Meeting 6 Aug 2002


Final meeting notes for northside Coffee and Chat, Tuesday 6 August, 2002


Coffee ‘n chat (“CNC” to the cognoscenti) happened again northside with its 
usual charm, vigour and good humour on Tuesday 6 August in the Belconnen 
PCUG centre.  Some 35 to 40 bodies assembled therein.  We were briefly 
acephalous - as some of our usual luminaries (John S, Ted M, Charlie K etc) 
were sorely missed, and so Rod B. seized the gavel shortly after 1000 hours 
and called us to order.  To acclamation, Rod took the chair and volunteered 
me for the meeting notes.  Not having done it for so many years, I was 
shamed into cooperation.

Rod B. extended a friendly welcome to a new member  whose name I did not 
catch - nor his question, as I was busy writing down the whiteboard notices 
of “matters to be raised at this meeting.”  (Aside:  perhaps we should have 
a little A5 or A4 sheet with “Notes for newbies”  to hand out, detailing:
·       a rundown of how cnc works,
·       how the minutes are compiled,
·       how to get onto the email list,
·       how to look up our website and
·       find contact details of other members,
·       details of the southside meetings also etc etc.)

Items listed for discussion were eleven - a relatively short list.  But 
discussion was animated.  The juices started to flow.  And the remaining 
time until the appointed close at 11.30 was filled to the brim.

1.      Ken F - BIGGER WINDOWS .  This seemed to be a similar matter to 
that raised previously by Mike D, though Mike’s issue was mainly about 
printing.  What to do when what you want to see does not fit onto the screen.

2.      Peter H - SCANNING WITH XP SOFTWARE.

3.      Ken. M - EVER SEEN A “BAD” FAT?  ALSO  MS INTERNET EXPLORER.

  About the two issues he raised at the meeting, Ken writes:

·       (a). EVER SEEN A "BAD” FILE ALLOCATION TABLE?
·       A printout was passed around of my C: drive. It shows as 30gig in 
My Computer, is actually 40gig as shown in the printout and has 16gig of 
files on it. 1 think it is FAT32. In the drive details, instead of showing 
it as Disk 1 it is shown as Error and the Partition is shown as #113 
without any details shown.
·       Looking at a printout of Control Panel/Administrative 
Tools\Computer Management\Storage\Disk Management it shows my C: drive as 
67gig (it is 40gig) with two partitions, WinXP as Status Healthy (Unknown 
Partition) of 35gig capacity and 14 gig Free Space, the second partition 
WinXP (C:) as Status Healthy (System) of 29gig capacity and 13gig Free 
Space. Both shown as FAT32.
·       Despite all that, because of the trauma of the last few weeks 
getting the drive to be visible and working, 1 am leaving well alone.

·       (b) MS INTERNET EXPLORER.
·       A printout of IE was passed around which did not have an address 
bar. It took a bit of fiddling to eventually get one

4.      Philip B. - what would be a suitable isp for a community group?  Is 
a palm pilot (currently specialling for less than $90)  suitable for 
maintaining a contact list, such as the old electronic organisers.)  Also 
looking for a little help with setting up his person webpage on pcug site.

A SUITABLE ISP:  Philip is working with a local public housing community 
group in Narrabundah that has obtained a grant under the Digital Divide 
program to help their low income residents to have access to computers and 
the internet.  They are setting up a bank of three computers in the group 
centre.  All are to be connected to the net.  A broadband connection seems 
to be the way to go.  I understand Transact will soon be rolling out in 
this area.
Tony S: Get a Transact broadband connection plus phone line for the 
community room.  Connect one of the three computers to the broadband and 
network the other two off the first.

PERSONAL ORGANISER PURCHASE  Philip welcomed the suggestion to look not for 
a Palm Pilot but for a later model Personal Organiser, his old one having 
given up the ghost.  Cash Converters provided a suitable 128k memory model 
for $55.  Tony kindly offered to help Philip set up his web page for 
providing information for his public transport and park conservation lobby 
group.

5.      Jim D - FORMATTING A NEW HARD DISK

'A new Seagate hard disk was installed using a Seagate app. 'Disk Manager'. 
Alas other utilities, eg ' Drive Image' don't want anything to do with Disk 
Manager or the hard drive, regarding it as some non-standard program. The 
question is how to get rid of DM without risking stuffing-up other drives 
and master boot records.
Responses to the question showed that this was not a one-off problem and no 
quick-fix was offered. It was suggested that a deep search of Google might 
yield some paydirt, but not to be too optimistic.'

6.      Bill P. - DIAL-UP NETWORK

7.      Norman G. - ETRUST EZ ANTI-VIRUS

8.      Margot: WEBMAIL, A SUCCESS STORY!

Margot commented on her successful use of Webmail to preview email 
messages. However, she had noted that any message she opened in Webmail, 
including those deleted in Webmail, appeared in the Windows / Temporary 
Internet Files on her computer. After downloading email to her computer and 
disconnecting from TIP, then immediately virus-checking Eudora and 
Temporary Internet Files with EZ, she had noticed that EZ told her of, and 
removed, any infection she had found on a message deleted from Webmail 
after she had opened it to check its contents. Others agreed that, because 
Webmail is an internet website, anything you look at goes into the 
Temporary Internet Files.

On the matter of problems she had sometimes had with printing from websites 
and getting, say, headings but no text or pictures but no text, all is now 
well. She followed Gordon's advice and uninstalled her printer (connected 
four years ago under Windows 95) and reinstalled it using the Windows 98SE 
disk.


9.      Allan M.: WINTABS, AGENT - NEW VERSIONS OF HANDY SOFTWARE.

A new version of the newsreader Agent has been released and is available 
from the PCUG website. The new version, 1.92 build 572 is a free upgrade 
for registered Agent users, and now incorporates Free Agent. It is a very 
minor upgrade for Agent users, but a major one for Free Agent, and all Free 
Agent
users are urged to upgrade. Can be downloaded from:-
http://www.pcug.org.au/files/a32-192.exe or
http://www.pcug.org.au/files/a16-192.exe
A handy free utility is wintabs, available from 17slon.com/gp/wintabs  This 
places tabs on the windows title bar for each document(or window) open in 
each supported application. Clicking the tab switches quickly to that 
document and application.

10.     Tony B - INSTALLATION OF CD-RWR
11.     Philip (again!)  ADART Autonomous Dial-A-Ride Transit, NEW US 
TECHNOLOGY FOR AUTOMATING DELIVERY OF PUBLIC TRANSPORT ACROSS LOW DENSITY 
COMMUNITIES.
Philip described a new computer-based public transport technology which has 
reached a fairly mature stage of development in the US.  It is called 
ADART.  It streamlines the operating costs and rider responsiveness of the 
widely used Dial-a-Ride minibus services which are widely used across 
thousands of counties in the US.  These services started with Paratransit; 
were extended to seniors, under Federal funding; and have in many areas 
been extended to the unemployed, low income people, school children and 
even the general public.  Hours of service have also been expanding.  The 
US government funded the ADART project in order to cut down its funding 
costs while delivering better transit service to dispersed communities.

Philip has been in touch with Robert Dial who developed the package of 
technologies that make up ADART and who designed the complex computer 
software.  This is Robert Dial’s summary of the technology as delivered in 
a recent conference paper:

“ADART is a modernized version of demand-responsive transit, which employs 
fully automated order-entry and routing-and-scheduling systems that reside 
exclusively on board the vehicle.
“Here, "fully automated" means that under normal operation, the customer is 
the only human involved in the entire process of requesting a ride, 
assigning trips, scheduling arrivals, and routing the vehicle. There are no 
telephone operators to receive calls, nor any central dispatchers to assign 
trips to vehicles, nor any human planning routes.

“Furthermore, there is no central base station or dispatch center. 
Computers on-board the vehicles assign trip demands and plan routes 
optimally among themselves via wireless communication. And the drivers' 
only job is to obey instructions from their vehicle's computer.

“Consequently, an ADART vehicle fleet covers a large service area 
efficiently without any centralized supervision, resulting in higher 
service levels and lower operating cost than conventional dial-a-ride. In 
effect, the vehicles behave like a swarm of ants accomplishing their chore 
without anyone in charge.”

Anyone interested can ask Philip to email the overview paper he recently 
received on the project from the US: 


POST-WHITEBOARD SESSION

·       The whiteboard list of matters having concluded, the meeting was 
thrown open to unlisted matters.  I didn’t keep up with all of it, or even 
very much of it.  Leigh spoke first re Open Office. In order to inject some 
levity into the proceedings, someone who asked to be nameless spoke about 
putting cats and ink cartridges into the microwave; but this was definitely 
by way of a joke and it brought universal peals of laughter.  Someone 
mentioned a site in Melbourne that sells refills and also recommends 
putting the cat and the cartridge into the micro- with possibly disastrous 
results.  Someone asked for info on using Works with XL files.  Greg spoke 
about XP paranoia. Jeff C asked for opinions about the O&O Defrag 2000 
Freeware described by
Peter Williams in the latest 16 Bits p.14. Answers seemed to be rather about
the latest MS Defrag program which also comes with Windows ME.

Philip B. asked about how to persuade a recalcitrant pdf webimage to print 
to a typesize of one’s choosing.  Beg, buy or steal ADOBE came one 
reply.  Versions of Star Office can convert pdf into docile format.  Tony S 
spoke about TurboCAD.  George asked about a PCAuthority disk that might be 
faulty and requiring the purchaser to go back to the mag and get a good copy.


The meeting closed at 11.30, right on schedule.  A good time was had by all.

Philip



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