Chinese Information Processing (I): Basic Concepts and Practice

1. Chinese Information Processing (I): Basic Concepts and Practice Unit 5: Asynchronous Communication

2. What is asynchronous communication • The word ‘asynchronous’ means ‘not real time’. • The opposite is ‘synchronous’. • When you communicate through the Internet with somebody else, the other party does not see your messages until they receive them.

3. Asynchronous communication includes: • Email • Listserv (mailing list) • Newsgroups • Discussion board

4. Email • Eamil applications • Pine for Unix • Eudora • Outlook Express • Microsoft Outlook • Netscape Messenger

5. Pine • PINE is a text based email application for unix system. To use PINE, you need to telnet to the server. Type pine and you can read email. All the commands such a send, delete save and exit must be typed in. Since PINE resides in your host server, you can use telnet from anywhere to do emailing. Telnet CSULB

6. Eudora, Outlook Express, Microsoft Outlook, Netscape Messenger for Windows or Mac • These are email applications that are installed on your computer. • When you connect to the server, these applications will retrieve the messages you have received from the server and transfer them to your computer.

7. When the application is installed, you need some information about your server such as POP configuration. If you have more than one computers and use these applications, remember that the messages retrieved to one computer cannot be transferred to another computer if you select to delete messages after retrieving it. You can choose to leave messages on server so that the other computer can still find them.

8. Three important terms • POP3: Post Office Protocol 3. A protocol that provides a simple, standardized way for users to access mailboxes and download messages to their computers. • SMTP: Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. The protocol widely implemented on the Internet for exchanging e-mail messages.

9. Three important terms • IMAP (4) - (Internet Message Access Protocol) – Is a standard protocol for accessing e-mail from your local server. IMAP is a client/server protocol in which e-mail is received and held for you by your Internet server. You can view just the heading and the sender of the mail and then decide whether to download the mail. You can also create and manipulate folders or mailboxes on the server, delete messages etc. A less sophisticated mail protocol is POP3.

10. Email account set up • When you use email applications, you need to provide some information of your mail server and your email account: • Your username: txie • Your password:  • Incoming mail (POP3): popmail.csulb.edu • Outgoing mail (SMTP): smtp.csulb.edu Use Mail

11. Web mail • Web mail is web based email application which allow you to use any web browser to read and send your email anywhere. • No matter where you are, if you can find a computer with the Internet access, you can use web mail. • Example: CSULB web mail, Yahoo, aol, hotmail

12. Encoding issues • PINE is designed for 7 but ascii exchange and not good for Asian codes (although it is possible). We do not recommend using PINE to read and send Chinese email. • Eudora, Outlook Express, Netscape Messenger (latest versions) allow 8 bit codes transmission and can read and send Chinese text. • Web based mail allows 8 bit coding, thus it allows Chinese text to go through. .

13. Important to remember: • Configure proper encoding before writing. • Choose proper encoding when you read messages • When you see gibberish sometimes, do not panic. The messages may not be damaged. They are just not properly encoded. View Encoding

14. Fixing corrupted codes • Sometimes, you received “bad” email messages. Actually they are not bad, but are not properly encoded, deciphered or corrupted by your email programs. They can be easily fixed. There are several types of “bad” email messages, among which two types are very common.

15. First type: • Looks like: • =C2=ED=BD=CC=CA=DA:=0D=0D • =B8=D0=D0=BB=C4=FA=B5=C4=CE=CA=BA=F2.=C4=FA=B5=C4=CE=C4=D5=C2=CE=D2=B0= • To fix it: • Copy and pasted in http://www.mandarintools.com/email.html and fix it.

16. Second type: • Looks like: • 今天是我國建國五十三周年紀念的大日子。 • They are unicode message

17. To fix it: • Use notepad to open it. Add <html> at the beginning of the message, and </html> at the end. Save the file as xxxxx.htm. Use Internet Explorer to read it.

18. Example • <html> • &#20170;&#22825;&#26159;&#25105;&#22283;&#24314;&#22283;&#20116;&#21313;&#19977;&#21608;&#24180;&#32000;&#24565;&#30340;&#22823;&#26085;&#23376;&#12290; • </html>

19. Listserv • Listserv is a mailing list. • Users can subscribe to a certain mailing list and receives messages sent by other subscribers to this list. • A mailing list has an owner or manager who has some privileges to monitor postings such as deleting postings, blocking some senders and deleting subscribers.

20. The owner must request to create a mailing list from the computer manage to create a list. • Then the list can be announced to the public and subscription is invited. • After one subscribes to the list, he/she can receive postings from other users and send his/her messages to the mailing list. • Chinese language teachers has a mailing list ‘chinese@kenyon.edu’ and they often exchange messages related to Chinese language teaching.

21. How to subscribe to a mailing list? • Send an email message to ‘LISTSERV@TAMVM1.TAMU.EDU’ • Type one sentence in the message body: subscribe CHINANET John Doe • The mailing list server will send you an automatic message informing you of your successful subscription. • When you want to unsubscribe, send an email message again to ‘LISTSERV@TAMVM1.TAMU.EDU’ and type ‘UNSUBSCRIBE’. • You can do the same thing for other mailing list you are interested in.

22. Find Chinese mailing lists at • http://babel.uoregon.edu/yamada/lists/chinese.html

23. Newsgroups • Newsgroup is a ‘bulletin board’ when people post news, comments or any other messages related to the topic of the news group. • Newsgroups, unlike mailing list, do not require subscription.

24. Many of the same techniques recommended for sending Chinese text through email are also applicable when posting news articles containing such text. The transmission of news from one site to another usually follows the same paths as email messages. Some of these paths are not friendly to eight-bit data.

25. Some news groups related to China, Chinese computing • soc.culture.chinaalt.chinese.text.* • talk.politics.china • soc.culture.asian.american • alt.chinese.computing

26. Web based newsgroups • Web based newsgroups do not require your subscription. You directly go to the web site, select a newsgroup and read the news. It is much easier than regular newsgroups. • Try the site http://news.interbulletin.com • Type a keyword, e.g. Chinese and search, you can find many newsgroups related to Chinese.

27. Discussion Board • The function of discussion board is very much similar to newsgroup. The difference is that discussion board is ‘threaded’ which means all the posting are topic related Got to Beachboard Discussion

28. Practice: Task 1 • Send Chinese text through email. • Use your own preferable email account (hotmail, aol, yahoo, etc) to send a Chinese message to yourself and see if you can successfully send and receive Chinese messages. • Use your own preferable email account (hotmail, aol, yahoo, etc) to send a Chinese message to two of your classmates. • Use your own preferable email account (hotmail, aol, yahoo, etc) to send a Chinese message to your instructor at txie@csulb.edu.

29. Practice: Taks 2 • Find some Chinese Newsgroups and read the postings. • Go to http://news.interbulletin.com • Find a newsgroup that interests you. • Find a piece of news in Chinese (either in simplified or traditional characters) that interests you. • Highlight the text, copy and paste it to Microsoft Word. • Use Microsoft Word to format the message (make it a one page document) and print it.

30. Practice: Task 3 • Post and read messages in Chinese in BeachBoard’s Discussion Board • Go to Beachboard. • Go to Communication and Discussion Board. • Post a Chinese message in Unit 5 Asynchronous Discussion. • Reply to two postings.

31. alt.chinese.computing(Discussion group for Chinese computing.) alt.chinese.fengshui(The aesthete of location, Chinese-style.) alt.chinese.story(Telling stories in the Chinese language.) alt.chinese.text(Postings in Chinese; Chinese language software.) alt.chinese.text.big5(Posting in Chinese[BIG 5].) alt.chinese.text.hz(Posting in Chinese[HZ].) alt.music.chinese-popalt.religion.christian.chinesecarleton.chinese-news(-news) chinese.comp.software(Discussion of Chinese softwares and Chinese computing.) chinese.flame(For flaming in Chinese.) chinese.newsgroups.announce(Important announcements of chinese.* hierarchy. (Moderated)) chinese.newsgroups.answers(FAQs etc of chinese.*. (Moderated)) chinese.newsgroups.discussion(Discussions of new groups creation/deletion.) chinese.newsgroups.newusers(Postings by new users.) chinese.rec.magazines.multiworld(discussion on WWW magazine multiworld) chinese.rec.misc(Miscellaneous recreatonal discussion.) chinese.rec.sports(Sports activities and comments etc.) chinese.talk.misc(Miscellaneous talks in Chinese.) chinese.talk.politics(Political talks in Chinese) chinese.test(Testing in the chinese.* hierarchy.) chinese.text.unicode(for flaming in Chinese)