express  the  love  you
       claim to espouse.


       Phantom Access - The Ethereal Takes Shape
       -----------------------------------------

       There was never any solid dividing line where we decided that  we
       really  wanted  to  put together a system where we could have the
       freedom of expression we wanted, with the  ultimate  goal  really
       being  the  very  simple  one of pushing the envelope further and
       further out there.  All of us had obligations, school,  and  per-
       sonal  commitments that would be difficult to integrate into this
       major change of plans.  But inevitably the  mass  exodus  out  of
       college,  the  avoidance of unnecessary responsibilities, and the
       initial stages of planning were set in motion.

       Six months later we had close  to  a  hundred  thousand  dollars,
       top-down  system  design,  a fully designed multi-user simulation
       engine, a general idea of what we would do and how  we  would  go
       about it, a team of our friends together one more time, only this
       time as a real corporation, and over one  thousand  megabytes  of
       the  collected history of Cyberspace, dating back to systems that
       existed in 1979, that had been laying in dusty boxes filled  with
       old Apple DOS 3.3 disks.

       On April 1st 1992 MindVox  went  into  its  alpha-testing  stage.
       Which  loosely speaking means that we put everything together and
       watched it disintegrate repeatedly as the last 300-400 bugs  were
       worked out of the system.  Since then it has been running in pro-
       tected environment mode with a collection of our friends and  as-
       sociates crash-testing the software, suggesting where rough-edges
       might be smoothed, and generally having a good time creating some
       of  the  atmosphere while trying to destroy the software in every
       conceivable way so that everything is solid upon inception.

       In May of 1992 MindVox will open it's doors to  the  public.   As
       much  as  we'd  like  to say that it's going to completely change
       everything, it will not.  All it can do is allow people who  feel
       in  rhythm  with this vision of the world to converge together in
       one of the most interesting nexus points of Cyberspace.   To  ex-
       tend  their reach, explore new levels of experience, and interact
       with some of the pioneers in the fields of computer science, net-
       working,  science-fiction,  music,  the arts, politics, religion,
       altered states, and future reality.

       Our main priority is to create and  continuously  evolve  an  en-
       vironment  that fosters an atmosphere of dynamic creativity, cou-
       pled with access to information and ideas, that present you  with
       a far greater spectrum of possibility than you might otherwise be
       able to access.