#set TITLE = "User comments and feedback
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.ig >>
<br>
<img src="new.gif" border=0>: There is now a
ploticus news group.  Visit: 
<a href="http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ploticus">
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ploticus
</a> &nbsp;
There is no need to "join" the group unless you want to receive all
postings in your inbox.. anyone can read or post.
<br>
<br>
I will forward ploticus correspondence 
received at steve@sgpr.net to the above news group as appropriate.
If you send me an email that you do not want posted to the news
group, please let me know. 
<br>
<br>
Selected correspondence will continue to appear on this page.
<br>
<br>
<br>
<a href="../gallery/gall.real.html">Sampler of web sites that use ploticus</a>.
<br>
<br>
<hr>
<br>
<br>
30 Jul 2001
<br>
Steve,
<br>
Just wanted to pass along a note of thanks for developing Ploticus.
We've found it to be of great use. Just thought you might want to know
about an open source product we've released, FEZ-Probester, that invokes
Ploticus.
<br>
<a href="http://www.fezhead.org/">http://www.fezhead.org/</a>
<br>
--Eric Boyd (eboyd@solidspeed.com)
<br>
<br>
<hr>
<br>
20 Jul 2001
<br>
I have created a new web graphic that may be useful for monitoring regional
climate patterns at major SRCC cities or to be passed to SRCC clients. The
graphs can be obtained from the "Climate Monitoring and Assessment" section of
the SRCC homepage ("Climate Graphs for Cities in the Southern Region") or
directly from:
<br>
<a href="http://www.srcc.lsu.edu/monitor_temp_precip.html">http://www.srcc.lsu.edu/monitor_temp_precip.html</a>
<br>
<br>..Also
<a href="http://www.srcc.lsu.edu/Reports/Allison/">here</a>        and
        <a href="http://www.srcc.lsu.edu/temp_precip.html">here</a>.
<br>
<br>
These graphs are updated each day at 6:10am using data through midnight of the
previous day.
<br>
In the future, we will be making this a dynamic product that can be obtained
for any COOP location in the region using a 'map' interface to UCAN data
extraction routines.
<br>
The software package used to create the graphs is called PLOTICUS and is a
fairly easy package to use. It can be used to create a variety of different
plots that may prove to be very beneficial for us.  If you're interested, you
can view the different types of plots that can be created at the PLOTICUS
homepage:
<br>
http://www.sgpr.net/
<br>
I have attached the PLOTICUS script file to show how these plots are created.
<br>
ps - The rainfall from Tropical Storm Allison shows up very nicely at the
Houston, TX site, as well as the Baton Rouge and New Orleans sites.
<br>
<br>
Kevin Robbins (krobbins@mistral.srcc.lsu.edu)
<br>
<br>
<hr>
<br>
<br>
7 Jul 2001 
<br>
Steve,
<br>
Thanks for making ploticus available.  I started using ipl after you
posted it to comp.sources.unix way back when but I haven't had
the need to do publication quality graphs for a couple of years.  It
was good to be able to pick up ploticus and be producing great
graphs in no time. I apreciate some new features (or features I don't
recall from last time). Catslide makes space so error bars don't
overlap and gif output makes it easy to stick nice graphs in
powerpoint.  I'm about to try rangebar's features for calcuating
medians etc on the fly rather than making SPSS do the
calculations, spending time reformating the output and then
invoking ploticus.
<br>
thanks again
<br>
Andrew Baillie (abaillie@laurel.ocs.mq.edu.au)
<br>
<br>
<hr>
3 Jul 2001 
<br>
<br>
Hello,
<br>
we deployed ploticus to draw some currency information graphs at
<a href="http://www.banky.sk/graphs/">http://www.banky.sk/graphs/</a>
<br>
We are pretty content with ploticus with just one exeption: when using
'tightcrop: yes' and 'scale' lower than about 0.65 in 'proc page', images
are cropped too much - see 
<a href="http://www.banky.sk/graphs/nbs-eur-ms.png">http://www.banky.sk/graphs/nbs-eur-ms.png</a>
<br>
<br>
But
I hope we solve that soon.
<br>
Thank you very much for such great application.
<br>
Sincerely
<br>
Peter Hanecak (hanecak@megaloman.com)
<br>
<br>
<hr>
<br>
<br>
30 Jun, 2001 
<br>
Hi Steve,
<br>
Here is the link to the ploticus binaries. Please note that I have only
compiled version 1.41 for pl and pltab only. It would be nice to have
compiled the png stuff also, but I am quite happy for the moment to have the
features available in 1.41 which are not in 1.39. If you do have some demand
for the png binaries, let me know. I would like to add that Ploticus is a
fantastic package, as you already know. We are currently using it to fully
automate the monitoring CPU activity on our server, in addition to file
transmission statistics. Our capacity management will soon include disk and
database usage.
<br>
Thanks & Regards,
<br>
Michael Katsilis (mkatsili@socs.uts.edu.au)
<br>
<br>
<hr>
27 Jun 2001 
<br>
Hey Stephen!
<br>
Just wanted to drop you a line to say thanks for the software.
Ploticus was a very quick, easy
and robust solution for our web page.
<br>
I am using ploticus through Perl CGI scripting to create GIF images of
stellar spectra, allowing users
to get a "quick glance" at a spectra before downloading it's large (and
cryptic) pixel file.   Ploticus was so well suited for this task that
our data formats never changed to accommodate Ploticus.  With a few
tweaks to the script file, I had GIF's being generated on the fly and
delivered to web browsers within a day of development.
<br>
You can find this demonstration at our site
<a href="http://stellar.phys.appstate.edu/">http://stellar.phys.appstate.edu/</a>
(through Online Spectra) where we
are releasing data from our spectroscopic survey of the nearby stars (
within ~120 l.y.) through NASA's Nstars project.  For more info, please
visit the web page.
<br>
If you would like more info on how this Perl CGI creates and serves the
GIF images with Ploticus, you can e-mail me at mcfaddnm@pm.appstate.edu
<br>
Thanks again!!!
<br>
-Michael "Flip" McFadden (mcfaddnm@pm.appstate.edu)
<br>
<hr>
18 Jun 2001 
<br>
<br>
Awesome! That is very cool. My only reservations before about using ploticus
was it being non-GPL. (I used it anyways... Gnuplot can't compare for plotting
actual data.)
<br>
I also have something sort of neat you might want to put up on the examples page:
<br>
<a href="http://mierle.com/keir/icqstats/">
http://mierle.com/keir/icqstats/</a>
<br>
That is the generated statistics and graphs. The sources can be found at
<br>
<a href="http://mierle.com/keir/icqstat.tar.gz">
http://mierle.com/keir/icqstat.tar.gz</a>
<br>
I would suggest checking out the README for more information. (And bring
a sense of humor!)
<br>
Thanks in advance, 
<br>
Keir Mierle (keir@mierle.com)
<br>
<hr>
<br>
15 Jun 2001
<br>
<br>
I'm sending this message again because my dumb mail system here ate the first one I think...sorry.
<br>
<br>
I have the UNIX emulator DJGPP in my windows path, I also used DJGPP to compile Ploticus.
<br>
<br>
You can download it from http://www.delorie.com/ for free.  
You need the "base" package and the "fileutil" package.  
Lots of other stuff there but you should not need it to just use Ploticus.
<br>
<br>
You also need "RM".  "CAT" is kind of like DOS "Type" and "Copy", while "RM" is like "Delete".
<br>
<br>
There are other unix emulators out there, so if you can just find CAT and RM and 
put them in your path you might get it to go.
<br>
<br>
I did have to change the source code because the virgin Ploticus code passed 
a parameter that the DJGPP RM didn't like.
<br>
<br>
Steve, I was actually working on this stuff when the message came in after not 
touching it for a while (it was working).
<br>
<br>
I've exceeded the DOS command line limit of 127 chars for what I need to pass my 
scripts on the command line.  I'd like to see Ploticus take the standard "@" redirection 
files.  "@file".  I'll probably take a stab at doing this
code.  Think there is some thing to do it in the http://www.snippets.org/ site.
<br>
<br>
Bob Paddock (BPADDOCK@joy.com)
<br>
<br>
<hr>
<br>
<br>
14 Jun 2001 
<br>
Dear Stephen,
<br>
<br>
This e-mail is to express my enthousiasm about ploticus. As a matter of fact
I came to your webpage quite exidentally, I was "lured" there by your getgui
program but that didn't get much attention (I'm sorry) after I saw ploticus.
<br>
<br>
I don't know how long and with howmany people you've been working on this
but this is quite something and I'm surely going to use this frequently.
<br>
<br>
I've started my company something like a half a year ago and decided that I
would be running Linux for a large part on an ideological basis (If I had
done paid work in the extra time it cost me to setup everything under Linux
I would have erned enough money to buy the most expensive office suite ever
made). And it's paying off. The high "scriptability" is making my life a lot
easier and I can now produce impressive documents with hardly any effort
(well other than the actual contents of the document ofcourse). 
<br>
<br>
What was missing was a good plot generation program. I don't want my
documents to look like "Oh, he's using gnuplot" so I had the intention to
write my own plot generation software in "off-time" to get out of the
gnuplot stage. This development is now arrested due to your great effort
called ploticus.
<br>
<br>
Moreover your software fits very nicely in the scriptability tradition as
you prove with the the mouse phenome project. 
<br>
<br>
I am considering a "credits" section in my report layout, I haven't made a
decision about it yet, if so you'll be in it.
<br>
<br>
Again a very big thank you and keep up the good work.
<br>
<br>
Kind regards,
<br>
<br>
Jacco C. van Muiswinkel (jacco@vanmuiswinkel.nl)
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<hr>
<br>
11 Jun 2001 
<br>
Hello Steve !
<br>
I'm working towards the end of a proof-of-concept
project incorporating Ploticus 1.40. What happens is
that I have set up a perl script to act as an email
"bot". It takes a product number in the subject line
as a parameter, and then uses perl DBI to get results
from a MySQL database. The results are then input to
Ploticus which then produces a graph that is returned
as an email reply. Ploticus works really well in this
- I'm very impressed!
<br>
<br>
What I need to know is, do you have any plans to make
Ploticus a daemon ?  I have done some timing figures
on my PC and the system("pl ..." ) takes approximately
0.5 seconds ( but it's only a Pentium 150/48Mb). I
would think that most of this overhead is perl doing a
system call and loading Ploticus. I reckoned that if
Ploticus was a daemon, most of the overhead would be
removed - this is pure theory of course :-)
<br>
<br>
Even if it's not part of the Grand Design, it works
really well- thanks for a great piece of software!
<br>
<br>
Best wishes,
<br>
Peter Garner (ptgarner@yahoo.com)
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<hr>
5 Jun 2001 
<br>
Why not release Ploticus under the GPL?
<br>
I understand your want to stop potential forking, but your current
license seems rather opposed to the open source philosophy.
<br>
Thanks in advance, 
<br>
Keir Mierle &nbsp; keir@mierle.com
<br>
<br>
<hr>
23 May 2001
<br>
First off, I would like to say that Ploticus is an amazing plotting application.  
I was fortunate enough to have found it early on in my search for a plotting tool.  
I love how much control I have over the appearance of a graph.
We'll be using it in our current project (plotting stock data).  
<br>
Jason Kwong &nbsp; jason_kwong@canada.com
<br>
<br>
<hr>
22 May 2001 
<br>
Steve:
<br>
I'm absolutely loving Ploticus... it is pretty easy to pick up and quite
versitile, and it puts out nice looking graphs.
<br>
--Ken Speich &nbsp; (kspeich@cidera.com)
<br>
<br>
<hr>
14 May 2001
<br>
Thanks Stephen! It looks fantastic now!
<br>
I am using Ploticus for my network statistics reporting. The plots looks
great! Much better than the previous graphics package that I have used.
Ploticus gives me more control on the colors, positioning, etc.
Unfortunately, I am handling sensitive data and would not be able to share
my results.
<br>
Thanks again!
<br>
Regards
<br>
Lee Lee Chan &nbsp; lee.lee.chan@sap.com


<hr>
<br>
25 Apr 2001 
<br>
Steve,
<br>
    We've used your ploticus program for making some pie charts in an =
electoral system, it was quite usefull since it wasn't that hard to =
learn how to use it, and it's very fast, even while using an old P 200 =
mmx with linux red hat 6.1.
<br>
I you want to see some examples, go there:
<br>
<a href="http://msa.istari.com.ar/voting/capital/000042/BUECON.htm">
msa.istari.com.ar/voting/capital/000042/BUECON.htm</a>
<br>
Greetings,
<br>
PS: When are we going to have some 3d graphics?
<br>
thanks
<br>
Gabriel E. Pati &nbsp; gpatino@msa.com.ar
<hr>
<br>
26 Apr 2001 
<br>
Hey Steve,
ploticus is really an amazing piece of software.
Good job !
<br>
Dierk (from Germany) &nbsp; Dierk.Laube@jci.com
<br>
<br>
<hr>
<br>
19 Apr 2001
<br>
Hi Steve!
You are doing a great job with Ploticus!
I'd like to know if you are planning to include WBMP as an output format in
a near future version of your product.
<br>
Thanks!
<br>
Claudio F. Alonso &nbsp; F_Alonso@miniphone.com.ar
<br>
PS: Go on, I really like your product!
<br>
<br>
<hr>
17 Apr 2001 
<br>
Thank you for responding, but I've figured it out.  I had xautorange set,
but the line refused to draw to the very last point.  So, I changed the
xautorange to xrange and set the range 20 minutes longer that needed
[instead of it being 2300, I set it for 2350], and now it works.
<br>
Thanks Anyway. Besides that little problem, so far I've really enjoyed
Ploticus.
<br>
Tammy Hower &nbsp; HowerT@hsn.net
<br>
<br>
<hr>
10 Apr 2001 
<br>
I am trying to use Ploticus on an HP/3000 (using the Andreas Schmidt port
of the code).  Very impressive application.  Thank you very much for
providing it to the community free of charge.
<br>
I am having a problem though.  Apparently you can assign a fieldname to
a field but there is no way to use that fieldname in the legend.  As a
matter of fact, as far as I can tell the legendlabel has to be hard coded
into the Ploticus file as a text string constant.  Is there some way in
Ploticus of linking the fieldname to the legendlabel?  Personally I wish
that you could specify an option in #proc legend to say to use fieldnames
for legendlabels by default for all plotted data.
<br>
Thank you.
<br>
<br>
Michael P. Smith &nbsp; MpSmith@hertz.com
<br>
<br>
<hr>
21 Mar 2001 
<br>
Brilliant! Excellent! Works fine!
<br>
This removes the last obstacle for a go to production with
ploticus here at Renault V.I. trucks (Volvo group, also
Mack Trucks). We'll be using it for intranet publication, so
unfortunately I cannot provide a site link.
<br>
Again, thanks a million, excellent package!
<br>
Michael Tonkin &nbsp;mike.lives@home.se
<br>
<br>
<hr>
14 Mar 2001 
<br>
Over the years printing graphs on Unix seems to be a constant test of ones
ingenuity;  I think [ploticus] is going to prove popular ... perhaps even a
productivity benchmark,
<br>
Stephanie Nile &nbsp; stephie@connect.org.uk
<br>
<br>
<hr>
13 Mar 2001
<br>
Hi Steve,
<br>
thanks for an excellent peice of software! Very nifty.
<br>
I have seen on boutell.com that the gd1.3 library should no longer be
used, and hence GIF problems. Therefore, I ported your ploticus to
gd1.8, and altered all GIF code to JPEG code. Most of it is
'%s/gif/jpeg/g' type stuff, although I also altered the 'Emember' calls
and whatever I could identify as GIFfy code.
<br>..<br>
This all compiled without warnings. I've only tested on Linux, but I'll
be trying out an IRIX and SunOS port later this week. As I probably know
the Ploticus code better than the actual functionality, my tests have
been rather lightweight, but I will try out some more stuff tomorrow.
Your use of the gd was very clean, so the porting was quite easy.
<br>
Yes, this all needs to be cleaned up, but I've only spent 2 evenings on
it.Do you wish me to send your code revisited?
<br>
Thanks again !
Have a nice day!
<br>
Michael Tonkin &nbsp; mike.lives@home.se
<br>
<br>
<hr>
27 Feb 2001
<br>
Hello mister Grubb,
<br>
We are using your programm for our website www.kweekvijver.com to =
display ambient temperature and light level.
<br>
I have a LDR and NTC resistor connected to a joystick port on a Suse 6.4 =
Linux Petium 200Mhz system. The system polls the joystick port =
continuously and updates a MySQL database (v. 3.23.33)  everey minute. I =
have another Linux system running Suse 7.0, which act as a slave during =
replicating the MySQL database. On the second machine a Perl script =
running as a CRONTAB job checks the database every 5 minutes, extracts =
the data, does some pre-processing and parses it to Ploticus (v.1.40).
<br>
Then the Perl script uploads the PNG graphics to the website. Then every =
visitor to our <a href="http://www.kweekvijver.com">www.kweekvijver.com</a> 
site can check the actual temperature =
here in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. I'm still working on a page =
(including some pictures) to show people how it works!
<br>
Thank you for your nice program and greetings from a cold Rotterdam.
<br>
Jaco,
Kweekvijver &nbsp;  k5r@kweekvijver.com
<br>
<br>
<hr>
23 Feb 2001 
<br>
Steve,
<br>
Kudos goes to you.  We have implemented your program letting our users know
the beam current of our neutron source here at Argonne National Laboratories
here in Chicago, IL.  I would like to extend my thanks to your development
of the program and would like to give you a link to our page that is using
it currently.  The link is 
<a href="http://grinehart.pns.anl.gov/operations/">
grinehart.pns.anl.gov/operations</a>.
This link will be changed in the next month or so, but I will keep you posted.
If you would like to add this to your list of real world examples please
feel free.  I also could give you our script to use as an example as well,
if you wish.  Thanks again and have a great weekend!!
<br>
Matthew Kwiatkowski &nbsp; mattk@anl.gov
<br>
<br>
<hr>
20 Feb 2001 
<br>
Thanks for the program, it looks like it will save me a lot of time, 
if I can get around these few learning curve problems of mine.
<br>
Bob  Paddock &nbsp; BPADDOCK@joy.com
<br>
<br>
<hr>
19 Feb 2001
<br>
Hi Steve,
<br>
Thanks for this good program!
<br>
I produced the whole test suite on my MPE box without problems ... and
already published this on my Ploticus web site
<a href="http://www.hillschmidt.de/ploticus/">www.hillschmidt.de/ploticus</a>.
Did you receive a copy of the HP3000 Newswire article:
<a href="http://www.hillschmidt.de/gbr/ploticus-0009.html">www.hillschmidt.de/gbr/ploticus-0009.html</a>.
<br>
Thanks again for the great work!
<br>
Best regards, Andreas Schmidt, Germany &nbsp; aschmid4@csc.com
<br>
<hr>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
15 Feb 2001
<br>
Steve,
<br>
I've been using your ploticus for about 2 months now.....GREAT WORK!!!  It's
made my life much easier for "automagically" plotting statistics from our
data network.
<br>
I do have one suggestion.  I have had problems creating graphs with multiple
lineplot's.  The problem being that the yautorange can only take 1 field to
determine the range (So, if the other field is not relatively close, then it
appears outside the bounds of the graph).
<br>
To help with this, I've updated the autorange.c file, to allow you to
specify a comma delimited list of values for the datarange option.
<br>
Anyway, hope you can make use of this code in a future release.
<br>
Thanks
<br>
Paul Totten  &nbsp; pwtotten@nortelnetworks.com
<br>
<hr>
<br>
<br>
<br>
14 Feb 2001
<br>
Dear Steve,
<br>
I use your program pl for plotting graphs and I like it very
much but I seem to be running into a little bug. When I use
the #proc rangebar and give a negative value for the barloc
parameter it doesn't seem to plot in the right way....
<br>
Is this a known bug, or am I doing something wrong?
<br>
Andre van der Hoeven &nbsp; Andre.vanderHoeven@dutlru2.lr.tudelft.nl
<br>
<hr>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
10 Feb 2001
<br>
Hello Mr. Steve Grubb,
<br>
I am planning to use ploticus in my current project to generate graphs.
This tool is really amazing & I am sure that I'll achieve what I want
through this tool.
<br>
I need to draw "Staked Area" & "Percentage Staked Area" filled line graphs
with legends. Ploticus provides
me this facility in bar type graph but not in "Filled Line Graphs", Is there
any way to do this?
<br>
I am attaching the sample of graphs I am looking for.
Please suggest me the way to achieve this.
<br>
Vijay Hajare &nbsp; Vijay.Hajare@in.bosch.com
<br>
<hr>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
26 Jan 2001
<br>
Steve,
<br>
Ploticus is a great package. I have tried many different open source and
commercial plotting packages to display climate data but none handle dates on
the dependent axis as well, and as simply, as Ploticus.  You can view samples of
the plots i am creating at: <a href="http://www.srcc.lsu.edu/temp_precip.html">
www.srcc.lsu.edu/temp_precip.html</a>
<br>
... more will follow using your Ploticus package.
<br>
I am having a small problem with [handling missing data]..
<br>
If I can get past this missing data problem using 'lineplot' I will be
generating near real-time plots that will depict the current status of
precipitation across the Southern U.S.  This would be a great addition to my
site. Any help that you can provide will be appreciated.
<br>
Thanks again for a great package....
<br>
Kevin Robbins  &nbsp; krobbins@mistral.srcc.lsu.edu
<br>
<hr>
<br>
<br>
<br>
31 Jan 2001
<br>
hello steve.
<br>
you did a nice job on ploticus and it make ploting graph in unix more
exciting as ever.
<br>
Kek Yee Teoh &nbsp; &nbsp; kek.yee.teoh@intel.com
<br>
<hr>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
22 Jan 2001
<br>
Hey Steven,
<br>
You are terrific and great! ( your software, too :) )
I must say that I have done a lot of research looking for graphical software that I could use in C/C++ programs.
I even considered MATLAB C/C++ compiler but I think that your software has better graphical implementation 
and layout.
<br>
Now, I have a next question but it does not create much of a problem to me: right now my C code saves the code 
for ploticus to the file and then I am using
system command to create a gif picture. Is there a way to create a gif or png pictures on the fly? (without 
storing the ploticus code to the file and then calling
"pl -gif  *.html" ) 
But even if this is not possible I still think that this is a great software and 
I have been using this for a while. 
<br>
Thanks again
<br>
Pawel Szczodruch &nbsp; paul.szczodruch@libhamp.com
<br>
<hr>
<br>
<br>
<br>
22 Jan 2001
<br>
Dear Steve,
<br>
searching for a tool to create bar and pie charts on a Linux system, my search
on
the web came up with Ploticus. I downloaded the latest source code and it
compiled
out of the box on my Linux system running RedHat 6.1. I am really amazed about
the quality of the plots. As it turned out, the pltab utility is very handy to
create nice EPS-files of my wave statistic data tables.
<br>
A small problem concerning the [eps] bounding box occurred ..
In general it would be very good, if the bounding box always starts with  0 0.
In this case the EPS-file could be easily translated into the PDF-Format for use
with pdflatex.
<br>
Hope this helps to improve your great tools
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Lothar Birk &nbsp; &nbsp; L.Birk@ism.TU-Berlin.de
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07 Jan 2001
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Hello,
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I have written a program called PHPLOT which creates graphs in PHP.
I started writing it in 1998 and its grown since then. PHPLOT is only
for server side dynamic graphs - and just for display on a web browser.
www.phplot.com  PHPLOT is  freeware and released under the GPL and PHP
licenses.
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I came across your site and noticed that ploticus is an excellent program
and has a scope that I can only hope PHPLOT will have some day.
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My question:
You have a very nice gallery of examples of how to use ploticus.
I was wondering if it would be ok to some of the data from the examples to
create a similar gallery of examples for PHPLOT? I really like the fact
that the data is "real" in the sense that it comes from real world examples.
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Sincerely,
A Ottenheimer afan@jeonet.com
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