Minutes of C&C Meeting 16 June 1998 Co-ordinator John welcomed 35 attendees. Minute-taking was shared this time by Jenny and Ted. Lyn McEvoy thanked the Group for the recent help with image translation; PCUG Vice President Anne Greiner thanked the Group for the offer of $200.- as a contribution to the purchase of a dishwasher; and Elizabeth thanked John and Gordon for the hours they have spent recently helping her to access certain software, as well as Neville for recommending the Inference search engine which is very helpful for finding painters and their works. Photos of the Midwinter Lunch will be available at next C&C meeting. 1. TIP back-up; how news is sorted PCUG users' home pages and e-mail are now backed up once a week, and a new system will soon allow back-up once daily. News is not (and will not be) backed up. Downtime for installation of the new back-up system will probably be some time on Friday 19 June. Problems with the old system may account for some news items not being posted to all members of the relevant newsgroup. By default, news items are sorted through Agent by "thread" i.e. by subject and message ID; but you can opt to sort by size of message, date, or subject. One of the drawbacks of using news digests is that the threading is lost. Déja News provides up to four years' archives of public news. Agent will report the last 30 days' news. 2. SPAM (unsolicited e-mail) TIP relies on its sources to eliminate SPAM from e-mail and news. Monash University has an anti-SPAM network which provides effective methods to eliminate SPAM, such as hitting the spammers' service providers. Never reply to SPAM, as by doing so, you give the spammers your address. 3. Adobe Photo Shop Bob has obtained, through Andy's Photo Shop Newsgroup, an excellent program, Adobe Photo Shop (http://www.andyart.com/photoshop/all.htm) which provides everything that could be useful for a web page. The 3MB program can be downloaded via pdf. Bob passed around a folder showing the extent of the program. 4. PERL programming language Leigh discussed the benefits of the PERL programming language which can be used to write CGI scripts. However, ISPs are not keen on this language as it is almost at the commercial level, using a disproportionate amount of server time. Allan noted that TIP limits users' pages to 10 MBs, which it was agreed, is generous. 5. Lotus Organizer Three recent crashes on Lotus Organizer were ascribed to a corrupted W95 file. Suggestions included: (i) to find out which module caused the problem, click on the "details" button when the system asks you to "close or continue"; (ii) uninstall, then reinstall the program; (iii) obtain W98 which checks all your system files; finds the corrupted module and fixes it; (iv) obtain a W95 update which does the same. Reinstalling W95 over the existing system does not repair the registry. Crashguard (part of Norton Utilities 3) has been found to conflict with Windows 4. 6. W98 Free Agent, Eudora, Netscape, will all work with W98. Both IE4 and Netscape were judged excellent at history handling (that is, pinpointing a site used before). 7. Printing white on white A recurrent problem where net pages with white text on a black background are printing as white on white, could not be resolved: the best suggestion was to use black paper. A tip for homepage owners: put metadata such as your competitors' names in your own page in white, they will not show up, but search engines looking for the name of a competitor will turn up your page. 8. PCUG Internet starter kits The Group agreed that the current kits need to evolve further. Chess recommended BatchS.exe which scans the system, you edit it and create an information file which can then be used to install W98 including TIP access. There was some discussion about the relevance of Ewan and Ping software in the W3.1x kit. Ewan or Telnet is required for some Australian National Library facilities, and for some low-level connection to TIP. Ping is a diagnostic tool often used to compare performance of different ISPs. It was agreed that the W3.1x kit probably did not need these programs. 9. Music player; MIDI files The conversion of audio from a CD to a compressed data file discussed in the C&C newsgroup, prompted Emil to recommend the Cowan shareware music player which is designed to look like a physical player. On 9 June, Emil posted a message to the newsgroup about this. Lew was keen to play classical music while piloting a sailplane on Flight Simulator: CD Streamer will convert the audio CD to a computer file, which can be played in the background. John cannot get IE3 to recognise MIDI files. 10. An answering machine for e-mail If you are going to be absent from home and without access to computers, most ISPs (but not TIP) can arrange an answering service. Or you can change your user name, or give your user name to someone else. The Group expressed some disbelief that anyone could go anywhere these days where there is no access to computers. 11. File extensions Wayne Corbin has a PCUG home page which lists many pages explaining the meaning of hundreds of three letter file extensions. eg. *.txt, *.dll, *.com 13. USB sockets. Chess explained how the USB sockets attached to the back of new computers have to have an additional "Hub box" added externally to allow more than two devices to be connected to the computer. 14. Agent software availability at PCUG rooms Emil discussed the need for a copy of Agent software to be made available for demonstration purposes only at the PCUG rooms. Mike and Alan suggested that the manager of the PCUG computer training room should be contacted. The meeting ended at 11.38 am. JL & EBM 17/6/98 970 ********************************************************** Coffee & Chat Page, including archives of past meetings http://www.pcug.org.au/~rcook/c&c.htm These Archives are now searchable. ***********************************************************
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