Edit: Disregard the previous title of this post. Embarassingly, the title/command was syntactically incorrect.

For those who didn’t spend their misbegotten high school study halls sending email messages in raw SMTP via telnet, the title is a command telling an email server that we would like to send out an email from the address enlight1@cae.wisc.edu. Which, incidentally, is exactly what the Maquina Fountain is finally able to do again. I finished my email code this evening, and, except for one test case, it even works! So to those on the enlight-members list, I apologize if you get bombarded with “Come clean out the filters” emails next spring when 8 billion petals fall from buds directly into the fountain, but hey- at least it’ll stop flooding the sidewalk.

For anybody who followed the above link to the “Art of Engineering” page that may be wondering if this is truly anything new, seeing as that webpage reports such capability already existed, let me bring you up to speed. (If you’ve already heard the story, by all means skip this paragraph.) The fountain used to be able to send email, around the year 2000. Then everybody who knew anything about it disappeared, leaving their code, a model of the fountain, and little else behind. For the past couple years Enlight has been recreating the original work to get the fountain up and running again, doing things like rewriting all the code, physically repairing the aging sytems that run the fountain, and actually documenting how it all works. As part of that process, I wrote my email code, and so now that piece of the puzzle is ready to be restored. So hopefully I won’t waste your time repeating that tale anymore, and hopefully you’ll have a little better frame of reference when I mention working on this or that for the fountain.

Ok, everybody who skipped the above paragraph, start reading again.

Ende.