[Ilugc] [Admin] Test HTML email

[Ramanraj K]

Prabhu Ramachandran recently wrote:
 > Sorry about the junk test mails but I'm hoping this works so we don't
 > end up with null-body messages in the future.

and earlier wrote:
 > There was a problem with the HTML->text conversion that I've hopefully
 > fixed.  Try again and things should work (even without turning off
 > HTML mails).

There may be other problems too that may be worth taking note.

I had the same problem earlier[1], with Mozilla, when I included a
portion of the "hello" program binary opened with emacs into the body of
the message, to make a point.  The reason might be that some junk [in
the sense, it makes no sense to us] characters may get included in the
body of the message, which some how instruct Mozilla to truncate the
message.  A simple test message, composed afresh, with one or two words,
entered only through the keyboard without cut and paste from
other programs, should help to rule out other errors.  Sangharsha may
also check the "Sent" folder, to confirm if truncated messages were
sent by Mozilla.

BTW, I am curious to know what Lord McCauley [Lord Macaulay?] spoke in
the British Parliament, just before English was introduced as a medium
of instruction in India, that Sangharsha has been trying to let this
list know. Many a legal system, including ours, is built upon the
philosophy of men like Jeremy Bentham and Lord Macaulay. If those
philosophers had had access to the tools we use today, the kind of legal
system we might be using may have been very different.  Very
unfortunately, with the kind of ridicule philosophy receives these days,
it may take eons before any useful reforms or changes become possible.

Before this is ticked off as OT, two bits of info:
Tim O'Reilly wrote [2]:
<quote>
I like to tell people the story of the Mechanical Turk, a 1770 hoax that
pretended to be a mechanical chess playing machine. The secret, of
course, was that a man was hidden inside. The Turk actually played a
small role in the history of computing. When Charles Babbage played
against the Turk in 1820 (and lost), he saw through the hoax, but was
moved to wonder whether a true computing machine would be possible.
</quote>

Then, Charles Babbage sought for funds from the British Parliament, to
build his mechanical computing device, at about the same time as
Macaulay was making his speeches, and this is well documented at
http://fourmilab.ch/babbage  Babbage recieved a little support
initially, but a lot of ridicule later.  His mother alone advised:
   "My dear son, you have advanced far in the accomplishment of a great
object, which is worthy of your ambition. You are capable of completing
it. My advice is--pursue it, even if it should oblige you to live on
bread and cheese."  Babbage never saw a fully working computing device,
but we are fortunate to live during a period when we can take much for
granted. The same issues that troubled Babbage still remain:  Can we 
please have a super computer like Thunder for our country ? AFAIK, that 
question has not even been debated in our Parliament yet. It is time we 
broke the repeating cycles of history to make substantial progress.

Cheers!
Ramanraj.

[1]
http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/pipermail/ilugc/2004-July/011411.html ->trunc.
http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/pipermail/ilugc/2004-July/011413.html ->trunc.
http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/pipermail/ilugc/2004-July/011414.html ->OK.
[2]
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/opensource/paradigmshift_0504.html