Notes from The Cutting Edge of Personal Computing February 16, 1997 Issue 68 +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+= Managing Editor: Patrick Grote -- mailto:pgrote@inlink.com Assistant Editor: Writer Liaison: Doug Reed-- mailto:dr2web@sprynet.com Graphics Editor, Webmaster: Judy Litt mailto:jlitt@aol.com Archives: ftp://ftp.uu.net/published/compunotes/ Website: http://users.aol.com/CompNote/ email: mailto:notes@inlink.com fax: (314) 909-1662 voice: (314) 909-1662 +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+= CONTENTS My Notes: 1=> Monday Chat! 2=> This Week's Winner! Columnists' Corner: 3=> Jeff Fishbein wonders who reads their mail . . . Reviews: 4=> Product: Learn & Play classic rock guitar. 1996. CD-ROM and Companion Guide Reviewed By: Richard Malinski, mailto:richard@acs.ryerson.ca 5=> Product: The HTML Reference Card Reviewed By: Gail B.C. Marsella, mailto:gbcmars@enter.net 6=> Product: Harley Hahn's Internet & Web Yellow Pages, 1997 edition. Reviewed By: Richard Malinski, mailto:richard@acs.ryerson.ca +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+= CompuNotes is: Available weekly via email and on-line. We cover the PC computing world with comprehensive reviews, news, hot web sites, great columns and interviews. We also give away one software package a week to a lucky winner for just reading our fine publication! Never dull, sometimes tardy, we are here to bring you the computing world the way it is! Please tell every online friend you know about us! CompuNotes B440 1315 Woodgate Drive St. Louis, MO 63122 notes@inlink.com +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+= SYSOPS SEE END OF ISSUE FOR SYSOP INFORMATION! +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+= To subscribe, send this email to listserv@peach.ease.lsoft.com SUBSCRIBE COMPUNOTES-L FirstName LastName To unsubscribe, send this email to listserv@peach.ease.lsoft.com SIGNOFF COMPUNOTES-L +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+= Patrick's Notes 1=> Chat Session with CompuNotes! Every Monday night at 8:00pm, CompuNotes hosts a chat session on Yahoo! Chat! Last Monday was our first night and a fun, informative night was had by all! This week we will be announcing the winners of our first annual readers awards. We will have our writers as guests to shed some light on the products coming out in 1997! We invite you to attend and join in on the conversation and fun! The address is . We are located in the SCIENCE&TECHNOLOGY area in the Computer/CompuNotes room. All you have to do is type WHERE IS COMPUNOTES and a guide will help you. Also, please plan on signing on Yahoo! 30 minutes prior to your chat if this will be your first chat. You'll need to download a plug-in for your browser to support the chat! As always, we'll be giving away a free software package to someone in attendance. 2=> Winner! This week's winner is jlb2@jhideout.com! Send them a congrats message mailto:jlb2@hideout.com! 3=> E-MAIL CAN MAKE PONY EXPRESS LOOK GOOD If you want to learn more about a product or company, or buy a product or service, the Internet has a wealth of information. But if you have a problem and want to contact the company, buy a stamp. I understand that not all e-mail is directly read and answered by a human -- the sheer volume handled daily precludes that as a possibility. It doesn't bother me when the President doesn't personally reply to me, or when I get an "autobot" reply to registration form or a support request (unless that's all I can get). When I get no reply from a company, though, it just makes me angry. It seems to be happening more and more. Here are three prime examples: 1. I have had nothing but difficulties with my Iomega Zip Drive, a product apparently manufactured by the company Dilbert's boss used to work for. When you call their tech support number -- even the toll number -- you get nothing but recordings, and no way to leave a message. I sent at least 10 e-mail requests for support with detailed descriptions of my problems. I've yet to get a reply (and, like most Zip users, it took me about 25 attempts to download the software upgrade, because their server kept killing the transfer). I've since discovered that my situation is far from unique, both in terms of quality of the product and response from the company. 2. I have tried to register three times with the Sitebuilder Network from Microsoft. The form response says verification takes five business days. I waited more than 10 days each time, then tried again. That was more than a month ago ... I've yet to hear from them. And they don't have an e-mail address. This is the thanks I get for promoting their limited-use technology (ActiveX)? 3. I registered for ZD Net almost two years ago. Since then, I've replaced my hardware and software -- and lost my cookies -- and now I can't get back on. I still get the weekly newsletter, but can't log into the site. The "mother's maiden name" verification rejects me, as well. Apparently Ziff-Davis knows something I don't about my mother. After repeated e-mail to ZD, I tried calling their New York offices, and left voice mail -- No response. Finally, last week, the e-mail address of a real human (!) who works at ZDNet was published in the newsletter, and he's taking care of my problem. But if his address hadn't been published, I'd still be waiting. California has proposed legislation that would require companies doing business in that state over the Internet to identify the business and offer consumers information on how to contact the company. Although some have blasted the proposal as an unwarranted and unenforceable regulatory effort, it's really no more stringent than the requirements placed on any other company that wants to do business in California by any other method. Too bad California's lawmakers can't make a company answer its e-mail. --Jeff Fishbein is a freelance journalist and Internet consultant based in Selinsgrove, Pa. He owns an Internet commerce site, http://www.riverweb.com 4=> Product: Learn & Play classic rock guitar. 1996. CD-ROM and Companion guide(36 p) Reviewed By: Richard Malinski, Novice! mailto:richard@acs.ryerson.ca Requirements: Windows, 486/66mhz, SVGA, Sound Card, 2x CD-ROM drive and mouse. MSRP: $59.95US Practice! Practice! Practice! If you learn anything from this CD-ROM, you're sure to learn that your won't get far without persistence. Notwithstanding this truism, playing with this CD-ROM is a great deal of fun. As a novice I could step through each of the eight songs slowly and repeat the lessons until I understood them. Understanding them is one thing, putting them together to sound like the demonstrations is another! The CD-ROM demonstrations and the commentaries on the songs in the guide are excellent for the novice and, I would think also for the advanced amateur. This CD-ROM, volume 1, includes 84 lessons covering basic guitar techniques and eight classic rock songs. The songs are Hey Joe; No Woman, No Cry; Life By the Drop; Sweet Home Alabama; Dust in the Wind; Blowin' in the Wind; Wild World and Blackbird. The installation of this product is not without its hitches. The installation program runs well enough. The screen displays are fine, the speed of the music is adequate but the volume is difficult to set. (I was not able to correct the volume problem on my 486/66mhz machine with SCSI CD-ROM.) As a result of this, with the volume set extremely high, the static and CD-ROM noise detracts from the songs. Reinstalling the software and resetting the sound from within Windows and within the Sound Blaster mixer does not help! The website has some technical hints but nothing more valuable than the trouble shooting section of the guide. The menu presentation and ease of use is excellent. The combination of printed guide and CD-ROM menu work well together. The guide gives a few extra hints and is suitable for those needing the security of a booklet but the CD-ROM really draws you in and through the lessons. You can choose one of eight songs to study. With each song there are sections covering the music, the chords, the words and specific lessons. You can listen to the song and not only hear it but also see the chords being played. This function provides you with a goal and as you pick through the lessons you can return to hearing the song to gauge your progress. Linking this type of personal instruction with computer capabilities brings the needs of the learner and the untiring repetition of the computer together! An example might give an idea of how I used this CD-ROM. To start, I tuned my guitar using the regular tuner. (There is a digital tuner for those with an electric guitar or an acoustic guitar.) By clicking on the notes of the headstock displayed I could hear the note and tune my guitar. This feature is a gem. I dread the thought of tuning a guitar but this feature makes it uncomplicated and a joy. Even with the static mentioned above I had no difficulty doing this! Next, I chose Life by the Drop which has 6 lessons. The number of lessons varies (Hey Joe has 15 whereas Sweet Home Alabama has 11) but many of the lessons are themselves segmented to give you a better opportunity to breakdown the sequences and learn the chords, fingering and techniques. Each chord is illustrated with a demonstration which you can see over and over again until your fingering and sound matches the demonstration. Combining two or three or four of the segments into one lesson and comparing it to the demonstration is either exciting or heartbreaking! Don't forget persistence! I especially liked the use of the written music and the navigation bar. One of the screens provides you with several graphics so that you have the ability to read the music in standard notation or tablature as well as see the chords illustrated as on the guitar (vertical or horizontal) and move through the song with the click of the mouse. The navigation bar lets you move from the introduction to any part of the song, highlight the music, see the chords and practice the part. I think that the combination of all of these elements that is the linking note, chord, fingering and sound into one is extremely helpful in learning the songs. Using the playback buttons you can stop, play and rewind or loop the music or jump to a section that you want to hear and/or try out. There are two help buttons or graphics used. One is a graphic of a cartoon character called Jim. By clicking on Jim you can get help on a particular feature on the screen or help with what you can do next. The other help feature is a question mark superimposed on a guitar pick. By clicking on the question mark you get access to basic guitar techniques such as hammer- on, tapping, pull-off, slide and trill. These two features are well designed because initially you need Jim to help you around the screens but once you get involved with learning the songs you need the guitar pick because you find yourself going back and forth from song to technique to song. For quality of development and ease of use, I'd give this product a silver rating. The depth of the lessons and the variety of ways to view each song contributes to a better understanding of how the components of a song go together. Such a product also illustrates how a well designed program can provide training in a way that isn't tedious nor superficial. I look forward to hearing the volume 2 in this series. I expect that by then either I'll have a new system or the problem with volume control will be resolved! UBI Soft 80 East Sir Francis Drake Blvd, Suite 3E Larkspur, CA 94939 Telephone:1-800-UBI-SOFT mailto:info@UbiSoft.com 5=> Product: The HTML Reference Card Reviewed By: Gail B.C. Marsella, mailto:gbcmars@enter.net MSRP: $4.50 Most of us with Web pages go to some length to avoid actually writing anything in HTML. We either purchase a specialized editor with buttons for the various functions (like HotDog or Netscape Navigator Gold), or pay someone else to take care of the details. Now and then it pays to jog memory on the actual commands, however, if only to correct the Webmaster's mistakes. The HTML Reference, a quick help card from Specialized Systems Consultants, does exactly that. It's actually a large brochure, with categories corresponding to the different areas of HTML (document structure, fonts/emphasis, lists, headers, images, forms, anchors, and so on.) There's no excess verbiage here, just a straightforward listing of the common commands, the correct syntax for them, and examples of the output. There is also a complete HTML listing for a simple Web page (using a wide variety of the commands), and right next to that a brochure section with the output as it would look on the screen. If you're a complete beginner with HTML, this card is not for you, but if you just need an occasional reminder, give the HTML Reference a try. They've gotten about as much as possible into a small space, it's clearly organized, and the price is reasonable. The HTML Reference card (ISBN 0-916151-79-4) is available from Specialized Systems Consultants, Inc. Phone: 206-782-7733 Fax: 206-782-7191 mailto:sales@ssc.com 6=> Product: Harley Hahn's Internet & Web Yellow Pages, 1997 edition. Reviewed By: Richard Malinski, mailto:richard@acs.ryerson.ca System reviewed on - 486-66mhz, 16mb RAM, 3x cd-rom Many of you are probably aware of this classic work. The earlier editions have been used by many as their first introduction to Internet resources and their locations. It is reassuring and very comfortable to have a sense of the depth of material on the Internet before beginning. Hahn's work gives this as well as convenient organization for those who like to have a 'little' guide of 900+ pages on the side. The installation of the book is no problem! The CD-ROM is almost as quick and certainly as painless. The brief instructions for installing the CD- ROM are located on the last pages of the book next to the cd- rom holder which is on the back cover. Putting the cd-rom in the drive, using FILL MANAGER to bring up the directory and double clicking on SETUP is nothing out of the ordinary. The Modern Age Books installation program is excellent. Selecting a directory in which to load the files and choosing to load Hahn's software but not the AT&T Worldnet service (I didn't need this service) is all there is to it. The group and the icons for Hahn's cd-rom software are inserted in Windows without mishap. There is however, no UNINSTALL icon! But wait, if you look closely at the contents of the CD-ROM you'll find an uninstall.exe file. If you double click on this file it will remove the software. Why not put this in an icon when the main icon is loaded? This would make a useful addition. Was this put together too quickly? More on this later. The use of the book and CD-ROM is almost as easy as installation. As you might imagine, the book and CD-ROM are organized along the same lines. The 'List of Categories' in the book is the same as the 'Contents' on the button bar. The 'Table of Contents' in the book is exactly like the expanded 'Contents' of the CD-ROM. The 'Index' at the back of the book is the alphabetic list of topics brought up when you click on the 'Index' of the button bar. The entries in the book are reflected in the cd-rom. There is certainly a comfortable feeling with the intuitive, book-like layout of the screen. At this stage the features of the CD-ROM begin to shine. The screen image is laid out as if you were using the book and one over which you have a lot of control. For those of us needing text bigger than 10 point, there is a slide control that lets you enlarge the image text to suit your preference. The menu and button bars are familiar to anyone using Windows 3x. On the menu bar under EDIT there is an ANNOTATE command which lets you attach notes to entries as you work with the material. The BOOKMARK not only makes a list as you would imagine but also pops up a small, yellow number tab out of the top of the book page. When you want to go back to a particular tab you place the cursor on the number, a title describing the tab pops up and if it is the one you want you click on it to return to your previous place. A very good feature on the menu bar is the USER button which enables users of the CD-ROM to each have their own set of bookmarks. The most useful aspects and at the same time the most challenging are the variety of ways to search for information on the cd-rom. You can browse through the expanded table of contents. You can click on the INDEX button, type in a word and see whether it is in the index or not. You can click on the SEARCH button, type in a word or phrase or use operators (AND, OR, NOT, NEAR) and find occurrences of the topics you want. You can also use the ASSIST command to bring up a form in which you can type words, click on the operator and then search the CD- ROM for your topic. As you might guess, the first methods are fairly straight forward but as you move down the list they get a bit more finicky. I found trouble with two aspects of the searching. The SEARCH feature allows you to type one or more words, to use operators and to incorporate brackets to nest your searching. I am, to this point, unable to get the AND operator to work the way I expect it to. Searching for 'feminism AND family' produces a list of entries with either feminism or family but none with both. You can get around this by using the NEAR operator and limiting the distance to one or two words. If the AND feature worked the way that HELP explains it, it would be fine. After several tries using AND I reverted to the NEAR solution. Notwithstanding the AND problem, the SEARCH function is the best way to access topics that might have something of relevance. With all the work that went into this CD-ROM it is a pity that the searching doesn't include the URL components. Invariably, you remember a snippet of a URL but not the whole thing. There is lots of space on the CD-ROM and the search capabilities are present. Perhaps the next version of Hahn's CD-ROM will have this feature. The ASSIST feature is more problematic. The form fill-in is a good idea but the closed vocabulary creates frustration. ASSIST or the 'Search Assistant' as the dialogue box is titled lets you scroll through a list of keywords. Some checking should have been done because several of the initial terms look like spelling errors and result in a 'No items found' message. It is odd also that the hint for searching in found stuck under ASSIST To make matters worse the examples are not even in the text; i.e., BEES AND HONEY doesn't produce the outcome that is suggested and as for BEES LOVE HONEY, there is no entries! It does seem that this component was assembled in a hurry. The HELP feature is no help in explaining ASSIST so I returned to SEARCH. The SEARCH feature is really the best way to get around the material. A really excellent feature is the hot links to Internet addresses. You access this feature by making a PPP/SLIP connection to your Internet service provider and starting up Hahn's cd-rom. Once you've found information and a site you want to explore further you, click on the Universal Resource Locator (URL) listed and presto change you're linked via your PPP/SLIP connection to the location and the information. The rating of this book and CD-ROM varies. The installation is near the top except for the hidden uninstall file. I'd give it a silver grade. The user friendliness of the screen layout and features is on the whole very good. The hot links are a real plus. The flaws in the Search Assistant need fixing. I'd rate the useability as silver again. Overall, the beginning user will have a positive experience with Hahn's material. It provides a good map of what is out there on the Internet. It has less benefit for the seasoned Internet user. Once you are more familiar with search engines like Yahoo and Alta Vista, you will easily find material that is more up-to- date material available than in Hahn's book. As you will quickly find out, the Internet is ever changing. While using the Yahoo or Alta Vista access won't cost you the price of the book, what it will cost you is time to search and select sites you want to explore. With the book and CD-ROM you would probably save some time! Osborne/McGraw Hill 2600 Tenth Street Berkeley, California 94710 Information on Osborne books - Information on Harley Hahn's books - +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+= SYSOPS READ HERE! We want to make CompuNotes available on as many BBS as possible. Sysops who volunteer upload this newsletter to their BBS as a ZIP file will be listed in our sysops directory shipped with each newsletter. We'll also link to your website. If you are interested, fill out the following lines and return them to notes@inlink.com with SYSOPS as the subject. After processing this, we'll send you a weekly UUEncoded version of CompuNotes. 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