FAQ for Oslonett's "WWW Meets The 1994 Winter Olympics"

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Please note that the contents and opinions expressed herein are the opinions of Oslonett, not Skrivervik Data nor Sun Microsystems.

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The mirror site at sun.com is nice, but the files there are not up-to-date

This is a temporary problem and will hopefully be solved by Sun and Oslonett soon. The files are created here in Oslo every 15 minutes. [Fixed on February 18]

Where do you guys get your news from? Do you run an electronic newspaper?

No. We get our news from NTB - a Norwegian news wire which sells their news to newspapers and anyone else willing to pay for it. The technical aspects of the delivery- and formatting process are described elsewhere.

Why are some of the pages so poorly formatted?

Good question. Please note that basically no formatting is done at all! We receive raw news messages from the NTB wire, and embed the text within <pre> ... </pre> tags. It is impossible to do any automatic formatting, since the raw data contains no markup at all. We do our best to post-edit everything though.

What does the word "KUNSTLØP" mean? You seem to need a K12 level English course?

Maybe we do, but note that NTB deliver Norwegian news only. Before the project started, we hoped to receive results only, not results mixed with comments and other noise from the journalist on duty at the NTB desk.

We have set up a translating filter which originally was designed to only translate names of countries, event names and other common phrases likely to appear on the lists. This Perl filter soon turned out to be more or less a natural language translator. We do some post-editing to correct funny translations, but we are not able to cope properly with every single file. Please live with it and feel free to learn a couple of Norwegian words :-)

Btw, "KUNSTLØP" is the Norwegian word for Figure Skating.

Why do you post the same message 2 or 3 times on your result indexes?

We don't - the news wire do. If you take a closer look, the duplicate messages are slightly different. Maybe the journalist made a typo in the first message and creates a new message. We try to remove duplicate messages from the indexes now and then. However, the Next and Previous links will take you to every message as before.

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How do you make the images? Do you have your own reporters up at Lillehammer?

No. We do screen captures on an Indy workstation with video-in cards. Analog video is fed directly into the Indy from a VCR which only acts as a tuner.

Why do you mostly capture portraits of Norwegian athlets?

Do we? We try to shoot the winners or the athlets who are most likely to win. Look at the Medal Standings - they should give you an impression on how the images are distributed within the participating countries.

Can I ask to you make a shot of my favorite athlet and favorite event?

Yes, you can and we will try, but we won't guarantee anything. It is difficult for us to capture events which take place after office time (timezone MET).

What about the images and copyrights? Is it legal to capture the TV signals and publish the images on the Internet?

Thank you for asking - indeed a very interesting question. CNN's lawyers will say "no, it is not legal". But so far, we haven't captured CNN, only the Norwegian channel NRK.

In Norway - and probably in most other countries - there is an amendment called "The Right To Cite". Naturally, this is most used within the field of regular text publishing and also electronic text publishing. We think it is feasible to also claim the right to "cite" information in other forms - typically audio, images and video. Authoritative opinions on this as well as legal practise in this field in other countries are welcomed.

I haven't seen an image of the Olympic logo yet. Where is it? It should be easy to capture?

Please don't ask. The five rings are probably one of the worlds best protected trademarks. We don't want the IOC lawyers on our backs.

In the Image Archive you mention MBONE. Can you transmit your VCR stream to the MBONE?

No. This would be to ask for trouble. Screen captures of single frames are one thing, video tapping is something totally different.

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When using your WAIS engine, I got strange URLs back from Mosaic. They don't work and seem to include the text "www.ncsa.uiuc.edu:8001".

Our WAIS servers are not registered within the directory-of.servers.src at CNIDR, and your WWW client has not direct WAIS support, so it is using the WAIS gateway at NCSA. Tell your sysadm to compile lynx and Mosaic with direct WAIS support. You need the freeWAIS src distribution, but the whole thing is trivial. I don't know anything about PC clients, sorry. You can get more help on WAIS together with WWW and Mosaic, by reading the WAIS tutorial from NCSA.

Where do I find current Point and Medal Standings?

NTB post these lists now and then so they will appear on the daily listings. You could either use the WAIS engines to locate them, or you can just let your WWW client search in the chronological list of events. We will eventually try to make a pointer to the current Medal Standings list.

The GIF images are not transmitted properly, only the upper half of the image show up, the rest of it is distorted

This is (at least I think it is) because of network contention and temporarily HTTP timeouts. Between Feb 14 and Feb 15 (~27 hours) our Plexus server has logged ~130.000 connections, or - more accurately - HTTP GET commands. As an exercise, find out how many GET commands this is pr. minute. I am not kidding!

A US mirror site is already set up by the time you read this. Please use this if you are within the US or Pacific Rim.