james is in town and man is he pissed

ok, james the mail server - now I know you unix folks (I was one a long time ago) think everyone can remember things like listf (is that right?) but uh, we can't. brain cells die and they go even faster when we get old and try to remember old tips, tricks and techniques... ya know how many cobol compilers I used to have to know? way-old-school...


so I load james and unzip it...that worked. now i start poking around the documentation and barely figure out how to get the wrapper going, so I made a batch file to do that called gojames and offjames to flip those switches (author might have included those bats) and began poking around docs some more and can't figure out how to configure this thingy or even run it and know it is running. a friend found it in start-controlpanel-admin services and so ok...we see it running but with absolutely ZERO parameters from me so we are pretty sure it isn't doing anything but eating up memory... so i invoke offjames and ok, i can turn it on and off but what the heck does it do? no configuration....


so the first question is ... how do we configure this puppy such as admin and a gazillion other little switches and then


...the real question becomes... do you folks ever write documenation that a 12 year old can follow? when we write data entry guidelines (i.e. for a hospital staff), we have to assume most of the girls are high-school drop-outs and write stuff that anybody can hack through, one-step-at-a-time...


the apache nightmare i just went through is a classic example of docs that are spread all over the place and it takes two weeks just to get an organized view of what to do... now i get to eat james for a while...

a good book with really simply idiot proof instructions would be a blessing since it appears that most of the developers in town (me too sometimes, i must admit), forget that new readers and users don't always have the same skillsets going as the developer.

right now i am getting an error message java is not recognized as an external command which kinda tells me a path is wrong or I don't have java but uh, don't cha think old james boy might have checked to see if I had the right environment and let me know WHAT to go get, i.e. missing java interpreter. bill gates is bad enough with HIS help manuals and messages. I would have thought you new breed of unix heads would learn we all need to be hand fed by now.


so... anyone here got a step-by-step on james and pa-leeez don't point me towards his docs because that is a royal merry-go-round...


gracias and good morning all...

 

 

 

 

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