W I N D O W A T C H
WindoWatch The Electronic Windows Magazine of the Internet
Volume 1 No.6 August 1995
W H A T' S I N S I D E
WindoWatch The Electronic Magazine of the Intenet
Vol.1 No.6 August 1995
Editorial
A Delphi Tutorial Herb Chong
HTML Shareware Tools..An Overview Paul Kinnaly
Quarterdeck's Web Author * A Product Review Jerome Laulicht
More HTML...Authoring Tools Phil Leonard
Microsoft's Internet Assistant Jim Plumb
Bellying Up to the WEB for Fun and Profit Lois Laulicht
Search and Ye Shall Find-Maybe! Peter Neuendorffer
Stanley Does Windows! Bob Miller's Stanley
System Commander * A Product Review John M. Campbell
Windows Aspect..A tutorial Part 5 Gregg Hommel
Is NetCruiser by NetCom in Your Future? Kyle Freeman
Time and Chaos * A Product Review Frank McGowan
Idiots-Redux Bob Miller
Super Programmer Peter Neuendorffer
A Brief History of the Computer Jim Gunn
Confessions of a ModemJunkie Leonard Grossman
Why WinZip...A Retrospective Bernie
The Shareware Plug of the Month
* * * * *
WindoWatch The Electronic Windows Magazine of the Internet
Volume 1 No. 6 August 1995
An Editorial
The Electronic SuperHighway Evolving
It's an International Flea Market in the making! Let your fingers do the
walking and let your modem carry you into the virtual yellow pages. It
can become the newest edition of the Home Shopping Channel hawked by
main line vendors of reputation and capital. As in life, the one thing we
can count upon is change, and when on the Internet, change is very
rapidly. To some, unregulated change will lead to chaos while others
equate regulation of the Internet with destruction of the Internet .
My own evolving view is that if the Internet is going to shrivel and
shrink, it will be of trite with commerce fueling the banal and
commonplace. There were those who warned us very early in the game that
the demands and practices of business was going to “do in” the Internet.
It was this group who insisted that no advertising be allowed and
probably invented the term spamming with commercialization in mind. The
Web browser was born and they lost the good fight!
Remember the great hope of television with the expectation of
educational and cultural opportunities? TV became many things unpleasant
but mostly it became boring and predictable! Hence the birthing of
cable.
It's much too early to say that the Internet as we know it, is
defenseless and is going to crumble. It's not too early to suggest that
perhaps the Internet is not an Electronic Super highway but rather a
short interstate with promising features like a very large international
mall. It must be our responsibility to protect users of the Internet
from the hucksters, -of sex, sedition or stupidity, by speaking out.
It is also our responsibility to understand that the Internet is going to
change....many times, to meet the demands of the growing numbers of users
who also have every right to quit and start their own. At this writing,
the Federal government has plans to do exactly that for itself and its
agencies including State and local governments who wish to participate.
There will undoubtedly be many highways with differing goals connected
through gateways each serving their own clientele. As long as the
Internet provides access to the many and seeks to continue its effort to
disseminate information, it will have the vitality to fend off this
upcoming assault with its familiar threat of the marketing of trite!
* * * * *
A Delphi Tutorial A WindoWatch Feature
Building a Small Delphi Application
copyright 1995 by Herb Chong
Borland's Delphi is one of the Windows programming tools being marketed
as a Rapid Application Development (RAD) toolkit. You are supposed to be
able to build applications faster with RAD systems than with traditional
development tools like C and C++, even with their spiffy new interfaces
and IDEs. What distinguishes a RAD tool from other quick, easy to use
tool building environments like Visual Basic is that a RAD tool has much
more power built into it from the beginning. However, it's not enough to
just be able to put together applications quickly. You have to be able to
build applications that can solve tough, real-world problems quickly and
efficiently. Visual Basic is great for prototyping look and feel, but as
soon as you start to use it on larger projects, its limitations become
painfully obvious.
Code reuse is difficult, and speed just isn't there unless you write lots
of DLLs or VBXs, defeating the whole point of going with Visual Basic in
the first place. Visual Basic 4.0 promises to help with some of the group
programming problems, but fundamentally, Visual Basic is not an object
oriented programming language and that means you have to use components
that you can't modify or derive from.
In this tutorial, we're going to build a small Delphi application. It
won’t do much, mostly because if you need to work through tutorials,
you’re not ready to do much yet. The program is going to copy files from
one place to another. That doesn't sound very hard, and it isn’t. Writing
this article took about four times as long as it did to write the
program. But that’s not the point. The point is to get you started with a
small program that is just a little beyond the introductory tutorials in
the Delphi manuals and into areas they don't cover.
Getting Started
Like all GUI tool building, when you program in Delphi, you need to think
about what kind of interface you want for your program. Once you have
your user interface worked out, much of the rest of the programming falls
into place. It doesn't make the details any easier, but at least you have
a better idea of where to start. Object oriented programming in general
requires that you think much harder about how your application needs to
work before you can begin coding.
The interface I chose for this tutorial program is simple. The user sees
either list and copy from one list to another. Each file list can be from
files in the same directory or in different directories. For simplicity
of programming, they can select only one file at a time. Figure 1 shows a
screen shot of the finished program. (Note: all the screen shots for this
article were done on Windows 95.) We’ll spend most of the time building
this user interface appearance before actually writing any code. The
finished program is only 129 lines of Object Pascal code, and most of it
is generated by Delphi itself. With Delphi, you spend more time thinking
about the problem than writing code.
To get started, you need to create a directory for your new project. I
like to keep all the work I do in separate directories under the \DELPHI
subdirectory. I have one called \DELPHI\PER-SONAL and within it, I keep
all my projects. So, create a directory where you want to keep this
tutorial program and launch Delphi. If you have used Delphi before,
you’ll come up with the last project you loaded. Since we are beginning a
new project, click on File|New Project. It shows the Object Inspector, which
lets you set object properties, and the main form for the program. Underneath
it, just barely visible, is the Object Pascal code for the form. Now, save
the project using File|Save Project As. Specify the name you want use for
the first form’s files. If you want to, give the project file a name too,
like "tutorial.dpr".
Before we do anything else, run the program to see what a completely
empty form looks like. Press the F9 key, or use Run|Run to compile the
code and launch the program and you get a completely empty default form.
Although it is hard to tell because of the default color scheme in
Windows 95, there are several undesirable characteristics of this form.
The first is that there is a maximize button. This sample application
doesn’t resize its controls, so allowing the user to click on maximize is
not a good idea. The other thing is that resizing borders are on the form
too. They also allow the user to change the size of the form window. We
need to get rid of both. You do this changing the form's properties using
Object Inspector.
The top drop-down listbox shows which component you have selected. In
this case, it's Form1 and it is of type Tform1. We need to change the
border icons and the border style flags. If you click on BorderStyle,
you’ll see that there is a drop-down listbox of possible settings. Change
the BorderStyle property to bsSingle. The ‘ + ’ character next to the
BorderIcons property signals that there are several settings grouped
together under this property. If you double-click on the property name,
you will see that there are three sub-properties.
The system menu is the icon shape on the left of the title-bar (this is
new in Windows 95). The minimize and maximize buttons are on the right,
next to the close button new in Windows 95. It’s OK to minimize this
application, but not to maximize it. Click on the biMaximize property
and change its value to False. The remaining thing to do is to change the
form Caption property.
This is the text that will appear in the title bar of your form. Once you
do this, run the program again and see what it looks like.
Well, there you have it, a complete Delphi application that does nearly
nothing. You haven’t entered or changed any code, and you have a full
fledged application. What you have done is change properties for a form
so that it runs the way we need this application to run. It prevents the
user from doing things that it's not prepared to handle. The next step is
to put the controls onto the form. Getting the Visual Appearance Right
Once the basic form properties have been set, it’s time to draw the
controls on the form itself. No code need be attached at first. The basic
visual appearance needs to be right first. To add controls to a form, you
need to use the Delphi main Menu bar. The three groups of buttons on the
left allow you to manage Delphi files, projects, and debugging using the
integrated debugger. In the middle and right portions of the window are
the Visual Component Library components, arranged into groups by tabs. The
controls we need at first are from the Standard tab, which is shown high-
lighted in gray. If you hold your mouse pointer over anyone of the icons
in the tabbed bar, you will see the name of the component.
Find and click on the Panel component. The icon indents. This tells you
that when you drag the mouse cursor on the form, you will be creating a
panel where you drag. Make sure the size is approximately what is shown
in the screen shot as we need to fit some buttons and another one of these
later.
Although this is a fine looking panel, it's not got the look we want.
Click once on the panel. The Object Inspector now changes to show the
properties for the panel. The panel is colored such that it appears to be
popped out from the form. This isn’t what we want. Instead, we want the
panel border to look like an indentation into the form with the surface
of the panel the same height as the rest of the form itself. To make
these changes you need to change the BevelInner and BevelOuter
properties. BevelInner needs to be bvRaised and BevelOuter needs to be
bvLowered.
In our application, each part of the file selector has a way to select
the drive, directory, and file that the user wants to copy. We need to
put these controls into the panel we just created. These components are
located under the System tab.
We will need the DriveComboBox, DirectoryListBox, and FileListBox
components. They also have to be grouped together with the panel that we
just created. Make sure that the panel is selected. Then select each type
of component and create them inside the panel.
Select the panel and drag it left and right to make sure that the other
three components are enclosed properly by the panel control. If any are
not, moving the panel will leave them behind. If this happens, cut the
component using Edit|Cut, select the panel, and then Edit|Paste it. This
makes sure that the component is contained within the panel. Make sure to
size the FileListBox component slightly taller than half way so that the
panel's caption is hidden. The other thing to do is to change the panel’s
caption to an empty string.
Once you have all the components arranged properly, select the panel and
do Edit|Copy. Then click on the form so that it is selected, and the do
Edit|Paste. You’ll end up with another panel and set of controls pasted
on top of your other panel and controls. See Figure 12. Click on the
group of controls and drag it into position on the right hand side of the
form.
Click on the drop down listbox in Object Inspector and scroll thru the
list. You should see two of everything except the form itself in the
list. These are all the components in your project. Their component names
are based on the type of component they are. For a project of this size,
it makes little difference what you name your components because there
are so few of them. For a larger project, you will give them more
descriptive names that identify the purpose of the control better. For
this project, we will leave the control names alone. After we add four
buttons we are done with the visual appearance of the program. But-tons
are located on the Standard tab of the Visual Component Library tab bar.
Select it and add four buttons from top to bottom, arranged as in Figure 1.
The easiest thing to do is to create one button of the right size and clone
it three times by copying the first and pasting it three times.
The button captions aren’t right, so you’ll need to edit them. The top
button is named About..., the next one is Copy >>, the next Copy <<,
and the final one Exit!. Make these changes and save your work.
Click on File|Save Project and make sure that the project is saved into
your working directory. Then press F9 and run your program. If you did
everything as you should have, the application should pop up with a
window.
Experiment with the program as it's running. You'll see that you can
click on all the buttons and controls and some things happen. What
happens isn’t what needs to happen yet, but you can scroll the listboxes,
select things, and see buttons go down when you click on them. The visual
interface is done. The only visual aspect left to do is to not highlight
the Copy buttons unless there is a file selected in the corresponding
FileListBox controls. To do that requires writing Object Pascal Code.
That's what we will do next.
Making It Work for Real
All the visual interface design that you did before was fairly easy and
frequently represents most of the design time in a complicated
application. For this application, it probably represents about half the
time if you are familiar with Delphi. The other half of the time will be
spent putting in the right code to make the application work. The first
thing we’ll do is to make the Exit! button work. You can do this by
double-clicking on the Exit! button. Up comes the code editor window.
Once it appears, you can edit the code. The code for the Exit! button
consists of one statement, Close;.
In the same way, you will add the code for the About button. Bring the
form design window to the front again and double click on it. Add the
statement to implement the About dialog. Save the project and run the
program again. You should be able to click on the About button and see
the message box. You should also be able to click on the Exit! button to
exit the program.
Well! It's getting closer to being something real. The next thing to do
is to make the drive, directory, and file components work together. If
you tried them in the version of the program you have now, you will see
that changing the drive letters or directories did not have any effect on
each other nor the file listbox. We’re going to add some code to make
them work together. Double click respectively on the left DriveComboBox,
and DirectoryListBox and add the lines of code to your project.
Do the same for the DriveComboBox and DirectoryListBox on the right. You
should be adding the lines of code as shown in Figure 19. Save the
project and run the program again. This time, when you change drives or
select a new directory, the file listbox contents should change. Hard to
believe it, but we are almost done.
Look at Figure 1 again, where we show the finished application. Notice
that the Copy buttons are both grayed out. This happens whenever there
aren’t any files selected in either file listbox. If a file is selected,
the appropriate Copy button is supposed to become enabled. If a file is
selected in each listbox at the same time, both buttons are supposed to
be enabled. To do this, your application has to both initialize the
buttons to be both grayed, but also to enable and disable the buttons as
appropriate.
First, lets get the button states started properly. To do this, you need
to modify one of the form’s events, the OnCreate event. Select the form
and bring the Object Inspector window to the front. You will see all the
form’s properties by default. If you click on the Events tab at the
bottom of the Object Inspector window, you will see the events list.
Note that no events have event handlers assigned to them. This
means that every event that the form receives is handled by a default
event handler.
Double click on the empty value next to the OnCreate event. You will
bring up a code editor window with a new method. Insert the lines of code
shown in Figure 21. Once again, save the project and run it. You should
see both the Copy buttons disabled.
So, now we have disabled the buttons at startup. How do we enable them?
Well, the buttons should be enabled when a file is selected in the
correct file listbox window. Click on the left file listbox to select it.
Now, in Object Inspector, double click on the OnClick event for the
component. Add the code for FileListBox1as and do the same for the right
file listbox. Save the project and run the program again. The Copy buttons
should enable themselves when you selected a file in their connected file
listbox. In Figure 1, each file listbox has the ShowGlyph property set to
True so that an icon appears next to each file name identifying the file
type. Can do that at this point in the program. Note that when you make this
change to the properties for each listbox, the contents change right away
so that you can see the effect of the change.
The only thing left to do now is to make the copy buttons actually do
something. Once again, you will be modifying the default OnClick
handlers, but for the two Copy buttons. Double click on the event
handlers list to create and add code shown to the code in the edit window.
Since the copy operation is the same for both buttons, but the strings
used to decide which to copy where are different, I’ve decided to use a
simple helper function to do the real copying operation. CopyFile takes
two string parameters as input, the file to copy and the directory to
copy it into. Scroll upwards in the code edit window until you get to the
section of code for private declarations. Add the function forward
declaration.
Now you have to add the code to actually do the copying. Now is where we
do something sneaky. Object Pascal doesn’t have a function that copies a
file from one place to another, and neither does the Windows API,
strictly speaking. However, there is an obscure function seldom used by
most people which does do file copying, and has a bonus function, it
uncompresses files from normal Windows setup disks! It’s called LZCopy,
and you need to add LZExpand to your uses clause in the form.
Because it is a Windows API function, it can’t use Object Pascal strings
directly. We’ll have to convert the strings to Windows API null
terminated strings. Delphi has functions to do this. Add the appropriate
procedures shown to your code. The code allocates several structures
and variables needed to interface with the Windows API. It then converts
the name of the input file and opens it using the LZOpen API call.. Next,
it builds the output file name and opens it too. Then it calls LZCopy to
do the real file copying. Finally, it closes the files and exits. That’s
all there is to it.
Summary
Although it took me about an hour to research, write, and debug the
program, it took more than 4 hours to write this article. Most of it was
spent getting the screen shots right and really describing all that I
did. If I was writing this program without the need to prepare for a
tutorial, it would have taken less than an hour to have a completely
working implementation. I'm not a Delphi expert by any means. I am a good
Windows programmer and know what things are supposed to do. I probably
spent less time designing the program than most people would because I
have designed many things like this before. Delphi is extremely easy to
use for people who are familiar with Visual Basic. It’s a bigger change
for people who have been using Borland Pascal or any of the C++
programming tools. Even, so, with only a few hours experimentation, you
can become very productive in Delphi.
For Further Development
The program we built was a small one. It and this tutorial supplements
the introductory material included with Delphi. If you want to extend
this program to make it into a truly useful utility, you need to make the
window and controls resizable, and perhaps even include multicolumn
listboxes for the file list display. You can also put in checks for
copying over the same file name, renaming on conflicts, selecting
multiple files, and so on. There are dozens of things that could be done
to enhance it. I'll leave most of them up to you. This small program is
the beginnings of a file manager/viewer application, much like what ended
up being called File Manager in Windows.
Herb Chong has many credits in his vita. It's always a treat to carry his
work because he understands what is needed to communicate and teach. His
many contributions include articles in Windows Sources, The Cobb Group's
Inside Microsoft Windows and of course, WindoWatch. Herb is the WindoWatch
Contributing Editor.
ww
* * * * *
An Overview of HTML Shareware Tools
HTML Editors
copywrite 1995 by Paul Kinnaly
HyperText Markup Language is, in simple terms, the "programming language"
of the World Wide Web. But don't let that reference to programming scare
you away. HTML is really very simple and straightforward. All it does is
"markup" an ASCII text file with "tags" which tell a Web Browser -like
Mosaic or Netscape- how to display the file.
Let's look at a quick example. Here is a very simple HTML tagged file:
=====================================================
A Simple HTML File
This is a Level One Heading
This is the first paragraph.
And this is the second.
=====================================================
The HTML tags are enclosed in brackets like this: < > and will not be
displayed by a browser while the remaining text is what will show on the
screen. Displayed in a browser, the above HTML text would look something
like this:
=====================================================
A Simple HTML File
This is a Level One Heading
This is the first paragraph.
And this is the second.
=====================================================
More complex markups can allow the browser to display lists, definitions,
forms, pictures, etc. As very specific standardized tags must be used to
generate each of these elements, the casual user might be discouraged
from trying to write HTML. But, with the explosive growth of the Internet
and the escalating interest in the Web, increasing numbers of people want
the ability to create their own Home Page - either for personal or
corporate use. To ease that process, a growing number of commercial,
shareware, and freeware tools have appeared. These tools relieve the user
of much of the burden of learning long lists of tags and markup rules.
HTML tools fall into three broad categories. The first of these are
"template tools". These packages are designed to work with a specific
Windows-based word processing program. Typically, they act as an
"add-on", integrating themselves with the program, providing additional
menu selections, and using many of the host program's text formatting and
display capabilities. Currently, the vast majority of such tools are
designed to work with Microsoft's Word 6.0 although template tools for
Word 2.0, AmiPro, and WordPerfect also exist.
The second category of tools are the "stand-alone" editors. These tools
are actually mini-word processors. They have basic text editing
capabilities, and their menus and button bars concentrate on providing
the user with a quick and easy method of "marking up" text.
The third category are the converters; these are usually mini-programs
that read in a file in one format and output a file in another. While
similar features are part of several of the Word 6 template tools, these
programs are generally designed to work with files that are not in a
specific word processor format. Most are based on converting from Rich
Text Format or PostSript to HTML.
The primary focus of this article will be on the second category of HTML
tools, the stand-alone editors. Other articles, in this and future issues
of WindoWatch, will highlight some of the other HTML tools available.
Most of the standalone editors allow you to import -or type- a plain text
document. Using the menus or buttons available in the specific program,
you then highlight a given section of text and “mark” it in accordance
with your menu selection. In the simple example at the beginning of this
article, for example, typing “This is a Level One Heading”, highlighting
it, and selecting “Heading Level 1” would cause the
and tags
to be placed on either end of the highlighted text.
Unless otherwise stated in the individual descriptions, each of these
editors has the ability to insert into a text document the markup tags
for all basic HTML functions as prescribed in the current HTML 2.0
specifications. Such tags include those marking Head, Body, Title,
Paragraph, Heading (size), Lists, Links, Anchors, etc. They do not
necessarily support insertion of all styles, forms, special characters,
or other less commonly used elements of the 2.0 specifications; those
that support these elements will be specifically identified. Similarly,
those that support the as yet incomplete HTML 3.0 specifications or the
special Netscape extensions to the 2.0 specs will also be identified
below.
Sources of information about or copies of each of the editors described
are included in URL (Uniform Resource Locator) format, in brackets, for
use in checking out any programs that appeal to you.
HTMLed 1.2e
This comprehensive $39 shareware program by Peter B. Crawshaw is
available from [ftp://pringle.mta.ca/pub/HTMLed/]. The author has provided
several means of entering just about every HTML tag used under the 2.0
specification with one notable exception - forms. Besides comprehensive
menus, the program has buttons for the most common markup tags and has the
ability to utilize multiple “floating button bars” that can overlay the
document being edited. One of the unique features of this editor is its
ability to load and save files in either DOS or UNIX format, the latter
saving one very important step in creating a document that must reside on
a UNIX-based system. Creation and use of a template for standardizing HTML
documents is also supported. Other menu selections include Elements,
Lists, Links, Styles, and Entities. This latter menu offers the unique
capability of formatting entry of not just common characters, but allows
the user to input any ASCII character by value, supports the extended c
aracter set of foreign language characters, and even handles various
accent markings such as Umlaut and cedilla. Other menu selections include
the capability to define the displayed fonts (for editing purposes only),
create a custom floating toolbar - on which one can include some tags not
otherwise included in the program, and conversion of the MOSAIC.INI file
into an HTML document.
The program does no error checking of its own, but does allow linking to
a user-selected Browser. This allows you to quickly see the effect of any
markup and correct it if necessary.
The unregistered shareware version is fully functional, but includes no
HELP file. Its weaknesses are primarily in its lack of direct support of
the form function of HTML 2.0 and both the proposed HTML 3.0 and Netscape
extensions to HTML 2.0. While this limits the fancy stuff, a user with a
basic knowledge of HTML would be hard pressed to find a more
comprehensive stand-alone editor for basic HTML documents.
HTML Assistant 1.4
The freeware version of a commercial program, HTML Assistant is written
by Howard Harawitz; information may be obtained from
[http://fox.nsth.ns.ca/~harawitz/] and the program itself is available
for download from [ftp://ftp.cs.dal.ca/htmlasst/]. The freeware version
is limited to files no larger than 32k, a generous size. This program has
a relatively limited menu, but a wide array of buttons, including all the
basic functions. An optional second button bar contains quick picks for
further functions. One special button is called "User Tools". It comes
defaulted to a Form tool and has the capability of adding in other user
designed tools as desired. This feature allows the program to adapt to
newer HTML tags which are not directly supported in the basic program.
Like most of the other programs reviewed, HTML Assistant can call up your
favorite browser to check your markup. A nice feature of the editor is
an option to “Autosave before test”; this ensures your current working
text is saved in a temp file to be used whenever you call up your browser
to view the effects you have created. The program also has the ability to
Autoconvert both Mosaic.ini and Cello bookmark files to URL lists which
may then be pasted into your HTML text. A detailed HELP file for the
program eases the process of creating HTML text for new users although
the program itself performs no error-checking.
The $99.95 commercial version adds several features to the freeware
version including automatic page generation - this version was not
reviewed.
A surprising weakness of the program is the lack of a pre-defined
capability to insert special characters, foreign characters, and accents.
Nor does the program support HTML 3.0 or Netscape enhanced functions in
its basic form. The User Tools capability will make up for some of
this, but presupposes that the user knows enough about HTML to properly
build such tools. Despite several nice features, the program requires a
fairly extensive knowledge of HTML to be used effectively to construct
more than just basic Web pages. If you have that knowledge, however, its
interface offers you a speedy and fairly powerful tool to put that
knowledge to use.
HTML Writer
Version 0.9beta4a is the most recent version of this program which may be
obtained from [http://lal.cs.byu.edu/people/nosack]. The author, Kris
Nosack, labels the program “donationware”; there are no time restrictions
or other limitations on its usage but you are encouraged to send a
donation, in an amount of your choice, to the author. The version number
gives a clue that it is still “under construction”, but what has been
built so far is quite comprehensive.
An extensive button bar contains all the common HTML markup functions -
including a Test button to call your favorite browser to check your work
and a Strip button which will remove all HTML tags from the page. The
menu includes virtually every HTML 2.0 feature which is not directly
supported by buttons, including forms. Many selections open dialog boxes
that are used to construct the desired element. The program even has a
unique “URL Builder” function that helps ensure the all-important syntax
of this item is properly done. An extensive list of special and foreign
characters complements the other features of the program.
The program contains a template feature, allowing the user to create up
to four different templates for “boiler-plate” items of text. It also
offers the user the ability to save files in UNIX format, should that be
needed, as well as the option of an “auto-save on test”. One of the
nicest features for a beginning user is a brief HTML tutorial which is
included in the program’s HELP file!
While the program appears virtually all-inclusive in its support of the
HTML 2.0 standard, it does not support any of the proposed HTML 3.0 or
Netscape features nor does it offer the user the capability of “adding
in” such support - as several other programs do. But, with the
comprehensive support of the 2.0 standard and the “beta” status of the
program, it is likely that such features will be forthcoming in future
versions. All in all, it is a well-done program particularly for
beginning-to-intermediate HTML users.
HoTMetaL 1.0+ (SoftQuad)
Another freeware version of a commercial program, HoTMetal is available
from [http://www.sq.com/]. Of the editors mentioned in this article, this
one is unique in providing a quasi-Browser view of the HTML source
document without the necessity of running an external browser. Although
the view is not truly WYSIWYG, it is a pretty realistic depiction of what
a true Web Browser will present. Unfortunately, it has another
distinction: its size. Unlike most of the other editors discussed here,
which typically ZIP to less than 200k and consume less than a meg of disk
space in use, HoTMetaL's self-extracting ZIP is almost 2.2megs and,
unzipped, its main executable alone is 1,870k! So any space saved by not
requiring a Browser to preview/check your work is lost to this program
itself. The program can also call an external browser to see exactly what
your output will look like on the Web.
HoTMetaL is best described as a rule-based HTML editor; its default is to
accept only those tags that are fully compliant with its standards.
Unfortunately, its standards do not seem to fully comply with HTML 2.0 -
leaving the user in the unenviable position of not knowing whether a
given error is caused by a bad HTML or just a rules interpretation by
HoTMetaL. Yet the user must either create the HTML file in this program
or import a previously marked up file through the rules checker to see
the quasi-WYSIWYG output while editing. If the document doesn’t pass the
rules checker, the user can either import it as a text document -losing
the WYSIWYG view- or allow HoTMetaL to strip the document of any markup
it doesn’t understand, an action that can render the document unusable if
the program and the document’s author don’t quite see eye-to-eye!
Unlike most of the other editors discussed here, HoTMetaL has no button
bar and its menus are relatively limited. The principal insertion means
is the use of the Markup, Insert Element (Ctrl-I) menu selection. This
brings up a window with a comprehensive scrolling list of HTML elements,
including those for both forms and tables. Another menu selection,
Markup, Insert Character Entity (Ctrl-E), opens a window listing
virtually every symbol, foreign character, and accent possible. One click
on the desired symbol causes the appropriate markup to be inserted.
The program includes a basic tutorial on HTML - written as a series of
HTML documents - and instructions on how to modify the rules used by the
program to allow it to accept most of the extensions to HTML 2.0 used by
Netscape. This process, unfortunately, requires editing the program’s INI
file.
While this program has its strengths, its size, finicky rules
interpretations, coupled with a fairly slow and cumbersome method of
marking up text, make it one of the less desirable editors for general
use.
WebWeaver 4.0a
This is a relative newcomer to this field and information on it may be
obtained from its author Mark McConnell at
[http://www.tufts.edu/~mmcconne/]. WebWeaver displays a fairly limited
button bar across the top of the screen and a second series of buttons
down the right side. Along the top you have buttons for Bold, Italic, and
Underline, three types of lists (Bulleted, Numbered and Descriptive),
Levels 1-6 of Headings, Paragraph and Horizontal Rule. The Right Buttons
are for Link, Picture, Anchor, View, and Strip. What makes these few
buttons different is that many of them open up large dialog boxes
specific to the function selected. For example, clicking on the
Descriptive List button opens a dialog box in which the entire list is
constructed. Several buttons are used to mark appropriate elements and
even a mini-help section is visible. When the selection is complete, the
Done button inserts the entire selection into your document at the
current cursor position. This allows the construction of these parts of
your document in a clear and straightforward manner, as a separate
element.
While the buttons are limited, they do cover the more common elements of
most HTML documents. The menu selections cover most of the remaining
ones. A couple of points worth noting: This is one of the few editors
that includes selections for such HTML elements as , ,
, and . It also has a menu selection for a variety of
Netscape-specific elements such as and . It is, however,
severely lacking in its capabilities to insert special characters or
foreign language letters and accents.
Clearly this program is a "work-in-progress". Many of the menu selections
bring up a dialog box stating "This is not available in this version".
Its shareware registration price of $8 reflects this fact. While I cannot
recommend the program in its current form, its innovative usage of dialog
boxes marks it as one to watch in the future. The author is currently at
work on a new version, which might be available when this is published.
WebWizard 1.1 (ARTA Software)
This fascinating program is included here by default. It is, after all, a
stand-alone. But unlike the other software discussed above, WebWizard is
not an editor. It is, rather, an automatic HomePage generator! Modeled on
the "wizards" included in much new software, WebWizard takes you through
a multi-step, menued process which actually creates a basic HomePage,
properly formatted and tagged. The program allows you to enter your own
personal text, a picture, and links to your favorite Web sites. While you
have no choice on the layout of the resulting file, the end product is a
highly usable - if somewhat plain - Web HomePage. Using the WebWizard
creation as a starting point, the more advanced user can edit the HTML
file further to modify or expand the basic page as desired. The program
might best be described as “optional shareware”; while there is no
requirement to register, a $10 contribution to David Geller, the author,
brings the user the promise of information on updates and enhancements.
The program itself is available from [http://www.halcyon.com/webwizard/].
Recommendations...
As I examined each of these programs, I could not help but think how very
nice it would be to have this feature from Program A plus that feature
from Program B plus... But that may be possible. Most of these programs
are under on-going development and most are available for free or a very
small cost. Thus a user can easily get and try several programs to get
the comprehensive features he or she desires. Better yet, most of the
authors are easily reachable via Email. A message to one requesting a
missing feature or suggesting a better way to handle an existing one is
far more likely to receive consider-ation than a similar message to
Microsoft or IBM - particularly if it accompanies a registration !
Do you really need one of these programs to write HTML? No, you don’t
need one; as both the text and the markup tags are ASCII, any editor
-even Notepad- will do. One can markup a text file in Notepad, save it,
and launch a Browser to view the result. Then why get one (or more)?
Because each of them makes it easier to ensure that you have properly
entered the tag that does what you want done. You don’t need to remember
long lists of markup codes; the editor does that for you.
Clearly, for the total novice, David Geller's WebWizard is the place to
start. It will construct a basic HTML HomePage for you without requiring
any special HTML knowledge on your part. At that point one of the nicest
features of HTML becomes available: you can look at what it has
constructed and learn from its example. Open the file WebWizard has
created in any of the other editors -or even Notepad- and you will see
the tags that have been inserted to markup your text. This same
capability of learning from others can be a great tool to improving your
abilities with HTML. Whenever you see a Web page that intrigues you -
"How did they do that?" - just save it with your browser and examine it
with one of the editors. You may even be able to cut-and-paste the
desired feature right into your own document.
The HTML editors I've reviewed are similar to limited, special-purpose
versions of full-featured word processing programs such as Word Perfect
and Word for Windows. Just as users develop fierce personal loyalties to
one word processing program, you may find the features of one of these
editors appeal to you more than any of the others. I've tried to point
out the principal features and limitations of each, but the final
judgement is yours. Fortunately, all are easily available on the Internet
for your testing. Pick one -or more- and give it a try. I look forward to
seeing some of your newly-constructed HomePages in my journeys through
cyberspace.
Paul Kinnaly is a government bureaucrat from nine-to-five. The rest of
the time he enjoys exploring new ways to use his computer. HTML and the
Web are his latest playthings. He also beta tests Windows95, makes
occasional posts to the Ilink and RIME Windows conferences, and -when the
editor can catch him- assists with writing and proofreading WindoWatch.
He can be reached at paul.kinnaly@channel1.com or via his HomePage,
http://www.channel1.com/users/paulk/.
**The editor caught him this time! Paul sat in the editor's chair for our
HTML feature. I shouldn't brag but I will! lbl
ww
* * * * *
TOOLS FOR THE INTERNET
CREATE YOUR OWN WEB HOMEPAGE
Copyright 1995 by Jerome Laulicht
The surge of interest in having one's own Web page has spawned a rash of
related software accompanied by a river of trade publication commentary .
Creating a Web site has been seen as a daunting task requiring the use of
arcane codes and commands which demand rigid conventions and reliance
upon experts. According to its developer, you can now you can satisfy
this urge more easily, working alone with WebAuthor, the “easy way to
create HTML documents” so claims its creators, Streetwise Software and
Quarterdeck. As an aside, Microsoft has a competitive tool in beta
version called Internet Assistant. Both piggy-back upon the Windows
standard --Microsoft's Word for Windows. As of this writing WebAuthor
can only be used with the 16 bit edition of V. 6. Similar tools are, or
are being made available for other mainline word processors like
Wordperfect and AmiPro.
Start With a Simpler Tool
If you are new to creating homepages, I suggest starting with Web Wizard,
a shareware tool for easy construction of a no frills home-page. This
software is a useful introductory tutorial on the HTML language while
getting your creative feet wet. Do not start by reading anything else
lest you seek confusion. In my first reading I could have been scanning
Latin. To learn first by doing, use Web Wizard until you have mastered
it well enough to produce several test pages. You do this by answering
questions generated by the program to create from scratch a file
containing the HTML commands. Check out the results using the browser on
your own computer and then correct, revise and test it again.
One can also use Notepad to study the completed HTML files and learn by
editing and inspecting the results. This will give you a notion of
what is required to become adept at building Web pages, aside from
considerations of design or layout. This experience also provides a
sensible basis for deciding whether you want to purchase WebAuthor now
because Web Wizard may meet your current needs.
There isn't much more to say about Web Wizard since its use is so self
evident. You can include text and a graphic along with a limited number
of URL links. Visitors will not be able to use your homepage as a
jump-off to many sites. It is a bare bones approach which gets you
started and teaches you quickly. You might decide to settle for this but
many people will want more. Some Internet access services are making
similar easy homepage tools available to their customers. However, if
you do want to become a full Internetnaut, you will make the choice
between full control using most of the HTML authoring options or a happy
compromise which acts as a buffer between you and the HTML standard.
Evaluation Criteria for WebAuthor
Quarterdeck's claim of more ease with WebAuthor permits a simple
evaluation framework. Quarterdeck talks of (1) point-and-click
document construction; (2) absolutely no HTML experience necessary;
and (3) being able to use Word's features. I'm a fair model for
potential users since I have long used Word and Windows, have never
created a Web document and have been turned off by the idea. The main
lesson I learned from several HTML programs was that they were
difficult and boring to learn and use with almost use-less documentation.
Nor am I a novice since I have enough under-standing of the Internet,
hypertext, URL paths, browsers, etc. to follow what's happening.
Therefore, I should qualify as someone able to learn and use these tools.
I planned this article with a positive but ambivalent bias because of the
frequent failure of even excellent software houses to communicate well.
I sweated unsuccessfully to use the beta version and decided to await an
upgrade. It was onl y when it too did not work that I finally guessed
that it was incompatible with Word's 32 bit version. There were no
evident hints in error messages or anywhere else. Quarterdeck is
promising a 32 bit version soon.
The Hope for HTML Tools
Quarterdeck is one of the outfits counting on the continued surge of
homepage growth. It, like other developers, are betting that Web Author
and the integrated suite of Internet tools will be in demand by
individuals as well as organizations. One must conform to the HTML
standards for presentation so the browser programs to decode your
material and display it on anyone’s screen. Most people probably want
to focus on content and prefer a tool to handle the tedious rote tasks
involved in publishing their information. The ideal is to make it at
least as easy to learn to publish on the Web as it is to learn a word
processor. When making the decision to finally purchase this kind of
tool, demand only a minimum of incremental learning for the HTML program
and rule out the need to learn a special language. Emulate the strategy
of presenting choices in plain language in dialog and list boxes, with
pop-up definitions. For example, if you want to create a list, you
either highlight the ord list or click the list icon. The program writes
the commands as is done in Web Wizard.
Another hope is that many people who never heard of HTML would
agree that if they can create documents with Word, they will easily learn
how to create documents for the Internet. Those who wish to publish on
the Internet, will ideally keep doing so and will look for better and
fuller featured tools (upgrades). Perhaps this not very far-fetched when
one realize that other developers are betting that a lot of people will
want to create films with their computers. This syllogism about
WebAuthor is interesting although the odds are difficult to estimate.
The fact is that both WebAuthor and Microsoft’s Internet Assistant are
far easier to learn than any of the five or six HTML programs found on
the Internet or BBS's in 1994. The speed of evolution of these tools is,
indeed, remarkable.
The final hope, of this is the sale-closing argument, is that you will
be hooked because you will be able to ignore the syntax rules and other
esoteria of the HTML standard. WebAuthor formats your creations into
HTML documents semi-automatically. Its rather like saying that more
computer users would become at least amateur programmers if only they did
not have to learn so much programming esoteria.
Learning WebAuthor: The Tutorial
To start learning how to use this program, put off reading the manual
and the on-line help. The tutorial is intended to give you the “flavor of
a hypertext document web by having you create links between files on your
own computer or network.” Plan to go through the tutorial two or three
times. Since there are many ways to make errors, go through the entire
sequence to get an overview rather than struggling to get everything
right immediately. You can then learn the procedures by starting to
catch and correct your errors. Your first few efforts will very likely
fail when you check them with the browser. The process is not as easy as
the hopes and the hype, but this should be no surprise. Marketing
people, programmers and tutorial writers have quite different goals and
problems.
By the second or third try you should be editing to achieve perfection.
Think of this process as writing several drafts of a paper. It is
difficult, in fact, to go very far after making an error without being
made aware of it. Technically the tutorial is well put together and
fairly easy to follow and use.
Although the tutorial is good overall, its no surprise that it can get a
bit goofy at times and it does have problems. The very first instruction
is an attention-catching example. “Open Word and select new in the file
menu”. Of course it is difficult to imagine how anyone could do the
WebAuthor tutorial without already having done these things. Sometimes
one gets the impression that no-one seriously critiques training
materials before they are made part of a package. At other times the
instructions are so cumbersome that they imply a procedure is more
difficult than it actually is. For example, six steps are listed to
teach you how to have large icons in the toolbar. It's as if someone
was providing a recipe for a person who has never cooked and it’s unclear
why this even makes any difference. The instructions could easily be
listed as two steps. The real joker is that you only learn to determine
whether the "HTML large" box is checked as it should be, and, if not, to
make it so. One look in the right place and then a single click. Really
helpful and necessary! There are some other less glaring examples of
this clumsy approach but fortunately these two examples are not typical
of many similar witticisms.
Two hints which are not clearly stressed will make the tutorial an easier
and more valuable experience ...simpler to use and more pleasant to
learn!
Open what is called the style window when you want to create an HTML
document. Else it is very easy to make silly errors which will further
bedevil you by leading to more errors. This can be tedious to
correct--take it from someone who did not follow this hint. Failure to
do this in a consistent way throws away some important practical
advantages of the program. It is a way to avoid basic structural errors
in working directly with HTML codes. Look up ‘style’ in the on-line help
before you start the tutorial.
Use the "Help on top option" to avoid being driven slightly batty. It
is easy to miss this option when you first bring up the tutorial window
because it is not standard in Windows programs. This choice is in the
options menu. The tutorial may be quite annoying to use without it
invoked as you switch focus back and forth between the instructions and
the Edit window where you do the work. Also make the Edit window
smaller than the entire screen or the help window will not reliably stay
on top.
This minor but near-essential feature of an on-line tutorial, does not
work nearly as reliably as you would like to expect. The help window too
often ends up disappearing to the taskbar when using Win 95, or when you
click a menu or change focus between windows. As you go through a string
of directions showing buttons to choose in dialog boxes, and switching
focus frequently, this defect is distracting and makes problem solving
harder.
Wanted. An inventive programmer who can make this technique work well
and make it easy to incorporate in any program help file. In their spare
time, they could also try to devise methods other than large graphics
files to improve on-line tutorials.
Also Wanted. Some discussion of whether there is some need for a
consortium of developers to encourage and support efforts to standardize
help tools, the results being made available to all comers.
After completing the first five steps in the tutorial, you might begin to
think that you have a program primarily intended for handling headings,
to link graphics to your page and your page to other sites. When you
reach that point it all becomes very easy because you are typing words
and making rather simple choices. The only obvious difference from
working with Winword is that you are using the WebAuthor mode and the
toolbar looks quite different. When you finally see your copy converted
to look like a Web page, the sun breaks through the clouds and all is
fairly obvious. Indeed, the HTML language is primarily about being able
to publish on the Internet with a cross platform focus, that is, readable
from a large variety of computers using different browsers and having
different kinds of monitors.
The tutorial does get trickier but it does indeed make the task look
easier. However, the tutorial omits many of the more difficult points
and makes little effort to help you understand. This is something you
will have to get elsewhere than from the program’s manual and the
on-line help.
The software does include capabilities for advanced users who wish to
use and understand the more difficult and esoteric elements and to add
important features to their HTML documents. It helps create the links
easily and correctly to all the components of your site as well as to
other sites by checking your accuracy and providing feedback. You can add
new jumps and links readily, edit the text files and get quick feedback
while trying out different modes of presentation.
A new user does have to be careful when learning how to take advantage of
the feature to switch a document back and forth between HTML and Word.
This provides the ability to carry out different functions in each while
exploiting the strengths of the combined tools simultaneously. However,
the penalty is greater complexity! Again we see that this tool is not
for the faint-hearted but this is still true for many tools of the
Internet.
No sensible argument can be made that WebAuthor is real easy to use; only
that it is easier to use than many other programs. It should not
surprise anyone who has looked with care at many Web sites to hear that
WebAuthor demands meticulous care and precision to achieve accuracy and
some measure of elegance and quality. There is very little or no
tolerance for error and the program does not hesitate to confront you
with messages stating your errors. A simple example: what is called the
style must be correctly labeled for each line or paragraph or you have
only a mess, and this is just the start. Even hitting the enter key at
the wrong time can put the wrong tag or code on a line or a paragraph.
This is not meant to discourage you but only to caution you to see beyond
the marketing noise. WebAuthor falls within the tradition of complex
word processors and sophist-icated spreadsheet programs, to take but two
examples. Were they ever easy to learn unless of course, you restricted
your usa e to letters and analyses of your weekly allowance when you were
a teenager.
Web Wizard, V1.1 Shareware. Registration=$10
Arta Software, David Geller
davidg@halycon.com or Compuserve 72667.1312
http//www.halycon.com/webwizard
Web Author for Word for Windows, V1.0 $100
Quarterdeck and Streetwise Software
Jerry Laulicht is early retired from the University of Pittsburgh. He
keeps his teaching skills tuned by training local people to use
computers.
ww
* * * * *
More HTML tools:
HoTMetaL Pro 2.0 - Etc: An Update
Copyright 1995 Phil Leonard
A few comments on the brand new release of SoftQuad's HoTMetaL Pro 2.0
(http://www.sq.com) for publishing HTML documents on the Web. My
original copy of HoTMetal Pro 1.0 with its companion CD, was bundled in
a book called HTML Publishing on the Internet by Brent Heslop and Larry
Budnick for $49. HoTMetaL Pro 1.0 was priced at $199 and 2.0 is the
same price, however, quite reduced in price as an upgrade for $59.
My original impression was that 1.0 was hard to use. It is a rules based
Word Processor. You make a mistake and HoTMetaL barfs. It is
intimidating. The authors of this book loved it, so I persisted. In
truth, I came to love the program as well even though it was not quite
polished.
With HotMetaL Pro 2.0, not only is the program quicker and more user
friendly, it now automatically chooses what it thinks would be acceptable
when you make an error. So instead of being confronted with "YOU CAN'T
DO THAT STUPID!!!", it now elegantly inserts tags where you probably
meant to put them and then asks you if this is what you meant.
I've only used Pro 2.0 briefly, but as one quite familiar with HTML
Writer and I have to wonder aloud at the blatant similarity between them.
There are now three break-away button bars. Almost every feature is now
supported with hot-keys AND buttons. It will open up unlimited browsers
for previews. It will open and convert almost any word processor format.
And it will PUBLISH, that is, find and replace all of your
file:///c:/gifs with http:///yourname/gifs, instantly opening and
previewing your document in Netscape. I am quite impressed. It supports
HTML 2.0, HTML 3.0, and Netscape. It does an SGML document check and
tells you each instance where you break the HTML 2.0 rules,and with what
rule, whether it is with Netscape or HTML 3.0.
Hot Dog!
In the midst of looking at HoTMetaL Pro 2.0 another contender grabbed my
attention. Hot Dog touted by many, looks as good as everyone says. It
actually resembles HoTMetaL Pro 2.0 in many ways. Even so, I didn’t spend
much time with Hot Dog because it became immediately apparent, at least
from my point of view, that three important elements are missing.
First and most important, Hot Dog does not appear to show in-line images.
Anyone who has coded HTML knows that long and complicated forms can get
very confusing. I find it helps immensely when I can see all of the
images and what HREFs are attached. Next, the HREFS in HoTMetaL Pro are
colored and labeled with hot keys. They really stand out and separate
themselves from the normal text. Just much easier to sort out. And
finally, HoTMetaL pro converts all tags into small graphical images, like
pentagons. The tags are much easier to see, and hide all of the tag code
unless you press a hot key or icon.
Hot Dog seems to have tons of options. I did not go through them all. I
think it is much more user configurable than HoTMetaL. Whether it is
familiarity with the product or just a good fit I find HoTMetaL’s
selection of options is exactly how I want it to work. When comparing the
two programs I have to lean towards HoTMetal probably because I just
prefer it.
Phil Leonard is a veteran Internet surfer who has developed a keen
interest in HTML authoring tools for the Internet. This is his first
contribution to WindoWatch...we hope not his last! He can be reached at
pleonard@cybercom.net
ww
* * * * *
Microsoft Does HTML
Creating HTML with Internet Assistant
Copyright 1995 by Jim Plumb
If you use MS Word 6 and you want to create HTML documents you might be
interested in picking up a copy of Internet Assistant, a free add-on
template for Word 6.0a available from Microsoft’s Web server at
http://www.microsoft.com/msword/ia.
I've used this product from time to time since it was in beta test and
I’ve found it a handy tool for creating HTML docs from scratch and also
for converting other Word documents to the HTML format. And of course you
can’t beat the price. However, you do need some power to run Internet
Assistant. Microsoft recommends a 386 with 8 mgs of ram. I soon
discovered, you will need those 8 mgs.
Internet Assistant (IA) comes as a self-extracting archive, which
should be extracted into a temporary directory. Use the File/Run menu to
run setup which puts IA in a sub-directory of Winword. It also asks if
you want to install the internet browser capability. You need to have an
internet connection to run the IA browser. IA is a Winword template,
which in this case means a set of styles, macros, dialogs, buttons, and
must be run under Winword.
There are two modes of running IA, Edit and Browse Mode, which can be
reached from the File menu or by a button with a pair of eye-glasses for
Browse and a pencil for Edit. Browse mode lets you cruise the net or
cruise your interoffice network, whichever way you hyper-links direct
you. IA comes with an very adequate help file which will be all you’ll
need to get up and running. I did find that one of the URL’s listed in
one of Help FAQs was out of date and directed me to another one.
Browse is where your 8 mgs of ram come in handy. My home computer has 4
mgs and it took a long time for the browser to down-load HTML files and
display them to the screen. I’ll stick with Netscape thanks. Edit mode is
where you create HTML documents. You can create the doc as you would in
Word. HTML attributes can be applied to your document as you would apply
styles. This version of IA only supports HTML 2 and didn’t see any
mention of support for HTML 3 on the Internet Assistant Web page.
When you finish your document save it as HTML and voila you are a Web
publisher. What I like about this is that while you are editing the HTML
file you can switch to browse mode and check the links to see if they
actually go anywhere. If you are browsing you can push a button to copy
the present URL to the clipboard, switch back to edit mode and paste it
in to your document.
One thing you need to watch out for when browsing, especially if you are
low on ram, is that IA opens each hyperlinked document in its own window
and keeps them on the desktop They can build up fast and use up your free
resources in quite a hurry.
IA can convert many kinds of documents to HTML, basically anything that
can be opened by or pasted into Winword can be saved as an HTML document.
It's my opinion that this one of its strong points. However you are
creating your HTML document, you now have a good head start on your work.
If you want to try this out, make sure your MS Word is 6.0a or greater.
If it is 6.0, you can download the upgrade from the IA Web page.
Jim Plumb is the WindoWatch homepage editor and our resident Acrobat
expert. He can be reached at jplumb.user1.channel1.com
ww
* * * * *
Bellying up to the Web for Fun and Profit
Copyright 1995 by Lois B. Laulicht
Anyone who frequents the business pages of the New York Times or reads
the Wall Street Journal is acutely aware of the high level of business
interest generated by the “Electronic Super Highway”. News stories of
exploratory agreements, emerging partnerships, recent Congressional
telephone legislation, and Administration involvement have focused full
media attention upon the spectacular growth of the Internet. The locus
of this activity is the World Wide Web....the graphical point of
engagement.
For whatever it's worth, both new and experienced Internet users, are
scurrying about trying to figure a way to make a buck out of the Web.
The promise of large numbers of ordinary people owning computers is
becoming a fact of life. Most of these boxes are now sold with internal
modems already setup. The most inexperienced computer users now have a
leg up to bop around the World Wide Web first time out. Should they have
the good fortune of finding a hardware vendor working with an Internet
provider who packages pre-configured browser software, it is a win-win
for everyone and an old business gets a new twist.
Once a user accesses the Web, they become a potential customer for
anything sold in the real world of credit cards, automobile show-rooms,
fine art, and mail order catalogues. It is the increasing volume of this
activity which becomes the fodder to create and do business. In spite
of the public promise of riches and glory there continues to remain a
huge leap from enthusiastic expectation to that of real world bank
deposits.
The Reality of the World Wide Web
It has been said by some that " the Web is a cornucopia of information
and an encyclopedia of places to go". The fact of the matter is that this
very interesting place called the World Wide Web with its scads of
information on a wide range of topics is almost more than what most
people can absorb and/or utilize. As a result, the search for and
compilation of data spread around so many different sites has created a
rash of new browsers, search tools, and data base software, to name just
a few categories. The plethora of homepages represent an expanding center
of speculation of what and how one can market goods and services. We
can read these in English or French, etc., but the Internet language of
choice is originally written with HTML, the Hypertext Markup Language.
After one gets into the thick of Web activity it’s almost impossible to
avoid the queries for information, yells for help, and words of advice on
how to create your very own homepage. The best advice I ever got on the
subject was from my Sysop, Brian Miller of Channel One, about a year ago.
He told me to learn to use HTML...yesterday!
I frankly stalled as would any sensible person with too much to do, until
I no longer had a choice. If I wanted to be a part of the new wave of
on-line publishing, learning this language is a necessity. Not that HTML
is hard. It isn’t. Not that we publish an entire issue of WindoWatch
using HTML...we don’t. However, if you want to have a presence on the Web
and want to diddle and experiment with your own homepage, nothing beats
a hands-on approach. For the moment at least, HTML is the language of
the homepage and is the very guts of the Web. All of which could change
tomorrow when a better mousetrap is written and released.
A Minimalist Approach to HTML
Given that I have no need or desire to become an HTML expert, were I to
start all over, I would tackle the vagaries of HTML quite differently. I
do have to edit copy and recommend changes and additions to those who
have primary HTML responsibility. I care very much, not only about the
voice we present but also about the public clothes we wear. Mine is
not the role of a technician but rather one of a nit picker.
My revised game plan would focus upon careful perusal of many samples of
working HTML documents that I liked. I would examine them using a
familiar tool, my trusty DOS ASCII editor, to get a feel for the
language. Using Netscape or Mosaic one can view the original document
and then experiment with the HTML tags in ASCII. Changing the copy and
then looking at those changes using a browser gives one immediate
feedback along with the freedom to experiment. By keeping the edited
and revised copy within the confines of a single working subdirectory,
one can create the feel of really being on-line. With practice and
experimentation, one develops sufficient skill to do the rudimentary
tasks as well as greater proficiency with the tools.
Some tips. . .
Graphics are gorgeous and allow one to do very creative things on a
homepage. Nonetheless, GIFs take time to bring up and view in a browser.
On-line time costs your potential audience money. A 14400 modem is quite
slow. Once surfers learn to keep track of costly on-line time it becomes
a short step to upgrade to the faster 28800. The modem upgrade combined
with a 32 bit operating system like Windows NT or Windows95 along with
the appropriate amount of on board cache is the difference between
snowplowing down a hill and good, tight parallel skiing.
Keep the material on your page fresh. Create a schedule to replace
material that has been on your homepage too long. I don’t spend much time
on sites with teeny notices saying Last Reconstruction -May 10, 104 BC
(before computers). We try to change content at least every two weeks.
The operative word here is try. . Would you bother to return to a page
with an old update sign and too often read information?
Try to find out who your visitors are. If you can, convince them to fill
out a brief form to help you understand the constraints of their
hardware/software, their level of interest and knowledge of your homepage
offerings, and where they heard about you. What was it that brought them
to your homepage? Would they visit your home-page again? Do you offer
free software or special prices on goods and service? While freebies and
gimmicks are pretty transparent to savvy users, good fun can be a
service to be enjoyed by all. My favorite gimmicky fantasy is a WEB
tutorial, in the form of a WindoWatch scavenger hunt. One way to find
out if your readers would participate is to ask them and then use the
forms feature for feedback and actual signup for the online event.
Organize your page for ready access to information using links to other
pages or other places and be prepared to check out those links often for
continued quality. Use variations of font size, texture and color to
help keep the page visually interesting . Background textures, while
interesting, also slow down the time to read files.
While visual appeal is important , we try to emphasize content, not
fluff.
Hits and Misses
There's a lot of chatter about the numbers of visitors who stop by a
given site. One of the functions where computers excel is in the area of
counting. When a computer on a BBS counts the number of times a
particular file is downloaded it is recorded within a piece of software
charged to count each of the downloads. There can also be automatic
counters installed on a Web site to count the number of visitors.
Unfortunately the numbers are not always accurate and can be deceptive in
terms of what they represent.
Here is an example of why most people should be very wary of raw homepage
statistics. There are three individuals working the WindoWatch homepage.
I log on at least once a day and sometimes more often than that. I
assume the others are counted as often. Our counter was tied to users
with graphical browsers so it didn’t register people coming on in text
mode. Therefore, to be honest, I must reduce the final monthly count by
3 X 30 or 100 visits per month and increase it by an unknown number of
people using text browsers. Windo-Watch, like other fledgling
organizations, would get more juice if we inflated that number.
Obviously, many of the ozone layer numbers touted about are highly
suspect. Notwithstanding the pros and cons, a count is a useful estimate,
if reasonably interpreted and used primarily to track increases and
decreases of visitors over a given period of time.
Security
The second biggest issue on the Internet is that of assuring secure
business transactions. Given the horror stories of hacker intrusion into
allegedly secure systems, it is not surprising that no one is willing to
get too heavily involved in untested credit card transactions. I
certainly wouldn't want to take the responsibility for abuse of a customers
credit card account and can understand the worries and constraints of
international commerce where patents and inventions are at stake.
One of the obvious drawbacks of HTML is its ease of replication. One of
the limitations of existing browsers is the simplicity of grabbing
anyone's work and calling it your own. And finally, the notion of giving
away ones creativity to the very open forum of the Internet is not
exactly conducive to business to do much more than use the Web as an
extension to their marketing department.
It will be interesting to reassess my own conclusions in this area six
months from now. I am also quite sure that the industry is creative
enough to turn up a surprise or two. But it is business who has charged
ahead in some of the most important areas we've discussed. The recently
released Server version of Netscape will go a long way in providing a
secure environment for clients. Mastercard and Visa are preparing to
make available secure credit card options as early as September of 1995.
Agreements have been made between Adobe and Netscape relating to
compatibility issues of the Portable Document Format of Adobe's Acrobat
(their established authoring tool) and the Netscape browser. Costs for an
Internet connection continue to drop and become more competitive daily.
Whatever else happens in this area, more and more folks will be sharing
the rapidly narrowing bandwidth of the Internet. Many will also come to
share my conclusions and will learn HTML because they must. Hopefully,
they will be very aware that the WEB is rapidly changing place. The
challenge to users is to keep up with emerging trends which quite often
lead to the development of new tools.
Although HTML is now it is not necessarily tomorrow. We must all remain
flexible and ready to give up that old model T? Do you know anyone still
using Edlin?
Lois Laulicht is the Editor and Publisher of WindoWatch. She lives with
her husband and their German Shepherds in the West Virginia hills.
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* * * * *
Looking for Information....
Search and Ye Shall Find.....Maybe!
Copyright 1995 by Peter Neuendorffer
What it means to search for information on computers and the Internet can
be illustrated by using real-life comparisons. Much of this search
article is about common sense that is rooted in experience and has been
incorporated into computer programming theory and practice.
A central problem of the information explosion, new or old, is how to
find specific information. I have a consultant friend who had to
uninstall a program that he couldn't find because the user had put every
single file into a single large directory on the hard disk. Liken this
to having a big warehouse with no shelves. As files proliferate on
computers, file names and extensions don't give a clue as to what’s
inside an individual file. So what that Windows95 has come up with the
long file name? Just another elusive title and not much else!
There are a number of important reference points for a search and for
search tools which include knowing what you are looking for, which
ballpark it probably is in, and how much time and work space you have.
How much stuff you will have to search - the size of the search space -,
and what you know about how it is organized are all relevant. That's a
lot to keep track of and to understand for most people. The noted
information scientist Norbert Wiener is quoted as asking "Am I walking to
lunch or coming from lunch? I don't know!" Not only did he not know what
he was looking for, he probably didn’t even know where he was!
Finding one's sense of direction when undertaking a search can be
crucial. The other day I mislaid my house keys. I knew what I was looking
for. Surely they were in one of the correct obvious places. I ransacked
the apartment, to no avail. This called for logic. Could I reconstruct
exactly what I did when I last came in? It came to me that as I was
unloading my bundle of bathroom sundries the telephone rang. Sure
enough, my keys were behind the toilet paper in the broom closet. A
likely place. I had the What, and the time and space, but not the Where,
nor had I accounted for human error.
Indexing of information is common from your local phone tickler to the
largest mainframes. One technique, hashing, involves storing information
not randomly one item after another, but in mathema-tical order that
makes retrieval faster.
Searching keywords on the Internet can be a pain, because you don't
have the What. If you do, you don't have both the time and space, as a
field of 200000 entries pops up for the word computer. How do you find
what you’re looking for if the search system doesn't understand what you
want? Even in these crude searches, Internet searches are indexed. The
search engine knows something about the data it is searching and how it
is organized - in addition to just how to search it. A simple tool in
computer science for searching lists is taken from how we search for a
name in a paper phone book, the Binary Search.
The Binary Search must have an alphabetized list to succeed so it knows
that the list is in alphabetical order. It uses this logic: When we
look for Jones in the phone book, we unconsciously turn to the middle
-actually to the left of middle- of the book. If we come up with
Friendly, we unconsciously turn halfway further in the book. And back and
forth by large chunks till we get the Jones page. This search is a lot
faster than starting at the first name on page one and then proceeding.
We are cutting the book in powers of 2.
This algorithm has an O of less than one. Many problems in computer
science are non-complete since it would take longer to solve them than
there is time in the universe. For example, because it is so hard to
find very large prime numbers, one company was able to patent two of
them. Having devised a search method, they own the rights to the numbers.
Finding out the exact location of Earth relative to Mars in 1000 years is
the three body problem that is deemed not solubable unless we wait 1000
years.
Fortunately, we are not usually looking for such weighty information, but
rather, something more like our Aunt Martha's phone number in our
personal information manager. With such a small field to search on our
computer, it is fast. We know the where, the what, have the time and
work space, and the software knows a lot about how the PIM warehouse is
organized.
However, when we get out into the bigger world, it is not simply who owns
the information but who is able to find it that is the important key.
Just talking to the IRS or Social Security can be a trial as you wait
endlessly through a hold pattern with recorded messages like Please do
not hang up, or your call will be further delayed. or Don't give up,
we'll be with you momentarily. Maybe!
If we attempt to index large amounts of information, that's OK, but we
will have to be prepared to update the index constantly. When I worked
for a department store, we were constantly counting inventory as
shipments came and went and merchandise was sold. The stock numbers were
set up differently for every type of item and vendor. Certainly the POS
system is a vast improvement, indexing the lists. If only discount
coupons didn't bog down the supermarket checkout line, violating all of
my time, space, and know what you are looking for rules.
People question the computer's accuracy , discounting the answer, and
this is another story. That can't be right, check again. or I hate
computers, they're always wrong. If people get their information and then
misread it or don't use it or reject it, what is the use of it all? The
famous case in point in science is the cold fusion Stanford experiment,
which astounded scientists because it would mean the ancient Alchemists
were right about turning lead to gold. Unfortunately, the certainty of
their results were deemed to be in the noise zone, or not much better
than fiction.
I have a friend who works as an order picker in a warehouse. He
punches stock changes into a computer when he physically moves items
around. But what if the store’s information gets out of kilter with
reality? Sales go up, inventory goes down some on paper, but actually
there is much less in the warehouse than anyone realizes. Although the
information was wrong, it was assumed to be right. The cozy computer
system then was consistent but only with itself, not with the real
stockroom! it was supposed to reflect That essential match was going to
pot. Somewhat like President Hoover's famous remark shortly before the
Depression "Prosperity is just around the corner."
According to Newsweek magazine, a state-of-the-art automated ware-house
for running shoes ground to a halt. The workers found that they could not
move anything into or out of the facility, even though conveyer belts
kept spewing out merchandise for non-existent orders. We live in the
real world, not inside a computer. Information not matching reality is
garbage, at best a theory or modelling.
That method of organization was described in Lewis Carroll's
Alice in Wonderland. At the tea party, the Mad Hatter ordered every-one
to move down the table when the dishes were dirty. Garbage in, garbage
out. But still, if you are not playing with a full deck, you can pose a
search question which is perfectly reasonable and still get garbage
for an answer. Its like dealing with one of those Bostonians who are
noted for firmly giving patently wrong street directions to passers-by
who have lost their way.
What if the search system doesn't have the foggiest idea of where the
item that you’re looking for is located in your search space ? It knows
nothing about it's warehouse except that it contains files which are in
text format. You are looking for the word computer on your hard drive.
It has an equal probability of being in the first line of the first file,
or the last line of the last file. You could index the drive, but that
takes a lot of time, and some space.
Without an index to use, you start out with a zero probability of
finding a match, but, as you move ahead, you are more sure of finding
your answer. By the end, you have a 100% probability if it’s there at
all. If you skip to the middle to start, this is just like rearranging
your warehouse and will still take the same time-- actually longer-since
you have to rearrange the warehouse.
The fruitless search takes the longest. If you asked a sales person to
look for an item in the color and size you want, he may come back 15
minutes later to report that "We don't have it." It takes so long
precisely because they do not have it. It's either there or it isn't but
he had to search the entire stockroom to find the answer. One assumes
that most stockrooms are well-organized and is surprised when this is
not the case.
Let's get back to searching your PC for text and presume you do not have
an index. You are starting from scratch. Your work space and time are
constant. You only have till three o'clock, and the hard drive only has
so much free disk and memory space to work with. You can narrow down the
size of the search space by looking only for DOC files and ignoring
categories of files like programs. Or perhaps start the search in a
subdirectory that is likely to have your information, like \DOC. The file
names do tell you something about how the data is organized, but they are
like labels on packages with the contents imprecise. Somewhat
informative, but not detailed as that would take up much more space.
Unfortunately, searching for a lower case a is different than searching
for a upper case A because words like alice and ALICE are stored
differently on the computer.
Another way you can narrow down the search is picking what you are
looking for carefully. Computer is not going to be very descriptive on a computer. In the middle of a lake, looking for a computer would be very helpful because it is a rarer item then on land. A rarer item on the computer might be EISA motherboard. We can also search for more than one thing or field at once, using Boolean Logic.
Boolean logic involves using AND OR NOT like arithmetic. A Boolean
expression is either true or false. In other words, we search for ALICE
AND COMPUTER. Both words must be found near each other in our files to
evaluate as true. If Search_it (ALICE and COMPUTER) then "we have a
match". It turns out that you can string together combinations of the
operators AND OR NOT. Of course on the computer, you have to have
software that does this. In real life you use these conditions all the
time without realizing it. "If it's lunch time and I'm hungry then I
think I'll eat."
One of the fundamental aspects of computers is being able to perform
different actions based on the result of a condition.
IF BEFORE LUNCH THAN EAT BREAKFAST ELSE EAT LUNCH.
Or, IF THE_COMPANY_SHOWED_A_PROFIT than PAY_STOCKHOLDERS
Else FILE_BANKRUPTCY.
Each of the actions above could be the name for a procedure, module, or
program that does all the necessary processing.
A Boolean condition could be ALICE and (COMPUTER or GROCERY). This match
would be a mention of the word ALICE and also one of the others, either
COMPUTER or GROCERY. Structured Query Language searches utilize this type
of searching; they also extract records that have common fields. But
remember in our search, we know very little about how our information
warehouse is organized.
It turns out, luckily, that Boolean conditions can be chopped in two, and
each half treated separately. This is like cutting the cards, and then
cutting them again, and can produce the same kind of speed increase as
the phone book example above. If we are searching for two things at once,
say ALICE and COMPUTER, as soon as we know that Alice isn't there, we
don't have to check for Computer.
In searching, time and space are at a premium. You give up one for the
other and must compromise. The ready availability to a great variety of
knowledge bases opens up information if one has the ability to use search
tools and learn to use those tools efficiently and with minimum cost.
Although it is currently gauche to say, not all of us will live forever.
It would be nice to know that we will find what we’re looking for before
the end!
Peter Neundorffer is a regular WindoWatch contributor. He is the creator
of Alice and a DOS and Windows programmer. Peter has very recently
released a text search program for Windows he calls Bool Text Searcher
which can be retrieved as ABOOL11.ZIP"
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* * * * *
The Cat's Out of The Bag!
copyright 1995 by *Stanley
The twenty pound black and white furry Windows expert!
Bob Miller's Stanley Does Windows
Dear Stanley,
I'm confused. How much memory do I really need for Windows 95?
Dear Confused,
Microsoft says that you need a 386 DX machine with 4 megs of ram (and
some people have been known to use an SX). In reality, such a machine is
so slow as to be unbearable. The minimum real system is a 486DX2-66 with
8 megs of ram but 16 megs is better.
Dear Stanley,
I'm going to be upgrading to Windows 95. Will my copy of WinWord 6.0
still work?
Puzzled
Dear Puzzled,
Yes but WinWord 7.0 either as a stand alone or as part of Office 95, is
far better. I’m using it and I love it almost as much as tuna fish.
Dear Stanley,
I am still using a CP/M machine with 64 KB of ram and I am having
difficulty getting programs for it. I see all these new programs for
something called Windows 96 or some such. Can I run that on my machine?
Old Timer
Dear Old (and you are),
Not unless you get the add on for CP/M users. This file is available
from the international CP/M support board in Ulan Batur, Mongolia. The
file is 123,421 MB in size but unlimited downloads are available to
first time callers after just filling out the twelve page questionnaire
-- in Mongolian, of course. The Board has two of the newest, state of
the art modems. One is a 110 baud and the other a blazing 300 baud. The
first 200 downloaders will receive a chance to win a fur lined bathtub
trimmed with barbed wire and filled with 200 pounds of rancid yak butter.
This is also the support board for Turbo Edlin for Windows 95 and all 173
patch files can be obtained here. Good hunting!
Purrfectly yours,
Stanley
Bob Miller really does have a Stanley! Stanley is a very computer
literate cat who has been generously providing advice to his large world
of computer users. He has been recently nominated to that most sought
after award The Microsoft Magnificent Mousekiller Mission. The prize is a
litter box filled with the most recent IBM offering- Warp bundled and
shredded with Lotus Notes!
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* * * * *
A Product Review... System Commander
The Operating System Manager: A Challenge
Copyright 1995 by John M. Campbell
The current crop of new operating systems has tempted the more
adventurous among us to give the various offerings a spin. Now, it isn't
too difficult to try different OSes, one or two at a time. For instance,
running, DOS, Windows 3.x, Windows 95, OS/2 Warp and Linux at the
same time represents a challenge over and above the obvious need for a
humongous amount of hard drive space. Yet, it is difficult to evaluate
several new systems unless they can be used alongside a standard
reference system. Three or more OSes can co-exist on one machine, but a
successful installation requires consider-able planning, keeping in mind
the need to easily switch back and forth among them.
All OSes depend on a small area at the beginning of the hard drive
reserved for the "Master Boot Record." Among other things, this critical
area holds the code needed to start the OS. Some systems, such as OS/2
Warp, Windows NT and Windows 95, have built-in features that make it
possible to move back and forth between that system and DOS. But no OS
that I am aware of carries the built-in capability to switch back and
forth among multiple systems. Enter System Commander, from V
Communications.
System Commander can manage over 100 different operating systems
in primary and logical partitions, or as many as 32 different FAT
compatible OSes in a single primary DOS partition! I can't imagine
anyone in their right mind attempting to run 100 OSes, but it's nice to
know the capability is there!
The program offers a lot of useful features that will be summarized at
the end of this article. For now, let's see how it works and go through
an actual installation.
C:(Root)
|
|----MSDOS622
|----COMMAND.COM
|----CONFIG.SYS
|----AUTOEXEC.BAT
|
WIN95
|----COMMAND.COM
|----CONFIG.SYS
|----AUTOEXEC.BAT
|----MSDOS.SYS (Win95
configuration file)
|
WINNT
|----BOOT.INI
System Commander works its magic by writing its own unique boot record
to initiate the boot process, then replacing it with the code for the
desired OS, which is selected from the System Commander menu. The boot
process then continues under the control of the selected system. If the
chosen OS uses its own AUTOEXEC.BAT, CONFIG.SYS, COMMAND.COM and/or other
unique files, images of these files are stored in a special directory,
then swapped to the root directory of Drive C when that OS is selected.
The inset is a typical SC image file directory structure that might exist
after loading three OSes:
The installation itself is straightforward. The program comes on a
single diskette. Typing INSTALL, then following a few on screen
instructions, sets up System Commander. When the computer is rebooted,
the program saves system information for whatever OSes it finds, then it
presents the SC menu. Every installed OS should be listed. The order,
description, and other functions can be changed at this point by pressing
ALT-S for a Setup menu.
If new OSes are installed after System Commander, they may not appear on
the SC menu when the machine is rebooted. Or, SC itself may not appear.
Windows 95, for example, overwrites the boot sector code, in this case,
SC's, with its own during the install process. The developers have taken
these possibilities into account. The Setup menu permits adding the new
OS to SC's menu, and a separate utility, SCIN, is provided to deal with
Windows 95 and the Japanese DOS/V, which also destroys SC's code in the
boot sector. Running SCIN from DOS reinstalls SC's master boot record.
Now for the additional features. There are quite a few. First, there is
optional boot security protection. A password can be chosen to pre-vent
access to the hard drive(s), and make it impossible to boot from a
floppy. Passwords are internally encrypted for additional security. A
second password can be used to prevent unauthorized persons from
accessing SC's own setup menu, or from using certain HD partitions.
It is possible to run multiple versions of DOS, or to run DOS with
various AUTOEXEC.BAT and/or CONFIG.SYS configurations. Each configuration
can be a separate menu choice.
If you are so unfortunate as to be stricken with a boot sector virus, it
can be easily removed by rebooting. SC will detect the changed code and
ask if a new OS has been installed. Selecting bypass on the SC menu will
cause the boot sector and the hidden system files to be over-written with
the fresh, hopefully uninfected, copies that SC keeps in the image
directories. Of course, all this is dependent upon using anti-virus
software to detect the problem in the first place! Another neat trick SC
offers is the ability to create multiple primary partitions and make any
of them bootable, something FDISK can't do. Consider Windows 95.
Normally, you have the choice of install- ing it over version 3.x, so
that Windows applications will migrate, or you can install 95 into a
fresh directory, in which case apps will have to be reinstalled. One
choice mangles DOS making it impossible to return to the earlier Windows
version; the other involves a lot of application reinstallation.
What if you had two computers? You could install Windows 3.x and your
DOS and Win apps on both machines, then install Win 95 on the second
machine only. With System Commander, you can, in effect, do something
similar on a single computer, if you have unused disk space. First,
using FDISK and SCIN, create a second bootable partition from the unused
space. This becomes Partition 1. The original bootable partition is
Partition 0.
Here is one example. Remember that DOS assigns Drive C to which-ever
partition is bootable:
partition 0 | DOS/Windows 3.1 |
(drive C:) | |
|___________________|
partition 1 | DOS/Windows 3.1 |
(drive C:) | with Windows 95 | _________________
|___________________| | |
partition 2 | Extended |---|Logical DOS Data |
(drive D:) | partition | |_________________|
|___________________|
In this layout, when you boot into partition 0, you can run
Windows 3.1 on drive C. Drive D is on the logical partition, which
contains application data. Partition 1 can either be hidden by System
Commander or will appear as drive E, at your option.
When you boot partition 1, Windows 95 will appear as drive C, and drive D
is the same logical partition as appears when booting DOS/ Windows 3.1.
Partition 0 can either be hidden or you can elect to have it appear as
drive E in our example.
Another feature of System Commander is the ability to make either Drive A
or B bootable, although this does not work with certain BIOSes, or with
operating systems that bypass the BIOS.
SC has still another useful feature. Actually, this one is vital. SC
detects any change in the root directory configuration files by
comparing them with its saved images. Normally, if you manually change
your AUTOEXEC.BAT or CONFIG.SYS files, on the next boot into the same OS,
SC will overwrite the images with the new versions. This may not be what
you wanted to do.
To overcome this problem, SC can be set up to prompt the user before
overwriting its image copies. If the prompt is answered no, the boot
proceeds using the files that are already in the root directory, thus
sparing the images SC keeps. You can then manually restore the root
directory AUTOEXEC/CONFIG to the originals. (I use a handy utility
called Autocon to manage multiple configurations.) Of course, SC can be
set up to use multiple versions of DOS configuration files. Each version
would be a separate SC menu item, as mentioned earlier. That would seem
to be the most logical way to go, if you really need multiple
AUTOEXEC.BAT or CONFIG.SYS files for different applications.
This is not covered in the manual, but I have found it useful to keep a
second copy of all image files in a separate directory. Several times, I
inadvertently told SC to overwrite its images. And on one occasion, I
let Win95 run an unruly DOS game in Single Application DOS Mode. The
game hung up the computer, so I could not exit back to Win95. I had to
reboot. Since Win95 adds a line to its AUTOEXEC.BAT to run a DOS app in
SA mode, System Commander kept bringing up that changed file, and the
game kept loading, and hanging my machine. That’s when I learned the
wisdom of keeping a fresh copy of the proper file stashed away somewhere,
so that I could replace the image in the SC directory. Yes, I had also,
dumbly, allowed SC to overwrite the image file with the version that ran
the game!
System Commander does sometimes misbehave. I discovered a problem when I
upgraded the program, after I had installed OS/2 Warp and Windows 95.
When SC's menu appeared, Win95 was listed three times! All attempts to
delete the extra entries using SC's own utilities failed. A V
Communications' technician was able to talk me through the process, which
was not something the average user would be able to figure out on their
own. It seems that Win95 adds code to the boot record of every
partition. This confused SC into thinking I had multiple installations
of that OS. The technician also told me how to bypass the OS/2 Boot
Manager menu that had been appearing when I chose Warp from SC. So now,
I don't have to see the extra menu and make the OS/2 choice there also.
I believe System Commander to be a unique and useful program for managing
multiple operating systems. The manual is well written and offers a
wealth of information about different OSes and hard drive partitioning.
There is an extensive troubleshooting section. The installation disk
even includes several typical main menu screens in PCX format, and a
utility for capturing the user's actual menu.
System Commander (current version - 2.11)
V Communications, Inc
4320 Stevens Creek Blvd., Suite 120
San Jose, CA 95129
(408) 296-4224
John Campbell, again, provides a down-to-earth, step-by-step, description
of a complex installation procedure. He is employed by the State of West
Virginia's Unemployment Compensation Board as it's local office manager.
John is a regular contributor to WindoWatch.
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* * * * *
Programming Notes A WindoWatch feature
Window Aspect: A Scripting Language
A Tutorial: Part Five Ghost BBS v3.20
Copyright 1995 by Gregg Hommel
First.... I'm sorry that I missed writing a column last month. I was
smack in the middle of finishing off GHOST BBS 3.20 for public release,
and found myself in need of two additional hands, and at least twice as
much time on the clock as there is normally. I tried putting Windows
CLOCK.EXE on my DoubleSpaced drive, but even then, when I ran it, it
still only had 24 hours in a day - but it was worth the try .
As a result, I simply ran out of time, and could not finish this column
before deadline. Lois was mean and nasty about it, and laid a guilt trip
on me that you wouldn't believe, but even then, I just did not have
enough time to do everything. And since, through registration fees, GHOST
BBS pays me, and Lois doesn't... well, you get the picture.... < Large
and noisy yawn...lbl>
In any case, GHOST BBS 3.20 is now finished, and I can get back to doing
this, before Lois really gets nasty, so here we go....
There is an old Polish saying that my mother used to use. Since I have
begun writing scripts, I have been partial to using myself. I can't
remember the Polish, and thus, won't inflict that on you, but the English
translation was something along the lines of...
"The amazing thing is not how well the Dancing Bear dances... what is
amazing is the fact that he dances at all!"
GHOST BBS, in particular, is a "Dancing Bear". To me, at times, the
amazing thing about that script is not how well it does some of the
things that it does, but rather, that it does them at all. (Such modesty!
Some of this is due to his remarkable coding ability? The life of an
editor is filled with temperamental writers!) A lot of what GHOST BBS can
do is tied in with the use of the Windows INI file.
I know that you are all familiar with the basic INI files used by Windows
for it's own configuration information, and you all know that the various
applications that you run under Windows usually have their own INI file
for their configuration information.
But the term configuration information can actually have a wide
latitude in meaning. If we look at INI files as being files to store
information, rather than just configuration data, where does that take
us?
To store information that a script application needs, we could use a
text file. Wasp has the commands necessary to do that. But to store
information in the file, we have to open the file (creating it if
necessary, using different commands for each case, so as not to destroy
previously stored information) for writing, locate the end of the file,
and then write the information we want stored using some form of
identification so we can locate it when we need it.
To retrieve information, we have to open the file for a read, read a
line from the file, and compare it's indicator to that of the
information we need. If it doesn't compare, we have to read the next
line, and go through the same process again, until we find what we want.
All of this, both writing and reading, takes multiple lines of code,
multiple if/then statements, and time while the script tries to locate
the information needed.
If, on the other hand, we use an INI format file, and note, the
extension doesn't need to be INI... it can be anything, so as long as we
specify the full name, and, if the file is not in the \WINDOWS directory,
the full path. The procedure becomes so much simpler. Writing to an INI
format file involves the single command, PROFILEWR. If the INI format
file doesn't exist it is created. If it does exist, the line being
written is simply added to the file.
Reading from an INI format file is equally as simple, involving a single
command, PROFILERD. Using this, we can read either a string or an integer.
If the locator for that particular line to be read doesn't exist, we are
then returned a null string if reading a string, or a minus integer value,
or an integer value. Otherwise, we are quickly and simply returned the
value we need, within split seconds of time.
To see how this might be of use to us, let's look at the INI format
files which GHOST BBS 3.20 uses. This will show some ways they can be
used, and perhaps help develop ideas for you....
1) GHOST.INI - This one is the basic INI format file used by GHOST to
store configuration data re: various run time parameters, file locations,
etc. BUT this file also stores a huge variety of information for GHOST.
That information can include the name and city of the last person to
call, filenames and so on, to pass to the virus scanner feature, text
information which become lines in a DOS batch file used to open a door,
and even the information regarding how your system was set up under
PCP/Win before GHOST began running. This last makes it possible for GHOST
to use it later in order to restore the system to that same state it
found when it shuts down.
2) LANG#.PMT - These files, and there may be multiple ones, have the #
replaced by a language number from 1 to 99. They store the various
prompts which GHOST uses on the screen while it is running, utilizing
each of any number of languages from 1 to 99. These files also include
sections which are translation tables, so that GHOST can receive a prompt
like O, as in the French Oui for yes, and understand that this is the
equivalent in this language, of the basic prompt response Y for Yes in
the default English mode.
The prompts stored in this file can contain certain pre-defined variables
in the form of @ONLEFT@ which GHOST will replace with information
determined while it is running. Since it has two main sections, one for
ANSI mode, and the other for non-ANSI mode, they can also contain ANSI
codes to change items like the colours, bold or flashing, and so on.
3) GHOST.USR - this little critter is the basic user record file. Windows
has a limit on the size of an INI format file of 64K, and storing user
information in such a file can quickly go beyond that size. GHOST always
checks the size of the actual user record file (see below) before writing
a new user into it, and if the file is getting too large, it starts a new
one. This USR file contains only one line per section, that being the
information telling GHOST where the actual records for that user are
located. That is, in which of what might be multiple user record files,
is the information for a specific user stored.
4) USER#.REC - This is the INI format file which actually contains the
information for a particular user which is pointed to by the GHOST.USR
file. The first file used by GHOST is USER1.REC. As a GHOST user record
database grows, and exceeds the pre-defined safe limit set in GHOST, new
files are created, with an incremental number in them, for GHOSt to use.
In this file is a section for each user, with the information they gave
to GHOST when they first logged on and completed the new user
questionnaire. Along with the user’s default transfer protocol (if set),
there is information defined by the sysop re: security level, access to
private areas on a GHOST system, and so on.
Based upon the above, you can see that it is possible for an application
to have, and use, more than one INI format file. This can be handy to
keep configuration information separate from data used while the
application is running and to modify what appears on screen, etc. GHOST
BBS stores the different kinds of information it needs, in different INI
format files, and the Wasp code simply uses the PROFILEWR and PROFILERD
commands to access the correct file, as instructed.
Those two commands are simplicity themselves to use, once you understand
the format of an INI type file. Basically, an INI format file stores
information in various groups or sections, distinguished by a section
header, shown in the file as a name enclosed in square brackets, such as
[Start Up], or [Last User]. In each section are lines which are the
actual information stored, in the format of info_name=data with,
obviously, the text to the left of the = being the data indicator used
to locate it, and the text or number to the right of the = being the
data stored there.
The PROFILEWR command is a really remarkable little fellow, which
combines the equivalent of a file open, create command, with a file
open, append type of command. The format of the command is...
PROFILEWR filename section_name indicator data
1) filename can be any legitimate DOS file name. If it does not include
a drive/path, the file is assumed to be in the \WINDOWS directory. If no
extension is included, it is assumed to be INI. If, however, you want the
file located in a particular directory, with a particular extension, then
simply specify the full drive\path\filename.ext. Filename can be either a
string constant specified for each PROFILEWR command (such as
"f:\ghost\prompts\lang1.pmt") or a string variable containing such a
filename.
2) section_name is whatever name you want for a given section. Don't get too carried away with this. Remember, the maximum size of a string variable is 255 characters, so use something reasonably descrip- tive for your purposes. As example, in GHOST.INI, the information
GHOST uses when it starts to determine certain run time parameters is in the [Start Up] section of GHOST.INI. Again, this can be a string constant, or a string variable, whichever suits your needs in the script.
3) indicator is a string representing whatever is to the left of the =
in an INI format file section line. Again, this can be whatever you want,
but the same rules apply... don't make it too long, but do make it
something descriptive to you as to purpose and use, etc. Remember, an INI
format file is a text file, and can be read in any text editor. If you
make things descriptive, it makes it easier to check for particular
settings in that INI format file, and easier for you to remember, in
code, what it is you want to write.
4) data is of course, the data that you want written to the right of the
= in this line. It can be a string, or an integer, and can be a
constant or a variable.
As example of using this, suppose I want to have my script change the
value of the line in GHOST.INI that controls whether autobaud detection
is on (1) or off (0). It is on now, and we want to turn it off. In GHOST,
the GHOST.INI file is pre-defined as string variable S0, for a variety of
reasons we won't go into here, the command to change this entry might be
PROFILEWR S0 "Start Up" "autobaud" 0
Or it could as easily be
PROFILEWR S0 sec_name line_name autoval
..where sec_name is a string variable set to "Start Up", line_name is a
string variable set to "autobaud" and autoval is an integer variable
determined by a setting in a dialog box, in this example, 0.
But the power of this command goes beyond just being able to write a
value into a line in a file.
If the file named doesn't exist, PROFILEWR will create it. If the
section specified doesn't exist, PROFILEWR will create it. If the
indicator line specified doesn't exist, PROFILEWR will create it. So,
even if the file GHOST.INI does not exist, if my script issues the
command above, I will end up with a file called GHOST.INI in my \ASPECT
sub-directory (which is what S0 specifies), that contains the
following...
[Start Up]
autobaud=0
I don't have to check for it's existence, because PROFILEWR will create
it if it doesn't exist, and append to it, if it does exist. Same goes for
the section names in that INI format file, and even the lines in that
section.
All of this done with a single command in Wasp!
The PROFILERD command is as equally remarkable in it's own way. The
format of that command is almost identical, except that the last item
(data) must be a variable of the correct type to receive the information
read from the INI format file. But the other entries in the command can
be of the same nature as in PROFILEWR, or PROFILERD filename section_name
indicator data_variable which makes the command to READ the value of the
autobaud setting in GHOST.INI something like
PROFILERD S0 "Start Up" "autobaud" autoval
So what's remarkable about this? If the value being read is a string,
and the line containing that data is not in existence, Wasp returns a null
string for the variable. If you are reading an integer, and the line
doesn't exist, Wasp returns a - value (generally -1) to indicate that the
line doesn't exist.
An integer stored in an INI format file isn't an integer.... if you use
a string variable to receive the contents of the "line", then you get a
string consisting of the number stored there. If you use an integer
variable, you get the number itself, as an integer.
This means that you can store an integer into an INI format file, and
use it as a string in a dialog box if you need a string there, or as an
integer, depending upon what kind of variable you use to read the data.
And PROFILERD is fast. There is no need to search through the lines read
from a text file or compare them to some value for an indicator that this
is the right line, and so on. That's all done by PROFILERD. It opens the
INI format file for a READ, searches for the section name included in the
command and then searches under that for the line name included. It then
reads the value of that line into the variable, using but one
command...one single line of code instead of the multiple lines that
would be needed to get the same data from a standard text file!
But how can this be used, other than in the normal way, to set
configuration parameters, etc.??
Wasp 2.0 greatly diminishes the memory restraints we worked under with
Wasp 1.0. Global variables are no where near the problem they were under
Wasp 1.0, but there still are limits on them. Even without those
constraints, they take up global memory in the data tables, etc.
Additionally, global variables can sometimes be tricky to deal with,
especially in a longer script with many sub-procedures. You just might,
inadvertently, modify the value of that global variable in one procedure,
only to find that modified value plays hell with another procedure that
uses the same global variable.
However if you use a local variable in a procedure that sets the original
value of what used to be a global variable, and then write it to a
section in an INI format file, the other procedure which requires that
value can also use a local variable. In other words, creating a
PROFILERD command to set precisely the value you want for that variable,
without worries about what another procedure might have done to the
global variable.
An INI format file can also give you the ability to pass data from one
script to another. As you know, you can normally only do this using the
internal global variables, such as S0, I0, and so on. But there are only
ten of each type of variable in this category, and that may not be
enough. You also have to be so very careful with those variables, since
they are available to any script that you run, and any script can change
their values. Those designaated values do not remain if you shut down
PCP/Win and start it up again.
If you store the values that you want to pass to another script in an INI
format file, on the other hand, they are at that value unless/until you
specifically change it in another script. And there isn't a ten variable
limit on the data that can be passed. All you have to do is have one
script write values to the INI format file, and the secondary script read
them. It doesn't matter if the secondary script is run during this
PCP/Win session, or another one. The values written to the INI format
file remain, and can be read and used by any script you wish, at any
time. Talk about being able to pass data from one script to another!
Well, I see by the clock on the wall -and the expression on Lois' face-
that I'm getting long winded here. I find INI format files to be
fascinating, simple to use, and quite valuable in script writing, and
tend to show that. But if I let this column go on any longer, Lois or
Paul will be redlining it to cut it down in size, and we can't have that.
We'll continue with some further discussions of using INI format files in
the next column.
Gregg Hommel is our resident Aspect and Procomm for Windows guru. As the
Co-Host for the RIME Windows and Procomm conferences many have met him
online where he modestly helps users solve problems. He's the author of
GHOST and serves on the WindoWatch editorial board.
ww
* * * * *
A WindoWatch feature: Yet Another Internet Service
Your Internet Provider: Is NetCruiser by NetCom in your future?
Copyright 1995 by Kyle Freeman
By now you've probably heard more about the Internet than about O.J.
Well, maybe not that much, but it's been the hottest topic in the
computer world for some time now. If you haven't already found an
Internet provider, you're more than likely looking for one, assuming you
haven't been turned off by the odious smarm of those Gramercy Press
commercials. One choice to consider is NetCom, a nationwide company
providing Internet access in about 250 cities. This article will review
NetCruiser, the proprietary software that NetCom provides to users for a
basic account.
Before getting to NetCruiser, however, let me make clear that NetCom will
sell you a Point to Point Protocol (PPP) connection, as well as a Serial
Line Internet Protocol (SLIP) connection, which will allow you to use any
Internet software, like Netscape, WSFTP, Eudora, Chame-leon, and others,
for about the same price as a NetCruiser account at $19.95 a month. But
NetCom's bread and butter comes from its sale of NetCruiser accounts.
Here's what you get when you subscribe.
First, NetCruiser software is free. NetCom gives it away to entice you
to get started. I've seen stacks of them given away at computer shows,
but if no such events occur near you, you can write to NetCom at 3031
Tisch Way, San Jose, CA 95128, call them at 1-408-983-5970, or fax them
at 1-408-983-1537, and they'll send you an attractive little package that
contains a single floppy with NetCruiser and a booklet of tips about
navigating around the Internet, with suggestions for sites to visit on
the World Wide Web, Gopherspace, and ftp archives. NetCruiser is also
sometimes sold for a nominal fee ($5 is what I've seen) at computer
stores.
Of all the pieces of Internet software I've tried, NetCruiser is by far
the easiest to install and use. Before you start, however, your system
must meet some minimal requirements. You need at least a 386 with 4
megabytes of RAM, DOS 5.0 or later, Windows 3.1, and 4 megabytes of free
disk space. Assuming you have all that, once you get your NetCruiser
disk, put it in your floppy drive, select RUN from Program Manager in
Windows, then type A:setup (or B:setup), and follow the directions.
You'll be prompted for your modem type (if your brand isn't on the list,
Generic works well), its COM port, and its baud rate, so you need to know
at least that much about your system. But unlike Mosaic or Netscape or
Chameleon, you don't need to know anything else. One of the beauties of
NetCruiser is that you can be a complete dummy and yet set it up and
operate it with no sweat.
Once you've gone through the initial setup steps, you'll be presented
with a menu of phone numbers from which to choose your local server. With
access sites in more than 250 cities and more being added nearly every
day, you're sure to find one near you. Once installed, it presents you
with a toll-free 800 number to call to register. You will get one free
month, with 40 hours of peak time (Monday - Friday, 9am -midnight) and
unlimited non-peak hours. This is quite a good deal. If you decide to
keep your account, you pay a one-time $25 connect fee and $19.95 a
month. If you don't want to continue, then you owe NetCom nothing.
Now, what do you get for that? Once you connect to NetCom, a simple but
tidy tool bar with eleven icons appears across the top of your screen
listing menu items above it. If you move your cursor over the icons,
messages at the bottom of the screen tell you about each one. To launch
any of them requires only a single click, a work saving feature for those
who don't have a mouse with one of its buttons configured for a double
click. Let's take a brief look at all eleven.
The first icon is a question mark, which is naturally the Help feature.
It is quite extensive. Not only do you get explanations about each of the
other icons, but Help includes discussions about the Internet, its
etiquette, interesting sites to visit, and sections about how to operate
NetCruiser, how to configure your modem, and how to use the menu items
above the icons. It is also remarkable, in comparison to other software
programs, for its dry sense of humor. In the section detail- ing how to
configure your modem, for instance, you are warned that if NetCruiser is
not set a certain way, "You will have unpleasant things happen."
The next icon is Reading E-mail. With a NetCom account you get an
Internet address where anyone can send you Internet e-mail. You choose
the name you want to use and it doesn't have to be your own. Your alias
could beTallTexan or HotMama, if you like, and so long as no one else at
NetCom has that string of letters, it's yours, followed by
@ix.netcom.com. You'll have some mail from NetCom the first time you log
on that basically glad-hands you for having the excellent taste to try
NetCom. Upon clicking the Read E-Mail icon, you get a dialog box with a
choice: your inbox, which will look for your newest mail, and your saved
mail. A single click on either of them brings up the desired result.
Once you have a message open to read, NetCruiser provides an addi-tional
tool bar of icons that perform e-mail functions. These include
responding, forwarding, saving, reading the next selected message, and a
garbage can for deleting messages. When you choose to respond to an
existing message to you, NetCruiser gives you the choice of whether or
not to quote that message in your reply. Once you choose that, you'll
get a screen that includes some additional icons. You can choose your
address book, or to add an attachment, send a message, or finally cancel,
cleverly represented by an envelope torn in two. This screen is exactly
the same as the one you get in tool bar icon number 3, which is Send
E-Mail. You would use this, of course, when you were sending a new
message that wasn't a reply to one you received.
The one thing the Send E-mail function doesn't allow you to do is import
text into your mail. That means all your responses have to be done
online, which is a hassle. You can send some pretyped text as an
attachment if you really need to send something you just don't have the
time or patience to type out while logged in, but the absence of an
import feature is a severe handicap for NetCruiser. You can, as I
mentioned earlier, log into NetCom with NetCruiser after you've con-
figured it to autoload NetCom's winsock.dll, minimize NetCruiser, and
then call up Eudora for your mail. If your mail-writing demands are
heavy, you'll no doubt want to do that. On the other hand, the
programmers at NetCom are constantly working on new versions, 1.6 is the
current one. This is sure to be a feature they will want to refine.
The World Wide Web icon is next. When you click it, you're trans-ported
to NetCom's home page. It contains a number of things you'll find
useful, such as a FAQ about using NetCruiser and a down-loadable version
of Accessing the Internet by David Peal, published by Sybex, which uses
NetCruiser as its model. You are also given the option to take tours to
Health, Education, Government, Business, and Scientific destinations on
the WWW. If you already know where you'd like to go, at the top of the
screen is a command line with the http address of NetCom. You can put
your cursor there and type your desired address. Otherwise, you can take
any of the tours of sample spots NetCom provides and go from there.
The Web browser has its own series of icons, of course. They include
opening a local file, saving the current document, opening your book-
mark file to save the current site or go to one you've previously saved
as a bookmark, and a search feature that will look for any string in the
current document. The command line itself has a drop-down arrow that you
can use to revisit any of the addresses you've visited that session. So
if you've gone ten steps down some series of menus and would like to go
back to the first one, you can find it with this menu, click, and presto!
you're back to the earlier screen. Icons also exist for returning to the
NetCom home page and two that resemble the forward and backward signs on
VCRs and tape machines to move you to the next document or the previous
one.
You can post articles to UseNet through the Read UseNet Groups program as
responses to articles you read there, or you can click the Post to UseNet
Groups icon to send new articles that aren't responses. I've never done
the latter, so I can't tell you about the problems or happy circumstances
surrounding that feature. I've answered mess-ages I read, for which the
procedure was much like the Send E-Mail part of NetCruiser, that is, easy
to do with self-explanatory icons.
For those who want to download uuencoded image files (and you know who
you are!), you may be disappointed to learn that NetCruiser, as currently
implemented, does not decode your pictures automatically. It will save
them as 00000001.msg, 00000002.msg, etc. You have to do the decoding
yourself. There is a way, however, with a program called WinVn, to
decode such images automatically while they are downloading. It involves
the same procedure I mentioned above of starting NetCruiser with its own
winsock.dll and minimizing it once connected, then starting WinVn.
You can find out exactly how to do this and many other similar
procedures, such as using Netscape, Eudora, and Wincode with NetCruiser,
by contacting Lee Johnson, self-styled as "the HelpnHand." He has
prepared a series of instructions on where to find those programs and how
to set them up to work with NetCruiser. You can contact him at
lrj@ix.netcom.com. He is one of those rare souls who seems to live in
order to help others. Ask him for the instructions on whatever of these
issues you're concerned about and you'll get an answer right away, along
with a list of all the other issues on which he has prepared
instructions. He can also usually be contacted most nights on IRC
channel #newu at 9 pm CST. Which brings me to the last icon. I can also
tell you very little about Internet Relay Chat. NetCruiser's IRC gives
you a choice to connect to EFnet or to NetCom's local IRC network.
Because I don't really care about chatting, I've only tried it once, just
so I could write about it in this article. Either because I had only the
slightest idea of what I was doing, or maybe because I called at 4 AM on
Saturday morning, I got no answer from anyone.
Let me add also that I rarely had any trouble logging onto NetCom. I've
heard others complain that too often the lines were busy or down,
preventing them from getting online. This has occurred to me only a
couple of times in three months. I tend to log on in what Hamlet refers
to as the very witching time of night, when churchyards yawn and Hell
itself breathes forth contagion to this world. There is naturally less
traffic at these hours, so my experience may not be representative of
more normal practice. But no doubt every major provider has occasional
trouble keeping all its lines open, so NetCom is probably no worse than
others.
So, if you're looking for a complete package of Internet tools in an
easy-to-set-up, easy-to-use form, NetCom's NetCruiser fills that bill of
fare quite well. It would also be a good choice for people of markedly
different computer skills who want to share the same machine. So if
you're a computer whiz, but your husband is a computer klutz, NetCruiser
would be a good choice for the two of you. You could use all your
favorite but hard to set up programs, while he could use the easy
NetCruiser menus. Unless you're expert enough to set up your own TCP/IP
stacks, configure your software to accept the IP addresses of your
provider, take advantage of the very best program for each Internet
activity, and you can get a cheaper price for a provider, NetCruiser
isn't something you'll want to ignore. All in all, it's worth a serious
look.
Kyle Freeman, a former teacher, now works as a computer consultant in the
San Francisco area. He is a regular WindoWatch contributor.
ww
* * * * *
A Product Review.... TIME and CHAOS
THERE'S NOT A MOMENT TO LOSE!
Copyright 1995 by Frank McGowan
Backward, turn backward, O Time in thy flight.
Alas, much as Shelley implored -or was it Keats? I never have been able
to keep them straight-, there’s no reversing the inexorable transit of
time toward its inevitable end. In a society with such a negative
attitude towards what’s gone before, as exemplified by the deplorable
insult, “You’re history!”, the only important time is that which is yet
to arrive.
Time is such a baffling concept, that it’s been the subject of
innumerable poems, essays, philosophical discussions, and studies by
theoretical physicists. Why is it, as Einstein mused, that ten seconds
sitting on a hot stove is so much longer than ten seconds listening to
Mozart -or was it Bach ? To the pragmatist, time and money are
interchangeable: wasting time is tantamount to burning greenbacks.
Businessmen/women would rather have their BMW repossessed than squander
precious moments that could be used cooking up schemes for adding to the
bottom line.
It is no surprise then that the bright minds of the software industry are
putting so much effort into designing programs they hope will appeal to
the hard-headed strivers in the ranks of middle manage-ment. Not for them
Walt Whitman's dictum to "loaf and invite the soul"! These poor souls
haven’t a moment to spare. You could probably consider them "Type
A-plus." It is for them that the software sub-genre of personal
information managers has been created. PIM's (to use the current TLA)
purport to help the overburdened executive do what humanity has hankered
to do since we first understood that our existence is temporal: manage
time.
As you may have inferred, I am a hardened skeptic when it comes to time
management. My idea of a nifty time management device is a pocket large
enough to hold a bunch of paper slips with illegible notes scribbled on
them, and a small daily calendar (for things too important to entrust to
one of my little slips of paper). The little slips of paper usually wind
up on top of my bureau in an untidy heap, anchored by the daily calendar
so they won’t blow all over the bedroom, thereby driving Sue to
distraction. As long as the papers stay on the bureau, she’s able to turn
a blind eye to the mess, though it takes some effort. Nevertheless, I try
to keep an open mind (why are you cocking your eyebrow, Sue?), so when I
was asked to try out a time management program called Time and Chaos, I
agreed. After all, I had plenty of time on my hands...
Okay, I hear you all protesting: "Maybe you've got gobs of time to spare,
but I don't. Get on with this! Please get to the point! Quit annoying us
with pseudo-intellectual noodling. Is Time and Chaos worth checking out
or not?
Yes.
Satisfied? If not, read on......
Time and Chaos (or T&C) makes a lot of sense even to such a “show me”
person as myself. I like it so much that I’ve stuck it into my Startup
group in place of the Calendar file I had put there a few months ago. The
only big drawback is that you need to have your computer handy to use it
-it doesn't quite fit into my pants pocket. Since most of you are,
obviously, never too far from your PC, this isn’t such a major flaw. And
besides, you can print out what you need, stick it on top of your bureau
and drive your mate to distraction just like me!
The designers of Time and Chaos have clearly studied their predecessors
and competitors closely and have found a good balance between richness
and usability. There are enough “cool” features on Time and Chaos to
satisfy the nerdiest, but they’re only there if you want and/or need
them. The Help files provide all the guidance you need to get up to speed
quickly. For the most part the interface is reasonably intuitive,
although the Done button on the Todo list led me astray. I thought it
meant I was done entering items to the list, but it really means the item
has been “done.” The screen is organized nicely into four main sections:
calendar, shown as the current month (upper left); appointment list
(upper right); Todo list (lower left): and Phone book (lower right).
The calendar section is where you select the day/month/year you want to
schedule. To get to another day in the current month, you just point and
click. Any appointments or todo’s for that day show up. Arrows and double
arrows let you jump forward or backward to prior or subsequent months or
years. I suppose if you have a major anniversary coming up in two years,
it might be prudent to note that as a safeguard against letting it slip
past. The backward move is helpful when you need to remember where you
were or what you were doing at a particular moment on any given day. (I
must be watching too much O.J.)
Adding chores to your Todo list is pretty simple, and you even get to
rate them from Critical to Work it In (my version would be If I Feel Up
To It). Delete them as you do them, too, by selecting the item, then
pressing the Delete tab on the Todo window. The program even nags you a
bit by asking “Are you sure?” If you have any chores on the Todo list
you didn't get around to, they carry over to the next day and the next
until you finally get them done or, if you’re out of patience, delete
them.
The Phone Book feature includes, among many pleasing options, the ability
to split your phone directory into white and yellow pages. You can create
different categories for your listings, to keep social numbers separate
from business numbers. As you would expect, the program has an Autodialer
function, if you have a modem. (If you don’t have a modem, how are you
reading this?) There are a slew of other goodies included in the Phone
Book function that should make life a lot easier, if no less complicated.
There’s even an integrated word processing function built into the Phone
function that supports Windows versions of AmiPro, WordPerfect and Word.
I don't know if they've thought of everything, but they've come pretty
darned close. You can create appointment lists and move around quickly to
set up schedules literally months or years in advance (for some reason a
scene from Casablanca comes to mind - Barfly: What are you doing tomorrow
night, Rick? Rick: I never plan that far ahead.) To enter an appointment,
you select the day, then click the button labeled Enter New Appointment,
and you're all set.
You can also set an alarm for each appointment. After all, it's no good
having an appointment scheduled with your dentist who’s 45 minutes away,
if you don’t remember it at least 45 minutes ahead of time. You can also
connect appointments to your phone book, so you can see all appointments
you have with any particular person listed there. A feature I especially
like is the Timebar. If you want to see how high your stress level will
go over the next few days or weeks, or you want to understand why it’s as
high as it’s been lately, click this Menu. Up pops a grid, laid out for
last month, this month and next month, showing you your time blocks for
each day of each month. The more blue bars, the higher the stress, at
least that’s my way of interpreting this data. And it’s right there in
front of you. One suggestion: I think it would be a good idea for
different colors to be used, so you could differentiate “good” time
blocks from “bad” ones. So, if I’ve set aside five hours next Saturday
for golf, that might be shown in green. But if I’ve set aside two hours
for a meeting with a difficult client, that ought to be displayed in red.
One or two minor cavils: Why no shortcuts on the menus? Sure, once I’ve
opened the File menu I can see that Ctrl-X would have gotten me to Exit
without opening the menu, but why no x in Exit now that I'm there? And
please run the Spell program on your message files. Permenently? You
may be hooked on phonics, but your spell checker isn't.
Other than that, I think Time & Chaos is a winner, though I remain
unpersuaded that a computer is a more convenient time manager than scraps
of paper. I am willing to grant that it's a lot neater. It's still not as
easy to stuff into my pants pocket, though. Time and Chaos is produced
by:
iSBiSTER International, Inc. CompuServe ID: 74017,3424
1111 Beltline Road, Suite 204 BBS Support: 214-530-2762
Garland, Texas 75040 * Fax: 214-530-6566
Voice 214 495-6724
The price is $29.95, plus shipping.
Frank McGowan is a computer consultant and college teacher. A former
science writer, he brings his considerable talents to WindoWatch as one
of our regular contributors.
ww
* * * * *
A WindoWatch feature
IDIOTS-REDUX
Copyright 1995 by Bob Miller
More idiotic ramblings from the PC Press.
PC World - August - page 124
[regarding MSN] Never before has client software for an online service
shipped in the same box as an operating system.
BM>Ever hear of Apple? How about Warp?
PC World - August - page 31
Everyone wants a CD-ROM drive on their desktop.
BM>English 101 anyone? Everyone wants ... on HIS desktop.
PC World - August - page 88
For one thing, the option to have a permanent swap file - which in the
past could permanently occupy 20 MB or more - no longer exists.
BM>You shouldn't use it but it exists. And only morons (or those doing
full color graphics) have 20 MB PSF's.
Some silliness in the Summer 1995 issue of GE2k:
the Gateway 2000 Magazine. Page 10.
Most files downloaded from a BBS, or other online service, come in the
form of a self-extracting file which normally has an .exe extension.
BM>Not the BBS's that I frequent. Indeed, you would be very hard pressed
to find any BBS -except a manufacturer's- that had .exe files on it. ZIP
is the standard except for the diehards who prefer ARJ.
Summer 1995 GE2k Page 35.
If you are planning on placing the TEMP directory in a RAM drive, you
should have at least 8 MB of RAM......With 8 MB of RAM, you can set up a
3 MB RAM drive and still have plenty of memory left for other resources.
BM>Rarely have I seen such a short paragraph with so many errors. If you
are planning on using a RAM drive, TEMP is the last thing you should use
it for. Most programs don't use temp files and those that do, use large
ones. Try printing a three page WinWord document with two fonts, two
point sizes and a graphic. The temp file Print Manager generates can be
over 10 MB in size. If the RAM drive fills up, the system will crash
_hard_ and you will lose any unsaved work. 8 MB is the bare minimum for
WFWG to even run in with any degree of stability. You are going to steal
37% of that precious memory for a RAM drive? For TEMP files?
_Ridiculous_ in the extreme. If you must use a RAM drive with Windows,
the absolute minimum amount of memory you need is 24 MB (16 for Windows
and its apps plus 8 for the RAM drive). And it is still silly.
From the paragraph preceding that one:
...these files will not be deleted. Why is this bad? Because over time,
these .TMP files will accumulate [true enough] and suck up your system
resources, which can lead to those "out of memory" messages.....
BM>No, Mr. Technical Consultant and Mr. Senior Project Manager, files (of
any kind) do _not_ "suck up" system resources. 5 files or 50,000 files
use exactly the same amount of system resources. Zero.
Windows Magazine August Page 241
Fax cards supporting the emerging class 2 standard.....work better with
......Windows 95. Only V.34 devices offer class 2 fax.
BM>Please don't tell that to my old Aceex 14,400 modem. It has been
using class 2 for a couple of years and I'd hate for it to stop.
PC Mag August Page 422
I'd like to be able to check whether a particular disk drive has
sufficient space before beginning to use an application. Can you do this
with a batch file?
BM>The good news is there is an easy way .... The bad news is that you
have to enter the number of bytes in hexadecimal...... [followed by a
lengthy batch file and an explanation of hexadecimal calculations].
Something is wrong with DIR? It seems to give me the disk space
remaining without such silliness.
Windows July Page 277.
We had problems with the video drivers supplied by Number
Nine.....dropped more than two thirds of the total frames averaging 9.3
out of 30, in a test. Number Nine sent new drivers....the video results
immediately improved. ... However, the new drivers repeatedly caused
General Protection Faults..... Overall, ... ranked first in our testing.
BM>How bad could the others have been if this was number one?
Windows July Page 248
Make sure MSCDEX is the last item listed in your Autoexec.bat file.
Otherwise, it will simply take over the whole upper memory space and
everything else will get dumped into conventional memory.
BM>It will? Gee, that must be news to the 40,000,000 intelligent people
who load it early so that Smartdrive can cache it. And our other stuff
still loads high.
Windows June Page 118
Try using an 8 MB swap file for 12 MB RAM.
BM>Try using 4 - it will work much better.
Windows Page 119
If you run standard Windows 3.1 and don't see the "enable 32 bit disk
access" check box, it means that your disk controller isn't compatible
with this feature.
BM>It does no such thing. Maybe your Windows was installed from a SCSI
drive or your hard disk isn't set up right in CMOS or someone used odd
partitioning software or several other possibilities. An incompatible
hard disk is just one of several choices.
Windows Page 182
If your app supports a temporary swap space (Adobe Photoshop does)
......your second option is to create a RAM disk for use as temporary
file space.....that should boost performance.
BM>Since that program likes 30-70 MB as a swap file, that would be quite
a machine that has that large a ram disk.
Windows Page 188
Many applications have their own print spooling utility.....Turn off
Print Manager to eliminate this double spooling.....Remember to turn
Print Manager back on...or your system will hang up waiting for Print
Manager instructions.
BM>Really? Every time I turn PM off, my system works just fine. Indeed, I
have some difficulty in figuring out how a program that is off can be
sending instructions.
Windows Page 211
MS DOS wants about 45 KB of the 64 KB HMA.....if you use Double-space,
it'll gulp about 12k of the HMA. The Command interpreter will sip about 2
KB. All this leaves only about 3 KB which is just enough space for six
buffers. Fortunately, MS-DOS itself includes 15 buffers by default, so
under the above conditions you can write a BUFFERS=21 to soak up that
last drop of the memory pool.
BM>Really? MS DOS does not include 15 buffers, and only 17 will fit in
the above scenario. Why not try something before you write about it?
Same article
If you use SmartDrive, you may not need any of them.
BM>Correct - as long as you want hopelessly slow floppy access.
PC World July Page 52
As of March, we're paying $30 per user to run the pre-release version of
the software [Win 95 Preview] on the machines of an additional 30 users.
BM>Gee, the rest of the world only paid $32 per FIVE users to
participate.
PC Computing July p.53 Hall of Idiot's Fame Star John Dvorak
A friend who said "I have it from deep within the Windows 95 programming
group that the real product [Win95] will not be ready until November.
Period!"
BM>Does this bear any resemblance to a virtually identical comment
(although attributed directly to a source rather than a friend) that
appeared last month in a different publication? Could it be that his
record of 2153 consecutive wrong predictions on the future of computing
have so bewildered him that he is starting to repeat himself?
Infoworld July 12 page 3.
You have chosen to go with Microsoft Office when a package like Claris
Works would do the job for most of your users.
This is too silly to even discuss. Claris Works is a competitor for MS
Works (and nowhere near as good). To say that it will "do the job for
most of your users" boggles the mind unless you have very low level
workers.
InfoWorld July 3 Page 54
The Gateway system locks with a password, not a case lock
InfoWorld July 3 Page 56
Password protection or keyboard lock? Gateway: both.
BM>Confused, are we? Or did the system lock vanish between pages?
The Grand Prize Idiot of The Month Award, however, goes to Robert Cringly
for his totally moronic column in Infoworld in which he claimed that
Win95 would be shipped with a hardware dongle. That one is very hard to
top. OTOH, Dvorak will, no doubt, come roaring back next month.
Idiots Redux is the invention of Bob Miller who has a huge collection of
Conference Host assignments from both RIME and Ilink. His newest is the
Ilink Windows95 conference . A very knowledgeable Windows writer, Bob is
the head of a Mental Health Agency and can be found at
bob.miller@channel1.com He and Stanley are regular WindoWatch contributors.
ww
* * * * *
The Summer of Ninety-five
Super Programmers
Copyright 1995 by Peter Neuendorffer
Some of my friends, those that I have left... grin slyly, when I say I'm a programmer and say "Oh, you write viruses, ho ho" or "I bet
you have sex on the Internet." So I have decided once and for all to
put the record straight about the life of the information jockey.
It was just the end of another day in the life of me, a super
program-mer. Single-handedly I had discovered a completely undocumented
loop processor so that I could let Windows process events that were
waiting. In VB it was called do events but it was called something
completely different in Delphi. And I'm not telling anyone what it is.
You'll never find it. It’s hidden deep in a help file forever.
All day the phone rang off the hook. People begged me to solve their
hardware, software, and personal problems, and I made polite noises,
hardly containing my eagerness to return to typing at my computer.
By 3 PM I had foiled the dreaded longint parameter pass that had
threatened to disable my file searcher. Then, the smug realization that
Dot and Dot Dot directory referents were potentially recursive and led to
endless loops. Conquering null-terminated strings was close at hand.
As the sun sank, I checked my mailbox and found no checks. But there was
yet another missile [sic] from Microsoft about Windows 95. This one was
even more colorful and glossier than the last. I found myself saying,
"No, that's not it." I was kind of hoping since they think I'm a
developer that they would send me a $500.00 developer package. But I
dream. As I turned to go back upstairs, mild mannered computer programmer
Peter Neuendorffer, clutching my fifth cup of coffee of the day in my
sweat-soaked fingers, I heard a whimper behind me, presumably at
eye-level, but possibly a mere transient phantom of memory.
It was none other than Captain Alice, commandeer of the program-mers
action starship, fellow super-programmer, arriving from another cyber
virtual hacker userfriendly UNIX WWW interactive newbie adventure in
Interface. She was in town covering the covered bridges convention, and
dropped by to sweep my porch, or so she claimed.
She was covered in high ASCII and not too stable. She frantically brushed
off several Constucts that were clinging to her, exclaiming "These wild
pointers are hell on my allergies." Then she stepped out of her ship, a XX
10 Googolgoogol with a detachable edible hard drive. She says the traffic
out on the suprahighway is murder what with all the Nintendo players
graduating. At first she made little sense, but together we initialized
her speech variables and the garbage level subsided.
She says that today, she was able to save the day, and yet again, TV
guide will arrive somewhat on time, Federal Express will drive it's
trucks tomorrow, and the ATM's will work. Though they won't temporarily
process certain requests. She says actually, there are Daemons out there
whose job it is to disable certain computational functions in order to
prevent a manual override inherent in simplex based systems. It's a UNIX
thing. I waited at the doorway as Alice decontaminated herself of foul
test data used in the day's structured design march. I helped Alice
unload several hundred pounds of client specifications down the cellar
steps.
Alice cleaned up, we went out ballroom dancing, then settled down to
creating a temporary universe in which we could meditate and get some
respite from the exigencies of reserved word conflicts. Although neither
of us are Slackers, we both are disenchanted with the corporate life, and
sooner or later hope to settle down in a depressed area and open a small
greasy spoon. If you care to join us, write us a note care of
petern@channel1.com.
Peter and Alice can be found on CDROM doing their thing. When Alice was
first discovered on the Internet she took the surfers by storm with her
modest and unassuming demeanor. She is much beloved. She urged Peter to
develop Windows95 many years ago, but he just wouldn't listen.... After
Gates introduces '95 late this month she promises to forget about Peter's
goof but until then the beat goes on as we will hear in the following:
I got a letter from the noted Present-ist and my friend, Alice A. today.
She has been vacationing on the Isles of Shoals, ten miles off of
Portsmouth, New Hampshire. She says that everyone there has Windows 95,
the final release, and questioned why I didn't. Again!
On Star Island, they are a special test site to install printer drivers
in the surf and mist, and under adverse weather conditions. She says that
all has gone well so far. She has taught the whales to install their own
wallpaper, and has successfully installed the entire Yellow Pages for
Greater Portsmouth and made an animated feature about starfish.
Alice says she is at last free from DOS command lines, and will never
ever look an extension in the face again - or "bad command or file name."
Mr. Parchmont, custodian of the Grand Hotel on Star Island, has seen the
light for the first time, and is ordering a complete Office Suite for his
box. She has to restrain him, however, because he keeps trying to sign up
for the Microsoft Network, and will talk of nothing else but Windows 95's
ease of use, neglecting his chores such as fixing the hotel rainspouts.
Alice says she is working on a new on-line service. With one mouse click
you can get a new operating system. Up in the Isles of Shoals they are
not worried about restraint of trade. In fact, up until the advent of the
modem, everything that came onto or off of Star Island was brought by the
ferry from the Mainland.
There is a treacherous breakwater between Star Island and Apple-dore.
Alice has successfully installed Windows 95 while sitting on this
breakwater at low tide. She promises to send herself to me by modem soon,
as soon as she figures out how to use the communications package that
came with the modem. With the advent of Windows 95 at the Isles of
Shoals, once more the townsfolk can converse with the seagulls. Me, too!
Alice has such a long memory....
Peter Neuendorffer creates Alice adventures when he is not creating new
software.
* * * * *
A History Lesson
A Brief History of the Computer
Copyright 1995 by Jim Gunn
Today we take the ubiquitous computer for granted. It and the software
we've come to depend on, are an everyday appliance. It is important to
look back through the years at all the people and companies that
contributed to the success of our beloved industry.
1642
A nineteen year old hacker named Blaise Pascal, - we're not sure if that
was his real name or his handle - invents the original computer. This
pioneering system had no graphical interface and used a stylus for the
command line. While Blaise had high hopes, it did not catch on as well as
he hoped.
The basic problem was with technical support. Neither the telephone nor
on hold music had been invented yet. Messenger pigeons were tried but
many of them croaked while in a holding pattern for the single tech rep.
Thus when things went wrong, there was no practical way to call for help.
Now-a-days, this problem doesn't exist since "on hold music" has become
commonplace. We can listen to in on almost any technical support line for
as long as we want.
1692
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz invents the math co-processor. The computer
could then multiply and divide as well as add and subtract. Leibniz's
invention was quickly adopted by all the mail order outfits of the time.
They in turn created the list price versus the real price marketing
gimmick.
1833
Charles Babbage proposes the first supercomputer. He conned the British
government into footing part of the bill, but mostly spent his own
fortune on it. Nine years and 27,000 pounds later, the whole project was
kaput and nothing ever really came of it. In modern times Seymour Cray
has subsequently perfected this process.
1842
Augusta Ada Lovelace invents the first computer hobbyist magazine. She
read a description of Charlie Babbages's system, written by an unknown
Italian engineer. Augusta promptly copied this, made up a whole lot of
extra stuff that was all theory and published it. Lovelace made all the
profits while the engineer had to go into consulting to earn a living.
Her publication enjoyed widespread popularity for a while. Then it seems
that she proceeded to promote the super computer as a means of predicting
the outcome of horse races and actually constructed and used the thing.
The readership believed all this because, after all, they had seen it in
writing, so it must be true.
When the results turned out to be not quite as accurate as desired, she
tried to pull a cover up. However, throughout Europe there was a network
of pages, outriders, and messenger pigeons which quickly spread the word
that the super computer was flawed. Augusta was eventually forced to
admit that there was a problem and had to implement a replacement program
which cost most of the profits from her endeavor. On her deathbed, she
still contended that the erroneous calculations only occurred in a
minuscule number of instances.
1944
Harvard University unveils the Mark I Automatic Sequence Controlled
Calculator. This, at last, was a true electronic calculating machine and
is considered the first computer as we know it today. Features included
being slower than the user wanted, miscalculating and it stayed broken
most of the time. IBM actually paid for it and the modern age had
arrived.
1946
ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) is introduced. The
age of the vacuum tube had arrived. ENIAC built upon the success of the
Mark I by introducing the "bug" while maintaining all of the former's
features.
1951
Remington Rand introduces the UNIVAC computer. Now the computer was
commercially available to businesses but hobbyists would still have to
wait a bit. In reality all they had done was purchase the ENIAC, renamed
it, and began selling copies. Later this would be termed cloning.
1954
IBM enters the computer fray big time with the 752. This is significant
for some reason or other. The author, having toyed briefly with one is
not too sure why. There was a 751, but it was just another ENIAC.
The commercial computer age was fully upon us at this point. Instances of
how useful the computer had become were everywhere. For example, in the
previous decade, an aircraft would take six to nine months to design and
reach production. Now that time period was shortened to three to five
years with the aid of a computer. In only two more decades, advances in
computational power would be such, that the period would be further
reduced to seven to fifteen years. Progress was inexorable.
1959
Jack Kilby and Robert N. Noyce invent the microprocessor. This begins a
whole new era for the computer industry. Noyce goes on to found Intel
corporation. Intel releases a new microprocessor model every few weeks
from then on. Thirty-five years later it finally becomes useful with the
release of the registered version of DOOM.
1964
IBM introduces the concept of If you can get one, it's obsolete, with the
shipment of their 360 series computers. The system/360 revolutionizes the
computing industry. Everything that had been previously programmed no
longer worked. Many companies not only installed the new systems, but
actually paid extra for "emulator" packages which allowed their programs
run. IBM secretly authorized sales people to treat customers to alcoholic
beverages even though there was a strict corporate policy to the
contrary.
1976
Stephen G. Wozniak and Steven Jobs invent the Apple computer in their
garage. They were attempting to repair the transmission on a '59 DeSoto
at the time.
The first model was named Lisa after one of their daughters, the later
version was named "Mac" after one of their trucks. They succeeded
mightily with their invention. Millions were sold, hundreds were used.
Having only a single button on their mouse was the only limitation.
The main result of all their efforts was a really neat-o Super Bowl ad.
1981
IBM introduces the Personal Computer (PC). This was wildly successful and
eventually reached a market share of 75%. Considering that IBM was the
only manufacturer at the time, this was indeed a notable achievement.
Only the near bankruptcy of the early 90's will ever surpass this in the
corporate annals.
In addition, the PC provided computing capabilities to the average
citizen.
Growth was slow at first, but as time passed, the number of individuals
having a computer on their desk or in their den reached epidemic
proportions. Nothing useful has been accomplished ever since.
1990
Microsoft introduces their hugely successful version of Windows, 3.0.
Suddenly every PC in the world has a graphical user interface - suddenly
every PC in the world is underpowered. Taking the industry by storm, icon
collecting became the national pastime.
A significant side effect is the growth of bulletin board systems. From
the beginning of the home computing age, bulletin boards had been the
territory of an elite cadre of highly sophisticated computer enthusiasts.
With the introduction of Windows 3.0, this changed entirely. Like Sam
Colt's revolver, all men were now equal. Anyone could send electronic
messages stating the stupidest things possible with Windows as the core
subject. Everyone had a computer, Windows, an opinion; no one had a
clue.
A couple of years later, Windows was revised to version 3.1. The
significant changes were: TrueType font collecting replaced icons as the
hobby of the masses and all UAEs (Unexpected Application Errors) were
banished by the introduction of the GPF (General Protection Fault).
Everyone was relieved that they no longer experienced UAEs and considered
the new version extremely stable. A clue was still not included.
1992
Gateway 2000, a dairy farm in South Dakota, finally perfects "on hold"
music. It is now available continuously via an 800 number.
1995
Microsoft Windows 95 appears. It is impossible to find a 5081 punched card.
Repent, the end is near.
Jim Gunn is a weird guy who has been dabbling with computers pretty much
forever. His main hobby is being president of Sterling Consulting in Salt
Lake City (a.k.a. Salt Puddle), Utah.
ww
* * * * *
Reflections of a Modem Junkie
Copyright 1995 by Leonard Grossman
This may be the greatest moment in the history of online communications.
Right now internet access is relatively cheap and, for those who have
enough interest in computers to read this magazine, it is relatively
easy. . . .and then again, it may not last!
Basic internet accounts range upwards from $10 a month for a shell
account to slightly more than twice that amount for full access. With
the advent of new software utilities like Slipknot, which enables Web
access even from a shell account, almost everyone can afford to get
online. And right now the internet remains, for the most part the
relatively open system that has made it such an efficient and effective
means of sharing information and infotainment. But both cheap access and
the very openness of the system are under attack!
In addition to the local and national Internet access providers like MCS,
InterAccess, Netcom, WWA, the older large commercial online services
like Compuserve, Prodigy and America Online (AOL) are really getting into
the act. The competition is hot. On some usenet groups the current joke
is that some of us have received enough pro-motional discs containing the
front end software for America On Line that we could back up Win95, or
even OS/2. It seems a new disk is in the mail every few weeks. Every
few days one of the major services announces additions to its internet
services.
Why are the older providers working so hard to hook us now? Be-cause
Win95 is now scheduled for release on the 24th of August of this year.
Whether or not it is actually released on time, its release will be one
more factor in the great sea of change in the world of online
communications expected to occur in the next year or so. Just as almost
every machine sold today has Prodigy or AOL already installed, as well as
DOS and Windows, within a few months every new machine will contain Win95
and with it the online software for the Microsoft Network (MSN). When
you boot up Win95, the MSN icon will be waiting on the desktop. Just
click and you can register online - if you have your credit card handy!
If the Justice Department allows it, the advent of MSN will provide
incredible competition to the old providers. But, how will all this
effect delivery of services? First, the major services do not yet have
wide availability of fast modem connections. Second, the big services
charge by the minute or by the message while most access providers charge
by the month or even longer periods except for the most basic accounts.
Even if you can get high speed access to one of the big boys you are not
home free. Compu$erve charges even higher rates for higher speed access.
On the other hand, with the major service providers, the end user doesn't
have to do much more to get their machine ready than to install the
provider's access software and log on. The options will all be on the
provider's server. With direct access it's usually up to the user to
assemble a suite of software that will do everything the user desires.
This method offers greater freedom but can be fraught with frustration.
Loss of freedom is what is really threatened by the encroachment of the
major providers and MSN. The user is forced into their selection of
internet clients, their interface and their options. But there are two
greater threats to the internet.
The big threat everyone worries about is censorship. With Congress
pandering to the lowest common denominator and the squeaky wheel, there is
real risk that in an attempt to prevent the one or two percent of the
online world who are children from access to pornography, or to silence
the distribution of unpopular and perhaps even hateful literature and
ideas, it is possible that the net itself will be destroyed. The entire
concept of the net is open architecture and easy access to systems and
servers.
Every firewall, every barrier, every "protection" built into the system
reduces its effectiveness as a medium of communication. What a pleasant
surprise to hear Newt Gingrich's comments on this issue. (I feel
better, now, about that "newt" icon appearing on my screen every time I
load Chameleon.)
Here, my objections to the big providers may prove to be wrong headed,
for if they can provide front end software which will permit the end
user, read "parents", with the ability to restrict access on the user
end, we may have the best of both words. Open systems with user control.
Ahh fantasy land.
But the real threat to the system isn't from the censors but from a new
breed of on line entrepreneurs. "After all what," they say, "is the net
for if not to make money?" That last statement would have been anathema
a few months ago. Remember the outcry when a lawyer spread his
advertising over the net. That seems long ago indeed.
Just a few months ago, virtually, no pun intended, every site on the
World Wide Web could be accessed. Just click on a URL (Universal
Resource Locator) and within a few seconds you were connected. It was
fascinating. More amazing were the number of commercial publications
which offered free and unfettered access. Time Magazine, Ziffnet, the
New York Times.
But slowly that's changing. It seems they were just getting us hooked.
While few sites actually charge for access, there are a number of sites
which require registration and passwords. No longer can I merely click.
Now, to read the NandO Times, an excellent source of national and
international news, I have to get down my little card file and look up my
user name and password. At least I didn't have to provide a credit card
number as I did for MSN, even though there’s no charge yet.
Commercial charges for online information are nothing new. Lexis and
WestLaw have long charged outrageous sums for access to what is
essentially public information. But now there are commercial sites on
the Web itself. Paid subscriptions required. There is no free lunch, but
for the moment there is a very inexpensive ride. Who knows what it'll be
like next year.
A FINAL THOUGHT
It's a gorgeous summer day. Temperature in the 70's. Gentle breeze
blowing. It's time to let the modem cool off and get some fresh air.
And I'm sitting at the keyboard writing this column.
Actually it isn't that bad. We just returned from a five day weekend in
Michigan -- early breakfasts, long hikes before lunch. Long naps in
the afternoon, with a good novel to fall asleep over. And then a walk on
the pier or a good dinner in the evening. No keyboard, no modem. Just
good conversation and that novel by one of my favorite authors, Richard
Powers, whose "Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance," blew me away a
number of years ago.
I should have been forewarned. Even the dust jacket makes it clear that
the new book, "Galatea 2.2" ((Farrar Straus Giroux, NY) in-volves a
confrontation with a computer. It’s an attempt to enable a computer to
compete with real students in a "Turing Test" and pass a masters degree
exam in literature. Real danger lurked when I read the words with which
the book opened, "It was like so, but wasn't. I lost my thirty-fifth
year. . . ."
Within a few pages we learn that the narrator had free access to what he
calls the world web. I've lost at least a year that way too. Just
published, the book is set in that time, seemingly light years ago, but
really not much more than a year, before the advent of the graphic
browser, but still the author-narrator's excitement mounts as page after
page he describes the addictive delights of connecting to machines all
over the face of the earth. "The web: yet another total disorientation
that became status quo without anyone realizing it."
The novel is much more than technobabble, it is a fascinating tour of the
subject of intelligence, literature and love. Logoff, pick up a copy and
a tall cool one. Sit out on the deck and enjoy.
Leonard Grossman is a lawyer with the Department of Labor and is a
regular WindoWatch contributor. He can be reached at grossman@mcs.com or
leonard.grossman@syslink.mcs.com
ww
* * * * *
Why Winzip?.... A Retrospective
Copyright 1995 by Bernie
Good reader this piece is meant to be accompanied by a musical score
beginning about mid-article, starting out at as a soft, almost
imperceivable volume and ending fortissimo. I hear a patriotic piece...
perhaps the Battle Hymn of the Republic... Go back and try it! Now see
what you've done... Ya got me started again. I'll have to cancel my
patient load AGAIN for today.......
DAMN IT!
Thanks to all for the overwhelming number of replies regarding the
musical question "Why should I use Winzip?" I have been very
surprised... veritably shocked at the lack of enthusiasm for this
ubiquitous utility, which has been evident in the feedback to my query.
I would not have guessed that there would be about a 6 to 1 ratio of
comments against. Either this unscientific survey means that Winzip is
truly held in quite low regard, or that I have somehow struck a chord
with the subversive element of this Windows NewsGroup, whose agenda would
be to function as the nidus for a return to the days of real blood and
guts computing... none of this cartoon stuff with little pictures serving
as replacements for intellectual thought... yes, even for truth, justice
and the American way. Today heralds a throw-back to the days when
cashiers gave change by counting rather than obeying the mindless orders
of the change-calculating cash register. A return to the time of phonics
and order in schools... to a time when you could leave your doors
unlocked, when gasoline was 39 cents a gallon, when gay meant happy (no
letters please... no slur intended), when funny little plastic glasses
were given out in theater lobbies to view 3-D movies. In short, a return
to the g ood old days.
Little did I think when asking this question, that, one day in the
future.... our children and our children's children will look upon this
day, the day of the response to my question on Winzip, as the
beginning... yea the genesis of a the new era, the turning point, the
rebirth of the return to sense, to personal responsibility, to integrity,
to everything that is good and wholesome and, yes... we were there... we
were there together.
Mine eyes fill with tears and my voice chokes with emotion as I dwell
upon this, and I can only say, with the utmost of humility, that I could
not have done all of this alone. No one person could have achieved all
of this alone. It was you... you renaissance people out there in
cyber-land who, in joining with me in this revolution, deserve so much of
the credit..... YOU are the ones who are never to be forgotten, of whom
stories will be told and songs will be written. YOU are the sentinels of
the new time, the bravest of the brave, the wisest of the wise! God bless
you folks. God bless you one and all.. real good!... and God bless DOS 6.
Bernie...I have only one name like Cher, Fabian, Pauline. and Fabio
bernie11@ix.netcom.com
July 12, 1995 -how fitting.. between the 4th of July and Bastille Day!
Bernie No-last-Name..You are the hero! The best of the best! The finest
and truest of us all. You make me proud.....
ww
* * * * *
The WindoWatch
PLUG OF THE MONTH
Games and puzzles are one of the easiest ways to get the uninitiated
computer user hooked! Our Plug this month is a computerized version of
one of the oldest games known to mankind. It has many computerized
versions most of which use the eccroutrements of the game and very little
else. This is the real thing and is as adictive and fun in front of the
computer as it was at a gaming table.
The version I looked at is shareware as is our policy for this column.
The registered version has important features that make this game even
more challenging with the additional ability to save one’s game.
So let's cut to the bone and stow the palaver...
WindoWatch's
Plug of the Month is....
MahJongg for Windows
The price for the registered version of this software is US$29.95 or
150 French Francs plus US$5 or 25 French Francs for posting and
packaging . I did NOT like the instructions for ordering the product so
check with the authors at CompuServe . Their address is:
Name:Berrie Bloem
CIS: 100545,2530
ww
The Staff
Editor Lois B. Laulicht
Contributing Editor: Herb Chong
Production Editor Paul Kinnaly
HomePage Editor Jim Plumb
Business Manager Bob Miller
Contributing Writers:
John M. Campbell, Leonard Grossman,Jim Gunn, Gregg Hommel , Paul Kinnaly;
Jerry Laulicht, Frank McGowan, Bob Miller, Peter Neuendorffer, Ben
Schoor, Paul Williamson.
EDITORIAL BOARD
Herb Chong, Gregg Hommel, Lois Laulicht, Paul Williamson.
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We publish in a Windows compatible format and in HTML on our home page.
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all rights reserved, is the property of Lois B. Laulicht and CCC of WV
Valley Head, WV 26294