To: "Richard N. Freedman" <rnf@null.net>
Subject: Re: The Internet - Technical Topics 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Wed, 01 Jan 1997 17:03:20 EST."
             <32CADF28.BA4@null.net> 
Date: Mon, 06 Jan 1997 13:20:40 EST
From: elliot


Hi,

          Lacking access to Athena, I request that you send me, if
          convenient, the "actual topics and specific schedule" as
          mentioned in the IAP Guide.

You should also be able to read it from the SIPB home page
(http://www.mit.edu/) when it's finalized. There may be some changes,
but this is the schedule we're looking at now:
7:00    Introduction to Internetworking
(break)
8:10    The Internet Protocol (IP) 
(break)
9:00    IP Addressing and Routing
 
Wednesday
7:00    The Domain Name System (DNS)
(break)
7:50    The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)
(break)
9:00    Applications: e-mail & the Web
 
Thursday
7:00    Hardware
(break)
8:00    Internet Engineering
(break)
9:00    Technical Internet Tools
9:30    IP Multicast & the Multicast Backbone (MBone)

          I have a specific goal. It may be that your lectures will
          teach me what I need to accomplish this goal, perhaps you
          can use a suggestion for a topic, or perhaps the answer is
          simple enough that you will take the time to tell me
          directly how to do it.  I have a list of addresses in an
          Access database. I can manually enter addresses one by one
          in an Internet form
          (http://www.usps.gov/ncsc/lookups/lookup_zip+4.html) to find
          the nine-digit zip code associated with that address.  How
          can I write a program (in compliance with Internet
          conventions regarding robots) to automate this query
          process?  It might be that my problem generalizes to the
          issue of how to write Internet robots, and that may or may
          not be a subject you wish to address in a general forum.

The part on the web may help, though it will be fairly short and not go
into very much detail (it'll only be about a half hour), as will the
general background on TCP.  You could write the program fairly easily
using a Unix scripting language with network support such as Perl; I don't
know how easy this would be to do under MS-DOS or Windows.

Regards,

elliot


