Minutes of the Meeting held 9 October 2001


Posted on behalf of Rod Blackburn


The meeting at the Irish Club was chaired by Terry Bibo and the notes were
taken by Rod Blackburn.

Here are the final notes.

1. TedMac asked for information on how to watermark an  image.
Suggestions included, see the  help files in the Paint shop Pro program,
contact the Canberra photographic society web page, hide your text in a
layer of the image, or hide the details in a colour close to an existing
colour in the image eg near white on white John S. Another suggestion was
that  a shift of 3 colour levels (from 0 to 255) csn be detected by eye and
it could be possible to encode every pixel . Then a full page of text could
be encoded with the image being visible only by enlarging the image Don N .
Jim H suggested searching the web for "hidden code" Emil suggested searching
for the word "stego". Another suggestion was that an image is covered by
copyright for a time.

Emil added the following comments:

Re copyright:
The Australian Copyright Council has a useful collection of up to date
information sheets on various aspects of copyright law and practice in
Australia. See:
http://www.copyright.org.au/page3.htm

The Council's Information Sheet "Copyright in Australia: an
introduction [March 2001]" had this to say:
--extract
"There is no system of registration for copyright protection in
Australia. You do not need to publish your work, to
put a copyright notice on it, or to do anything else to be covered by
copyright - the protection is free and automatic. There are no forms
to fill in, and there are no fees to be paid.
A work is protected automatically from the time it is first written
down or recorded in some way, provided it has
resulted from its creator's skill and effort and is not simply copied
from another work. For example, as soon as a
poem is written, or a song is recorded, it is protected."
--end of extract

However, the owner of a copyright may need to consider ways of proving
his or her rights in case of a dispute later on.

In relation to Ted's query, that Information Sheet says:
--extract
"Copyright owners who embed electronic rights management information
in digital copies of their material may take action, pursuant to the
Act, if this information is removed or altered. In some cases, dealing
commercially with circumvention or decoding devices, offering decoding
or circumvention services,
altering or removing electronic rights management information, and
knowingly dealing with copyright material in relation to which rights
management information has been removed, is a criminal offence."
--end of extract

Re watermarks:
You can obtain a unique watermark from Digimarc. It is available free
by registration at Digimark site according to the help file in
ThumbPlus image viewing software that I use.

That well-known program allows both the embedding and the viewing of
watermarks. I have not used that functionality myself.

The help file says that the watermark cannot be removed without damage
to the image. Hence, it recommends that the owner of the image retains
an original without the watermark.

The technique is (I suspect) an application of an encryption method
called steganography. The idea behind it is to make a secret message
or file invisible by hiding it inside a binary file (image, sound
etc). The secret itself could be encrypted. The software
'sprays' the bits of the secret message/file inside say an image in
such a way that there is no detectible diminution of quality.

There are several programs that use steganography for encryption
purposes. One such is called Invisible Secret.

Check out:
http://www.5star-shareware.com/Utilities/SecurityApplications/invis-secretsp
ro.html

2. JohnS told a story about work he had done on Elizabeth's machine
which would not boot. Here are his comments.
   A. Thought last S'side report of "my monitor will not turn on" would be
easy. Cable loose or something simple.  But far from it.... The machine
would not boot at all - no video, no beeps. But power apparently O.K.
    B. Got the box home and hooked up to spare old keyboard, monitor &
mouse. It was a PC100 M747 "all on board" (with integrated video & sound)
motherboard, AMI bios, 2 X 32 Mb
SDRAM, a slot one 333 PII .
    C. Found CMOS battery was reading 0.4 volts instead of 3.0 volts
offload. Power supply voltages were good. Replaced it and felt confident.
Still no boot or video but at least got 2 short beeps, pause then another
short beep. According to my AMI bios codes this is faulty CMOS or RAM.
    D. At this point Merv kindly lent me his old ISA "MICRO 2000 POST PROBE"
card. And by a great stroke of luck - had a brand new PC100 M747
Motherboard, which he sold for a very reasonable price. Tried the probe card
and it indicated good oscillator, clock & voltages, and an BIOS halt code of
85 hex. The documentation was a little ambiguous depending on what version
of AMI BIOS (and you can't tell from the chip itself - you need video to
read the code!). But the general
consensus seemed to be "Faulty CMOS or RAM". By this point I had established
that 3 new CMOS batteries had been fitted in the last 3 years - way above
normal!
    E. Changed the BIOS/CMOS chip for the one in the new board - felt
confident! But still stopped at 3 beeps and post code 85. Changed RAM sticks
for a single 128 Mb one from my system - same result. Put old 64 Mb RAM
back - same result. Changed BIOS chips back over, and changed Motherboard -
felt confident! Same result....
    F. At this point I got a bit desperate and started ringing around for a
replacement CPU - everything else had been changed! But no luck at all.
Thought I would have to try the markets. But had one last go with the Probe
card and tried each 32 Mb RAM in Slot zero individually. Bingo! Got a
different POST code with each - one stopped at 85 and the other just kept
cycling through to 77 Hex and started again. My 128 Mb RAM also stopped at
85 Hex - looked as though the 77 Hex one is distinctly suspect. But why no
Video with either motherboard?
    G. At this point I decided to swap to another old monitor and got a good
picture! Plus an error code saying the CMOS needed setting up (or the
battery
was flat). Set it up O.K and got a good system! Threw out the suspect RAM
and installed 128 Mb plus the old good 32 Mb. Left in the new Motherboard as
it was cheap - came with additional PS2, USB and IR posts which the old
system did not have, and the problem of multiple batteries had not been
properly explained.
    H. Moral of this story. TEST the test equipment first!!!

John also mentioned that on Nov 6th the meeting at the IRISH club will be
followed by the Club's Melbourne cup lunch at 1 pm.
"For just $15 a ticket enjoy:
    Complimentary Champagne on arrival
    A hot & cold buffet lunch plus desert
    Prizes for the best dressed
and of course THE MELBOURNE CUP ON THE BIG SCREEN
    Sweeps will also be run during the afternoon
    Please book your table at reception. Payment can be made on the day"
I suggest you get bookings in early - they will take them by phone on
6288-7451 - be sure to mention Coffee & Chat & we'll get a bunch of tables.
Even N'siders & spouses will be welcome!

3. RodB told a similar story of attempting to transfer Outlook Express
mailboxes from one system to another, which had a number of unfortunate side
effects and led to one apparently unreadable .dbx file. The meeting
suggested importing the recalcitrant file.

Darrell Burkey added the following comment:

I believe that this is the correct procedure. I've transferred the mail on
several systems this way without a problem, knock on laminex. I think it
would be safe to delete the .dbx file (but back it up first) because this is
an index for one of the corresponding folders and Outlook will rebuild the
index if it's missing.

4. TrevorF reported that defrag on his system kept restarting after
displaying the "drive contents changed" message. A number of suggestions
were made including to turn off auto virus checking  and running End-it-all
before starting the defrag.

Darrell Burkey added the following comment:

Someone suggested to me that starting your computer in safe mode will get
around this as nothing but the very basics will load. I gave it a go and it
worked very well. But I've only defragged Windows a few times. I doubt very
much that it's necessary with modern operating systems or that you will
actually see any performance boost from it. It's pretty safe these days but
I figure the less I risk my data to software that accesses things on such a
low level, the better. If it's not broke...

5. MikeD experienced some apparently heavy disk usage (disk light almost
hard on). Takinfo told him that IE5 was using 70% of the CPU. Removing IE
temporary files fixd that, but Tick was also using lots of CPU. This was
apparently caused by using the costing facility of Tick, which has been
revised in the latest version. Not using costing is an even more effective
way of reducing this use. The latest version may be found at:
http://software.reallyeffective.co.uk/.

Mike also said he was looking for volunteers to help him run U3A classes on
webpage construction and using the Internet for genealogical research. Or,
for that matter, volunteers to run courses on any interesting topic.

6. Derek commented on some inadequacies in Sixteen Bit proof reading that
had led to old incorrect information replacing newer correct information.

7. Richard spoke of problems using a soft modem. Amonst exclamations of
horror the general response was "get a proper modem".

8. John Armstrong said he had found a very interesting virtual museum site
about the history of computing. Try http://vmoc.museophile.sbu.ac.uk.

He also spoke about FreecellPro and how much more intriguing than the
standard Freecell it was.  It became apparent that many Coffee & Chat
attendees like the game and like to cheat themselves at it as well!

At this point the meeting ran out of written items and some miscellaneous
matters were raised.

Using Google to look for "hidden codes" produces some very interesing
material.

If your scanner stops working, it may pay to review your CMOS settings.
Also, if your scanner is attached to the same parallel port as a printer,
printing problems can occur if the scanner is not powered on.

What is the best way to turn a text file into an image. Two suggestions were
made: print the text file and scan it; display the text file and use
Alt-PrtScrn to turn hte window into and image, then edit as desired.

Elizabeth reported curious behaviour when she used Google to find
information on Afghanistan.

There was a question abot the relative merits of search engines and some
CSIRO research into that. A short report on this in Monday's Canberra Times
said Google was rated best.

Many people present at the meeting went on to the picnic at Eddison Park,
which was very pleasant and enhanced by perfect weather.





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