Going away

Ah, it seems this was handled automatically.  Sending another copy for 
info in case it didn't get through.

------- Forwarded Message Follows -------
From:          Self <Single-user mode>
To:            w3c-wai-er-ig@w3.org
Subject:       Unsubscribe
Date:          Wed, 17 Mar 1999 09:22:26

Hi, can somebody please unsubscribe me from this list?  I'm going home 
soon, and I really can't keep up with it all anyway.  I'm recovering 
from a bad fever and I'm a week behind with everything, including 
important coursework that I have exams in soon.

I am aware that some of the people on this list either have jobs in 
accessibility, or could make it their major project, or something.  I'm 
not like that.  I'm just a student and I wrote the access gateway 
initially for myself out of necessity.  It is not an official project 
and I simply don't have the time to sit here talking about it all day, 
especially considering that it takes me longer to do course-related 
things than it does fully sighted people.  Besides, I don't consider the 
gateway to be a major achievement.  It's just a little utility program 
that I wrote because I needed it.

Of course I would like others to be able to use the gateway, but 
securing this is taking too much of my time and I'm going to have to 
stop.  I'd love to go into accessibility properly when I graduate, 
although I doubt if I'll be able to get into anywhere (especially if I 
get a low result).  The only access research group I know of is in Keio 
University in Japan but I can't get a response from them or the 
university.

With regards to listing the options up front, I don't think that people 
who don't like exploring will like reading through loads of options 
before starting either.  And if people haven't got the time to explore 
then the gateway will probably be of little use to them, if indeed they 
found it in the first place.

About Altifier, I'm afraid this is taking up much more time than it 
should.  It is not simply a matter of integrating; it is also a matter 
of making sure that Altifier is in a suitable condition to be put on the 
Internet in the style of the gateway.  This means verifying the 
security, ie. is there anything that someone could put on a web page 
that will make it crash, overrun a buffer, or something?  The way it has 
been written does not make this kind of verification easy.  Also there 
are almost certainly other bugs to fix - it is currently obviously 
taking advantage of some quirk in the compiler that Michael was using, 
for example, and I'm supposed to figure out what that quirk is and where 
it's used.  I can do all of this, but it takes time, something that at 
the moment I do not have much of!  Michael, if you want to integrate 
Altifier with the gateway, please look at the gateway's extension 
mechanism; you'll probably be able to do it a lot quicker than I would 
since you are already familiar with the Altifier source.  But no way am 
I putting it on anyone else's machine in its current state, because of 
the security and robustness issues.  You'll have to host it if you want 
it.

So please somebody take me off, as I'm just going to have to stop.

Regards

-- Silas S Brown, St John's College Cambridge UK http://epona.ucam.org/~ssb22/

"Though science may explain the world, we still have to explain science"
 - Paul Davies, in "Superforce: The Search for a Grand Unified Theory of
 Nature"

Received on Wednesday, 17 March 1999 04:27:32 UTC