Instructions for Using the New AIM Server

Since the AOL server has stopped letting us connect, we have written a new AIM server and installed it on one of the departments computers.  We would like you to use this server instead of the AOL server to complete the lab.  To use our server:

• Change your program to create a FLAP Connection to our server rather than AOL's.  To do this, add two more arguments to the construction of your FLAPConnection to indicate the server and port to which you'd like to connect.  The construction should look something like this:
  
  new FLAPConnection(username, "rome.cs.williams.edu", 9898)
  
  Rome is the name of our server, and 9898 is the port used for TOC.  You should not need to make any other changes to your program to switch servers.
  
  
  
• Since our server does not know about your AOL accounts or communicate with AOL at all, a few little things will be different:
  
  
• You do not need to create or use existing AOL accounts.  Instead, you can log in to our server with any user name you like, provided that no one else is currently using that name and that you supply the password "cs134". 
  
  
• You will become buddies with everyone else currently logged into our server and receive buddy update when anyone logs in or out of our server.
  
  
• Since you can no longer exhcange messages with standard AOL client programs (AIM, iChat, etc.), we have installed "PurpleCowChat" on the lab computers for you to use.  This is our own solution from Lab 4, modified to connect to the rome.cs.williams.edu server.  You may use this chat program to communicate with the version you are writing.  To run PurpleCowChat:
  
  
  • Open a Finder Window on a lab computer.
  • Click "Applications" from the column on the left side of the window.
  • Open the "Utilities" folder.
  • Open the "PurpleCowChat" folder.
    
  • Double click on "PurpleCowChat" program.  (It will open a small white window behind the purple chat window -- you can just ignore or close that white window.)
    
  • To log in as multiple users at the same time, simply double-click on the icon again to launch an additional version of the program. 
    
  
  We will put a copy of PurpleCowChat on the web page to use on your own computer once we see that it is working well for people in lab.
  

Please let us know if you have any trouble using the server or chat programs.