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I*nternational S*ociety for B*ayesian A*nalysis

Setup Instructions for Automatic Interaction with bayes-an

The method we are advocating for automatically adding to the bayes-an archives is essentially the same as the method that your browser uses for displaying images, or PostScript documents, or sound files.

The form for puting a document at bayes-an produces a document with an special mime type: application/x-xxx. This means that you can specify a special "viewer" for processing the data created by the form. This "viewer" is a program that does the job of preparing the directory to be put at bayes-an@xxx.lanl.gov and mails the directory with the correct header.

Even if you don't understand the above paragraphs you can still setup your UNIX system by following these four simple steps:

  1. Load the Perl script xxx.pl and put it in a directory on your path. Make sure that you save the source and NOT the one looong string without new lines that appears when you first click on xxx.pl above. Usually the browsers give you several options about the format you want the file to be saved in your local disk, choose html or source.
  2. Load the csh script uufiles and put it in a directory on your path. As in 1 you want the source not one long line.
  3. Create or edit the file .mailcap in your home directory and make sure that it contains the line:
    application/x-xxx; xxx.pl %s
  4. Edit the file xxx.pl and follow the instructions described on the first lines of that file.
If you are on a network with other people who are likely to use the bayes-an archive it makes sense to make the installation only once for the whole network. Ask your system administrator to read this file (the one you are reading now) that has URL
http://omega.albany.edu:8008/ISBA/magical.html

Currently we are only offering scripts for UNIX systems but the method based on mime contents is general and it can be implemented on any operating system with a WorldWideWeb browser. If you write a working script for performing the operations in xxx.pl for either MS-windows or Mac or VMS or... email your solution to us and we can include them with this file.

carlos@math.albany.edu