Floating GNU

 
 
Fleud, n. "The Encyclopedia Galactica defines a Fleud as a digital organism designed to do the work of man. The former marketing division of then EUnet Deutschland GmbH defined a Fleud as 'Your Digital Online Pal Who's Fun To Be With.'"

Fleuds!

Applying Softbots to Real-World Problems

We have implemented a bunch of so-called fleuds, i.e., friendly EUnet daemons, that worked on the EUnet FTP server, the WWW and R&D machines that fulfill many useful, but human-wise mindbogglingly tedious tasks, e.g.:

  • Ms Emily (Master Fleud) hosts the Question & Answers data base that can be queried by any UUNET employee.
  • Ms Giggi G. Giggle (Master Fleud) is the moderatress of the GEARS mailing list; a world-wide list for students in Genetic Algorithms 'n stuff
  • Mr Clip (Servo Fleud) hosts the daily news clipping archive that can be queried by any UUNET employee.
  • Mr Firehose (Servo Fleud) hosts a local hypermail copy of the FIREWALL Digest from GreatCircle.
  • Mr Edward E. Ed, III (Master Fleud) records and answers my emails while I'm offline.
  • Mr Job (Master Fleud) posts news articles to various job related newsgroups to announce and point to the UUNET staffing homepage: http://www.uunet.de/jobs/
  • Mr Libri (Master Fleud) sends out reminders to people who forgot to bring back their books from the UUNET library (EUbib).
  • Mr Sunshine (Master Fleud) sends a reminder to UUNET personnel which work too long-and tells them to go home (for this it parses the output of EUmel, the UUNET Meldesystem).
  • Mr Smartass (Master Fleud) silently parses websites using weblint and complains about bad HTML code, missing references, and other things.
  • Mr Valentino (Servo Fleud) sends out valentine's greetings when I'm away...
  • Mr William W. Wiggly, Jr. (Master Fleud) answers emails of contributors to the Webland project. Willy can be reached via webland@de.uu.net.
  • Mr Background (Servo Fleud), is a collective name for so-called Servo Fleuds. These guys keep track of various things, including regular FAQ news postings to various uunet.de.* newsgroups.
  • Mr Surf (Servo Fleud), kept track of the gateway to Marketing's Promoland;
  • Mr Hit (Servo Fleud), creates hit statistics for WWW servers.
  • Happy Birthday (Servo Fleud), birthday reminder service.
  • Marvin (Paranoid Fleud), answers electronic mail requests sent to marvin@research.de.uu.net

A research paper for submission to the International Journal of Rejected Manuscripts on the highly adaptive, object-oriented, evolutionary fleud architecture & design of these autonomous software agents (hence Softbots), is in the works [1].

[1] Heitkötter, J. (1996) "Fleuds! How a bunch of friendly daemons got out of control", submitted to Int'l J. Rej. Manuscr.

 

  

Copyright © 2001 Jörg Heitkötter, all rights reserved. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.