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Did you ever want to chat with a couple of friends at once at other universities or locally here at Columbia and decided against it, either because you were unwillling to pay for a conference calling feature, or because you despise the fact that the only mail you get is your extremely large phone bill ? Well, there is an application called ytalk which allows you to eliminate such concerns and is available through your CUNIX account.
USAGE
The basic usage is simple: At the dollar sign type "ytalk ". The will allow you to talk to anyone locally, i.e., here at Columbia, or far away, i.e., at another university. Of course, they have to be logged in as well as you, when you initiate the ytalk request. The easiest way to check is with an application called finger. By typing finger and their email address (or email address and location if at a different university/server), you will be given information about whether or not they are logged in, and perhaps on what specific server they are on. If you were to type: $ finger abc123 and abc123 was someone who had an account here at Columbia and was logged in, you would receive information about which server he/she was currently on. With this information, you could initiate your ytalk request. Below are two examples of what you might type at the dollar sign:
$ ytalk [email protected]
$ ytalk [email protected]
WHAT HAPPENS
If in fact the person you wanted to ytalk is currently logged in, you have not enterend any typographical errors, and ytalk states "Rining abc123..." the person will receive information on his/her screen stating:
Message from Talk_Daemon@aloha at 21:00 ...
talk: connection requested by [email protected].
talk: respond with: talk [email protected]
NO PROBLEM
If he/she then types in either talk OR ytalk [email protected], you two will now be connected in a ytalk session and eliminate those dreaded phone bills. Chat for as long as you like and when you're finished, hit the control and C keys together to quit. Play around with it enough and you will see that you can talk to more than one person at a time (hint: hit the escape key), add a friend, delete a friend, etc. Have fun! (You also might want to check out the IRC article also in this issue.)
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