
  
  





                       W  I  N  D  O  W  A  T  C  H



             The Electronic Windows Magazine of the Internet





  
   Vol 2  No. 8                                             October 1996
  


  page 2
                              WHAT'S INSIDE
   Vol.2  No.8                                              October 1996
  

                            The Editor's Soapbox  Lois Laulicht
                    NT 4.0 - The Release Version  Linda Rosenbaum
         Pentium Pro Problems:An Upgrade Warning  Linda Rosenbaum
                     Win NT: Connectivity Issues  Jim Plumb
           Personal Web Servers at Home and Work  Herb Chong
                         The Basics of WordBasic  Jack Passarella
      Mobile Computing Using Lotus Notes-Part II  Paul Williamson
            Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks: HTML I  Gregg Hommel
 The NT 4.0 Controversy: A Software SwitchHitter  Lois Laulicht
               Stellar Alice: An Alice Adventure  Peter Neuendorffer
    Internet Humor: A Collection of Anonymous
                            Gags, Pranks & Quips
             Welcome Back: WordPerfect 7  Part I  Frank McGowan
                    Reflections of A ModemJunkie  Leonard Grossman
    Testimony: The Encryption Debate - Senate
         Sub-Committee on Science and Technology  Philip R. Zimmermann
               Writing a First Program in Delphi  Peter Neuendorffer
                              Internet Addiction  Contributed by Jon Helis
                  Russ Jensen's Computer History
                    Computer Created Art Gallery  Herb Chong
                                   The Last Word  Ben M. Schorr



  page 3
  WindoWatch              The Electronic Windows Magazine of the Internet
   Volume 2  No. 8                                          October 1996
  

                         The Editor's Soapbox!


The Very Last Word on the BrowserWars...

I'm so tired of the relentless drum beat, "my browser is better than
yours, and it's free!" Let's close the windows, turn up the air, and
cool down the rhetoric !

The browser wars are a PR bonanza for both Netscape and Microsoft. It's
worth zillions and it should only happen to WindoWatch and soon. Byte
Magazine, if you haven't noticed us, get on the stick !

The browser wars have created a media wallowing that has flourished for
at least the last year reaping huge monetary rewards for contenders and
commentators alike. It's better than OJ, a political convention or even
the U.S. Open. Come on Byte, don't treat us like a pimple on the
backside of a hot-pink elephant or worse!

This supra yuppy drama twixt David and Goliath are in the category of
waxing one's legs in public. It hurts like hell but necessary to keep
our collective attention in focus. In unison or together! Oh Byte! Why
don't you pick on us?

Notwithstanding other conflicts like the Middle East, Bosnia, and the
every fourth year blood letting of American politics, the Gods of our
collective fathers couldn't be kinder. Netscape and Microsoft enuff!
It's WindoWatch's turn in the sun. Hey! You know who. Knock that feather
off my shoulder! Take that! It's the American way.


Eating Crow...

Last month the Acrobat edition was released with a huge error. Linda
Rosenbaum's name was not on the masthead. I hear the hisses and boos and
deservedly so. Among the other things that Linda does for the magazine
are her editorial responsibilities for NT.


The Simtel Collection

The entire WindoWatch archive is being moved to the Win95 listing or
/win95/winwatch. If you are pointing to Walnut Creek, then the full WWW
reference is:

       http://www.simtel.net/simtel.net/win95/winwatch

or the ftp reference is:

       ftp://ftp.simtel.net/pub/simtelnet/win95/winwatch



   ww page 4
    The NT Final
  


                  NT 4.0, RELEASE VERSION (BUILD 1381)

                         By Linda L. Rosenbaum


The closely watched and much anticipated release of NT 4.0 has finally
arrived! Microsoft sent NT 4.0 release to production at the end of July
and it began to appear in the stores at the end of August. I received my
release version of NT 4.0 Server (build 1381) the Friday of Labor Day
weekend and wasted no time installing the release version...

As I had done with the installation of beta 2, I installed the release
version as an upgrade over my existing version of NT 4.0. As with beta
2, this is not recommended. However, I concluded that my prior upgrade
seemed to be working fairly well and I was not interested in spending
the time to have to start from scratch, if I did not have to do so. I do
anticipate that, at some point I may need to do a fresh installation,
but until that time, I am happily working in my several times upgraded
installation.

My package for the release version did not include the three setup
floppy diskettes. Since I prefer to install NT from them, I created the
setup diskette before doing the installation. (Details on how to do so
are found in setup.txt). I also printed out the setup.txt found on the
NT 4.0 CD-ROM in the directory for Intel installations (\i386 folder).
This file contains important information about steps to be performed
prior to installation as well as some things to look out for. The
principal one affecting me was the continued advice given by Microsoft
to disconnect the cable from a UPS to a serial port. I obligingly did
so.

The installation of the NT 4.0 Server release went very smoothly. After
creating the setup floppy diskettes, I shut down NT, inserted Disk 1 and
restarted the computer. The setup diskette properly loaded and was quite
similar to what I have seen in prior installations. At the point where
the setup tells you to insert the NT CD-ROM and press enter, a dialogue
detailing the license restrictions/ limitations appears. I do not recall
seeing this with prior NT versions. I read through it and then agreed to
its terms. Setup then continued. Setup properly saw my two installed
versions of NT (NT 3.51 WS and NT 4.0 AS) and asked if I wanted to
upgrade over one of them or install in a new directory. I chose to
upgrade over my existing version of NT 4.0. I still have NT 3.51 WS on
my system as well as Windows 95 and DOS 6.20.

Since I was upgrading, I was offered relatively few choices. It is worth
mentioning that I was presented with even fewer than when I upgraded
from beta 1 to beta 2. It seems obvious to me that an upgrade is geared
to rigidly upgrade what it already finds installed. It is easy to go
into Add/ Remove Programs in Control Panel to make changes after NT is
installed. As a result of opting for the upgrade installation, I don't
know what changes were made from beta 1 or NT 3.51, if any, when doing
a series of clean installations. The Start Here documentation does cover
most of this fairly well.

During the installation I was presented with one message box that did
catch my full attention. It read as follows:

            The following non-Microsoft networking
            component is installed on this computer, 3COM
            Fast Etherlink/Etherlink III Adapter Driver.
            Although your network connection may function
            properly after the upgrade is completed, the
            component should be removed and replaced with
            a newer version.

I was a bit mystified by this dialogue box since I had assumed this
would be done automatically. More on this a bit later.


As in beta 2, Microsoft Internet Information Server version 2.0 setup is
fully integrated into Windows NT Server version 4.0 setup. In beta 2,
however, I was never presented with the option to actually install it
during my setup of NT Server 4.0 beta 2. In the release, version I was
given this option and chose not to install it at that time.

NT Server 4.0 release also comes with Microsoft FrontPage version 1.1.
Microsoft FrontPage provides a way to develop and maintain Web pages.
Although I am not presently creating or maintaining a Web page (but I
can do so via my ISP), I decided to try to install FrontPage. This is
done apart from the NT setup. Using the Windows NT Server compact disc,
the setup program is located in the \Frontpg\Frontpg folder. I chose
the typical installation, which installs the client version of
FrontPage, as well as the server extensions.

The setup program installs three *.wri files that I highly recommend to
print out and read after the installation of NT 4.0. They are in
compressed format on the NT compact disk so are difficult to access
until NT 4.0 has already been installed. The three files are readme.wri
(located in \system32 folder), and network.wri and printer.wri (located
in \winnt folder). The readme.wri contains quite a bit of additional
information about Windows NT 4.0 ranging from special problems with
specific programs being used in NT 4.0 to the particulars on certain
hardware devices. The network.wri file contains additional details on
networks (network drivers, TCP/IP, DUN, etc.) and printer.wri contains
additional details on printers (printing issues, printer drivers, etc.).

I was curious about the message I had received during the NT 4.0 setup
relating to my network adapter driver primarily because this network
adapter is on the Hardware Compatibility List. I first looked in my
\system32\drivers folder and saw that my network adapter driver had not
been updated. As a matter of fact, I could see it was from beta 1 of NT
4.0 Server. After doing some asking via online forums as well as poking
around myself, I finally understood better what the setup.txt
documentation and message during installation was referring to. It seems
that starting in beta 2 many/most of the network adapter drivers were
moved to a different folder in the CD-ROM itself. The documentation
makes it sound like a supported network card's drivers will be found and
installed from this new location, at least for most PCI, EISA and MCA
network cards. For reasons that are still not clear to me, it seems an
upgrade does not automatically upgrade to a newer version of this
specific driver. Beta 2, unlike the release version, gave me no messages
during the setup, so I was unaware of this as an existing issue. The
network adapter drivers for the vast majority of supported network cards
are now located in the \DRVLIB folder on the CD-ROM. The HCL does point
to the appropriate folder on the CD-ROM drive when the specific network
card listed is clicked on. I actually continued to use my older network
adapter driver for some time while I tried to figure out and understand
what was happening. I was finally pointed to the fact that in Network
(in Control Panel), Adapters (Tab), I could choose to update my network
adapter. I had to point to the proper location on the CD-ROM drive, but
then the updating took place without incident. I did get an error
message about not being able to find a .hlp file which did not exist on
the CD-ROM, but that didn't have any negative effect on my ability to
update the network card driver. After a restart, the newer driver was
put into use.

What continues to be puzzling, is the license.txt file that exists in
the \DRVLIB folder with respect to the network adapter card drivers
contained therein. The license.txt documentation states that these
drivers are for Windows 3.5x and earlier. It seems to imply that MS does
not warrant anything with respect to using them in NT 4.0. And yet all
printed documentation seem to indicate these are the appropriate drivers
to utilize for NT 4.0.


About a week after receiving my release version of NT 4.0 Server, I
received the release version of NT 4.0 Workstation. My husband also uses
NT (we have a four system network of computers using a mixture of NT and
Windows 95). We had installed NT 4.0 beta 2 on his system over the
summer. We had intended to install NT 4.0 beta 2 in a separate directory
from his NT 3.51 WS installation. However when faced with the choice of
either upgrading or a new install, we decided to be daring and did an
upgrade. We got lucky because NT 4.0 beta 2 has worked very well for him
and it was so much easier doing an upgrade preserving his various
settings and programs. We ran into a problem with using the software for
his scanner (HP IIcx) which was cured by upgrading his system to the
latest version of Adaptec EZ-SCSI (version of aspi32.sys that comes with
HP software conflicts with something in NT 4.0).

I followed the same steps I had used for upgrading my system to the
release version of NT 4.0. I made the three floppy setup diskettes and
disconnected his UPS from the serial port. The upgrade went much the
same as described for upgrading my system to the release version.
However when we did the final reboot after setup was complete, we got a
real surprise. The mouse was frozen! I saw the mouse properly and
various cursors also displayed, but it would not move. Trying to
navigate NT 4.0 without the use of a mouse is a true exercise in
frustration. I tried all sorts of things such as restarting from a cold
reboot and restarting in VGA mode. I finally got the idea to check the
specific mouse settings via Control Panel and hit pay dirt. For reasons
that are still a mystery to me, the upgrade selected a mouse driver
called Pointer Device msi8042. My husband has an MS Mouse 2.0. After
changing to the proper mouse driver for NT 4.0 (which again was a
"treat" doing so without the use of a mouse), NT 4.0 release version
came up and has worked fine for him since.

While NT Workstation 4.0 does now incorporate the Windows 95 user
interface and many other features that first appeared in Windows 95, it
is very important to note that there are some features available in
Windows 95 that are not available in NT Workstation 4.0. These include
the following: (1) Plug and Play, (2) Power Management, (3) Fax, (4)
Direct3D, (5) Infrared, and (6) System Tools such as Disk Defragmenter
and Scandisk. In addition, there is no way to upgrade to NT 4.0
Workstation over a Windows 95 installation. The two registries are
incompatible and the release version of NT 4.0 WS contains no facility
to convert a Windows 95 registry to an NT one. Hence anyone currently
using only Windows 95 who desires to use NT 4.0 must reinstall all of
their software.

The release version of NT 4.0 allows you to change your display
properties without rebooting/restarting the computer. Display
properties are changed by right clicking on the desktop and choosing
Properties. The settings tab is where a different resolution and/or
number of colors is changed. In some cases an application may have a
problem if the display is changed without a restart. The readme.wri
suggests closing certain types of applications prior to changing display
properties. I have not actually tested this feature out because I rarely
need to change display and have adjusted to it not being available in NT
without a restart.

The release version of NT 4.0 incorporates direct draw. It is fully
compatible, according to readme.wri, with the version released for
Windows 95 in the DirectX 2 release. The only difference between these
two versions of Direct Draw is that the Windows NT version does not
support ModeX low resolution modes.

The readme.wri states that certain video cards have drivers which
contain Direct Draw support in the release version of NT 4.0. The video
cards are as follows (for Intel platforms): ATI Mach64, ATI Mach32, S3
Trio64V+, S3 Trio64V2, S3 868, S3 968, Matrox Millennium, and Tseng
ET6000. Systems with video cards other than these are still able to run
Direct Draw applications but no hardware acceleration is provided.

Unfortunately I do not have any applications/games with Direct Draw
support so was not able to test the Direct Draw included in NT 4.0
release. I do have a video card listed as having hardware acceleration
in Direct Draw.

For the first time, NT 4.0 release includes some support for joysticks.
It contains a driver specifically for the Microsoft SideWinder 3D Pro
joystick as well as a generic driver for other joysticks. The readme.wri
file contains detailed directions on how to install the appropriate
joystick driver.

Readme.wri also makes reference to NT 4.0 release CD-ROM containing
drivers for Sound Blaster Plug and Play sound cards. NT 4.0 does not
support Plug and Play as does Windows 95. As a result, cards such as the
Sound Blaster sound cards have had problems in prior versions of NT.
Creative Labs finally released a set of drivers for NT 3.51 for their
various plug and play cards. Drivers for NT 4.0 are available on the
CD-ROM. Readme.wri indicates where these drivers are located and
suggests seeing the readme.txt in that folder before installing these
particular drivers. I am fortunate that all of our three Sound Blaster
sound cards are pre plug and play and as a result we have had no
problems with the two used in the NT systems.


I continue to be pleased with the performance of NT 4.0. The release
versions seems a bit faster to me than the beta versions were. However
the various benchmarks have stayed consistently the same on my system
since beta 1. I re-ran the full set on the release version. I originally
was using the same equipment as I had been using for NT 3.51, NT 4.0
beta versions and Windows 95, as follows: Pentium P133 (Super Micro
P55CMS motherboard with 512k pipeline cache) with an Adaptec 2940,
Conner CFP 4207S, Hercules Terminator Professional (with 4 meg of video
memory), and 64MB of RAM (fast page mode DRAM). About a week after
installing the release version of NT 4.0, I decided to install a
different video card into my system.

This video card did not have video drivers for the beta versions of NT
4.0 but does have video drivers included in the release version. It is
the Hercules Dynamite 128/Video, which is based on the ET6000 chipset.
All benchmark tests were run in 1024x768x16bit. In Windows 95, both
video cards can get a refresh rate of 90. In NT 4.0 release both video
cards can only get a refresh rate of 75 (due to limitations of Microsoft
provided video drivers, not to limitations of the video cards
themselves). The results from Winbench 96 version 1 are as follows:

                       NT 3.51  NT 4.0   NT 4.0  Win 95  Win 95
                       (T Pro)  (T Pro)  (D128)  (T Pro) (D128)
 Disk WinMark 96         1320    1260     1270    1100    1190
 Graphics WinMark 96     16.4    14.7     14.2    19.8    25.8
 CPUmark16               253      288     280     273     284
 CPUmark32               286      295     296     273     289


The results from Wintune 95 are as follows:

                          NT 3.51  NT 4.0   NT 4.0   Win 95  Win 95
                          (T Pro)  (T Pro)  (D128)  (T Pro)  (D128)
 Dhrystone (MIPS)           245      246     246     244      244
 Whetstone (MFLOPS)          77      77       76      74      73
 Video speed (MP/s)          23      21       14      13      13
 C:\Cached speed (MB/s)      27      37       36      23      22
 C:\Uncached speed (MB/s)   .68     .72      .7      .79     .82
 RAM read avg (MB/s)        226     245      244     250     232
 RAM write avg (MB/s)        82      83       82      83      83
 RAM copy avg (MB/s)         56      61       61      60      58

I am not convinced that any of the differences indicated in the test
results reported in the two charts are noticeable in real life. I do
notice a difference in video speed between Windows 95 and NT (even in NT
4.0). In some instances, video redraw seems a bit slow to me in NT 4.0,
with both the Terminator Pro and the Dynamite 128. I also see instances
on my system where NT 4.0 is faster than Windows 95. Overall the
performance of my SCSI hard drives seems a bit faster in NT as compared
to Windows 95. I also believe the performance of NT 4.0 is enhanced by
having 64MB of memory. NT can take far better advantage of more memory
than can Windows 95.


DUN (Dial Up Networking) was modified a bit in the release version as
compared to what was in beta 2. The choices when one right clicks on the
DUN monitor changed some although I did figure out how to find all the
same information as before. Now I get a choice of which phone book entry
I want to dial, which is more akin to the way RAS (Remote Access
Services) itself worked in prior versions of NT. However to access the
various statistics and so forth, I have to select open up dial up
networking monitor. NT 4.0 release version supports both the NT
scripting (i.e. via switch.inf) or the scripting from Windows 95. A few
example scripts utilizing the Windows 95 scripting language are
included in NT 4.0 release. If an upgrade is performed, any prior
modem.inf and switch.inf is left in place. The newer versions are
installed as modem.new and switch.new. Since I already had working NT
style scripts on both systems using NT, I chose to continue using these
for now. I have never written any Windows 95 scripts so have none to
easily verify that they work in NT, but based on the experiences of
others, this should not create any problems.

The release version of NT 4.0 RAS also supports AutoDial. RAS AutoDial
maps and maintains network addresses to RAS phonebook entries, allowing
them to be automatically dialed when referenced - whether from an
application or from the command line. A network address can be an
Internet host name, an IP address, or a NetBIOS server name. If DUN is
installed on a Windows NT Server computer that does not have one or more
ports configured for dialing out, Remote Access AutoDial Manager is
installed in a disabled state. If you later change one or more of the
ports to the Dial Out option, Remote Access AutoDial Manager must be
manually enabled. Since I only have one communications port on my system
and it is configured as Dial Out only (which is proper for my specific
setup), I was not able to test Remote Access AutoDial on my system.


In the course of my testing, and use of the release version of NT 4.0
Server, I specifically tested for problems I had in the beta versions.
Some have been fixed and others have not. One that has not been fixed
and which frankly surprised me quite a bit is NT 4.0's inability to read
a mixed compact disk. A CD that has both audio CD and regular CD data on
it cannot be properly read by NT 4.0. The same CD can be properly read
in both NT 3.51 and Windows 95 on my system. I also am still having some
problems with using sound schemes in the release version of NT 4.0,
although the problems are much improved over what I saw with beta 2. In
beta 2, I was unable to even read/utilize sounds from the Plus! Pack for
Windows 95 (which I had been able to read properly in beta 1). I can
once again can "read" such sounds and utilize them in the release
version. However, each time I restart NT 4.0, I lose my named sound
scheme choice (a sound scheme created and named by me). Most of the
specific sounds continue to work properly but not all. I can go into
Control Panel, Sounds and re-select my saved sound scheme, but first
must also deal with a message box which asks me if I want to save the
existing sound scheme, which shows as having no name and which was never
activated by me. I recognize this is a minor nit, but an annoying one
nevertheless.

The problem with creating new folders in Norton File Manager has
disappeared with the release version of NT 4.0. In beta 2, creating a
new folder in Norton File Manager also created a phantom desktop icon,
which did not go away until a restart was done. However, the
installation of NT 4.0 release version itself, which I performed as an
upgrade over beta 2 of NT 4.0, created two phantom folders in My
Computer which I have not been able to delete, although I have tried
valiantly to do so. This did not happen on my husband's upgrade to
release version of NT 4.0 Workstation, and I have yet to figure out what
went wrong on my upgrade. This is a rather benign problem, so I have
left it as is for now. The speed at which drop down selections open up
when needing to select from a partition other than the current one has
been significantly improved in the release version of NT 4.0. The speed
is now quite comparable to what I see in Windows 95 on my system. The
release version also restored the message boxes when first going into NT
4.0 which detail Restoring Network Connections. This series of messages
disappeared in beta 2 and I was never quite sure if that was a bug or
feature. It now seems to me that it was a bug in beta 2.

I did run into a new problem with the release version of NT 4.0 on my
system that I have not been able to solve so far. I noticed right after
installing the release version that I was getting a lot of CRC errors
when using RAS. After some testing, I discovered these errors went away
if I did not have Windows NT Task Manager running at the same time I was
using RAS. This problem makes no sense to me and did not disappear when
I changed video cards. For now I have stopped keeping NT Task Manager
open at all times, but miss the information doing so supplied to me. I
tested this same situation on my husband's system and do not have the
same problem with the release version of NT 4.0. So it seems to me that
this problem with the release version of NT 4.0 is related to the mix of
hardware and software on my particular system.

I also still have the same problem with Procomm Plus for Windows 2.11
that I ran into on my system in beta 2. If I use it with other programs
open and minimized (series of various types of programs), the port is
not released by NT when I exit Procomm Plus and does not get released
until I restart NT. However if I use Procomm Plus with no other programs
running, the port is properly released by NT when I exit Procomm Plus.
For now I have taken to closing all other applications when I need to
use Procomm Plus, which is becoming less and less as my use of the
Internet increases.

I tried to install a new version (version 6.11) of Arcada Backup Exec
Single Server in NT Server 4.0 release version. I was not able to do so
because the setup locked up (as NT Task Manager had stopped responding)
during an early stage of the install when it checks for Services. I
tried in VGA mode and was unsuccessful there too. I have not had the
chance to do any more investigating of this problem at this point in
time. In any case the version I was attempting to install is still not a
fully complaint NT 4.0 version. I was hoping it might improve on some of
the problems I am having with Backup Exec Single Server version 6.10 in
NT 4.0.


Despite the problems noted above, I believe that anyone currently using
either NT 3.51 Server or Workstation should upgrade to NT 4.0. The
enhancements and additional features are well worth the price of
admission. In addition, I think anyone using Windows 95 who has the
hardware capable of running NT 4.0 Workstation, should give serious
consideration to moving to NT. With the inclusion of the Windows 95
interface and several other Windows 95 features, the only drawback to
such a move is the time to reinstall all programs and the loss of
backwards compatibility. Gamers who would like to use NT 4.0 Workstation
should consider a dual boot setup whereby they either maintain a Windows
95 installation or at least a DOS 6.2x installation to run their games.


                       ...........ww...........
Linda Rosenbaum lives and works in a suburb of New York City. She is an
assistant controller at the World Headquarters for a large global
manufacturing company. She has two young children and a husband whose
full time job is to take care of the kids. When not working, Linda can
be found on a variety of online services and the Internet reading and
writing about her experiences with NT, networking, and multimedia. She
maintains a home network of four systems using a combination of NT and
Windows 95. Linda is the NT Editor for WindoWatch and can be reached via
Email at either lindar@cyburban.com or 71154.2622@compuserve.com.


wwpage4a
 Pentium Pro Problems!


                            An Upgrade Warning
                     Copyright 1996 by Linda L. Rosenbaum

 As my review of the release version of NT 4.0 indicates, other than a
 few quirks, I had the release version working quite well on two
 diff-erent Pentium based systems.  We upgraded both Pentium systems,
 which had two different Pentium motherboards and CPU's, to the same
 Pentium Pro motherboard (Super Micro P6DNE).  We got both dual
 motherboards with just one Pentium Pro 200 CPU and what should have
 been a relatively easy hardware upgrade, turned into a nightmare even
 though we now have both systems functioning.  While my understanding of
 what happened to us when we upgraded is still quite sketchy and lacking
 in terms of technical understanding, I think its well worth relaying
 our experiences so that others who contemplate such an upgrade can be
 ready if they run into similar problems.

 Having moved all the hardware over to the new motherboard (all other
 equipment was kept the same for each system), we started up the
 computer.  We needed to make a few minor adjustments to the CMOS/BIOS
 regarding ISA IRQ's and DMA's used, and the use of parity RAM with ECC.
 After doing these, we let the system start up and boot into NT 4.0.
 Imagine my surprise when it locked up, solid, at what appeared to be
 the first sound uttered.  I have a sound scheme on my computer, as does
 my husband.  The first sound is heard as the system is getting ready to
 restore network connections.

 We were doing this initial upgrade on a Friday night and knew we did
 not have ready access to our dealer.  But, we were confident that we
 would be able to get this setup working.  I learned that going into NT
 3.51 worked just fine (I still have NT 3.51 WS on my system).  I also
 tried Windows 95 and ran into some problems which I thought were
 related to the NT 4.0 lockups, but in hindsight now am not so sure.  I
 also discovered that I had no lockups if I went into NT 4.0 in standard
 VGA.  Between Friday night and Saturday morning, we tried virtually
 all of the tricks I could think of, including different video cards,
 different PCI slots for the video card, different settings in the
 CMOS-BIOS with respect to IRQ and DMA settings, and a different IRQ for
 my SB 16 sound card in NT 4.0.  None of these options cured the
 lock-ups.  We also learned that removing the sound card did cure the
 lock-ups.  I created a  no sounds  sound scheme and was able to get
 into NT 4.0 without locking up and with the sound card installed.  I
 then tried all sorts of DMA combinations for the sound card, again with
 no success.  As soon as a digitized sound was played, i.e wave file,
 the system locked up tight even though I could play a midi file just
 fine!

 Fortunately, my dealer was able to return my frantic calls for help
 that Saturday afternoon.  He suggested we try a video card driver from
 beta 2 of NT 4.0.  Unlike many users, we did have beta 2 and hence this
 experiment was relatively easy to do.  And it did indeed cure the
 lockups!  With this fix we were able to get both Pentium Pro
 motherboards installed and working on both NT 4.0 systems.

 I was not pleased with this fix as a long term solution, mostly due to
 my concern of using beta 2 video card drivers in a release version of
 NT 4.0.  However, I do want to emphasize that we have had no problems
 using the beta 2 video drivers, seeing speed improvements over our
 Pentium based systems. These increases vary from program to program,
 but are present in many subtle and not so subtle ways. I contacted both
 manufacturers of the video cards we do own, but both were rather
 mystified by our problem.  They were also unsure of of the real cause
 and hence where a fix should come from.  As I did more research, I too
 became more and more confused as to what was the real cause of our
 lockups or whom I should look to for a cure.

 I did learn that we were not alone in these lockups.  It seems to be
 related to using a Sound Blaster sound card, release version NT 4.0
 video drivers, a variety of different video cards, and a variety of
 different Pentium Pro motherboards.  On the other hand, my dealer (and
 several others) have the Matrox Millenium video card working just fine
 with Matrox's NT 4.0 video drivers (or the NT 4.0 release video driver
 for this video card) in a Super Micro Pentium Pro motherboard (P6DNF)
 with the most recent BIOS for that mother-board (.9 AMI BIOS).  Our new
 motherboards use the same BIOS and we too have the most recent one
 (motherboards came with it). My dealer was also having lockups until he
 got the most recent BIOS from Super Micro.  I also became aware that
 even with what sounded like some of the same hardware as ours, not
 everyone got the lockups.  And to make this even more confusing, I know
 of at least one person with a Matrox Millenium video card who still got
 lockups with sound.

 One of the individuals I conversed with on this situation on
 CompuServe (Win NT Workstation forum) was finally able to cure his
 lock-ups and at the same time passed along information he received on
 the cures and why the lockups were occurring.  One of these messages
 turned out to be the most detailed explanation of what was happening
 that I had seen so far.  It is technical of course, and seems related
 to the BIOS misconfiguring the chipset settings.  It seems that the
 perm-anent solution to this problem is to receive a new system BIOS for
 the affected motherboards that contains the correct, non-conflicting
 chip-set settings.  In the meantime, the following workarounds were
 suggested to prevent the lockups from occurring:

 1. In BIOS setup, if available, disable USWC Write Posting during I/O
    bridge access feature.  This will have a negligible effect on
    performance.

 2. In BIOS setup, if available, enable the Passive release feature of
    the PIIX3.  This will enable the correct chipset configuration.

 3. Disable the USWC feature for the video driver via the NT system
    registry.  This will have a significant effect on graphics performance.
    This is accomplished using regedt32.exe (NT registry editor) and adding
    a key named "DisableUSWC" under
    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\GraphicsDrivers.

 On our Pentium Pro motherboards we have a BIOS setting that sort of
 sounds like what is described in number 1 above.  However it is already
 disabled on both of our new motherboards.  I could not find any BIOS
 setting that sounds like number 2 above.  We decided to try the
 registry fix, mostly out of curiosity.  We tried on my husband's
 system, which is using an STB Velocity 64V.  As expected, based on the
 above, this did indeed cure the lockups we were having with the release
 version of the video drivers for this video card (which we had obtained
 from STB).  In real world usage, my husband sees no difference in
 graphics performance between using the beta 2 video drivers and the
 release drivers with the registry setting which disables USWC (my
 motherboard BIOS manual describes this as a memory cycle that stands
 for Uncacheable Speculative Writing Combining).  However, it has
 occurred to me that since it seems this was not enabled in NT until the
 release video drivers, we may be comparing what's slower performance to
 slower performance rather than being able to truly tap a graphics
 performance improvement.  I have not tried to benchmark my husbands
 system and in the interim he has continued to operate with the registry
 fix, using the release version video drivers.

 We have not yet tried this same fix on my system because in the
 meantime I had placed an order with my dealer for a Matrox Millenium
 video card.  I have been assured that I will not need the registry
 entry which disables USWC.  Unfortunately the video card (at least the
 4 meg version which I ordered) is on back order.  In the meantime I
 have continued to use the beta 2 video drivers for the Hercules
 Terminator Professional video card.

 Hopefully our experiences when upgrading to a Pentium Pro mother-board
 will help others who are contemplating either an upgrade to a Pentium
 Pro motherboard from a working Pentium with NT 4.0, or who are
 contemplating an upgrade from NT 3.51, which is working just fine with
 a Pentium Pro motherboard.  I am hopeful that a newer BIOS for our
 Pentium Pro motherboards will make this situation even better than it
 is now.


 Linda tracked down this confusing problem just a day or two before we
 released this issue because we felt that it was important to inform
 our readers of possible difficulties during installation.


                                     ww



   ww page 5
    It's All About Connecting!                                      NT
  


                       WIN NT Connectivity Issues

                      Copyright 1996 by Jim Plumb


Right out of the box, Windows NT comes with a made-for-networking
environment similar to that found in the various UNIX implementations.
It's not all there, but a workable LAN (Local Area Network) or WAN (Wide
Area Network) is possible. This includes the ability to connect to other
computers' shared resources and to share resources with other computers
either on hardwired or dialup networks.

NT comes with several of the more popular networking protocols and
client interfaces to connect with others over a Microsoft network, a
Netware network or a TCP/IP network. Actually they can all be running at
once over the same wire. Even Appletalk is supported in NT Workstation
for printing.


TCP/IP

TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) is the
networking protocol of UNIX and The Internet. Because of the latter its
use is now expanding into corporate networks, previously the domain of
Netware, Microsoft Network and LAN Manager, LAN Server, Lantastic, etc.
Included with TCP/IP are the utilities FTP, Telnet, Ping, the mainstay
of networkers everywhere. With NT workstation you can also BE an FTP
server. In a TCP/IP network, each machine is assigned a name (hostname)
& number (IP address) and large networks usually have one or more Name
Servers, which keep track of and disseminate host information to the
group at large.


Connecting to Net Resources

NT machines share their resources over the net and connect to others'
shared resources. Resources are commonly disk drives and printers. You
can share directories on drives or whole drives and by drives I mean
hard drives floppies, CD-ROMS, and Zip and Syquest drives. Printers can
be directly connected to the NT machine or connected to over the network
and then shared to other PCs.

Sharing your drives and directories is done through the File Manager by
selecting the drive or drive/directory combination to share, and
specifying certain names and security parameters for the share.
Descriptions are helpful when others are browsing available shares (see
screen below). As you can see I'm sharing a directory (My Documents) on
the C: drive and I'm calling it mydocs. This name, the description and
the computer name is what people will see when browsing for shares on
the network.

As you can also see, I've given everyone Read Access only to the files
shown on the following captures.

     [Screen capture graphics can be viewed in the Acrobat .PDF
      edition of this issue.]

Use the File Manager to connect to others' shared drives. Selected
shares are given a drive letter and exist as virtual disk drives (see
screen above). You can see me browsing the workgroups in the Microsoft
Windows Network.

These are other PCs and could be running NT, Win95 or Windows for
Workgroups. Opening up a group will display computers in the group and
under them, the disks and directories they are sharing. I am mounting
the C: drive of computer BSNPC3 (\\BSNPC3\cdrive) to be accessed as
my K: drive.

What I would prefer is the ability to name a network mounted resource
rather than give it a letter. It is one of the holdovers from the old
days which I hope gets changed. This is how the big boys do it in UNIX
and that's how the Mac folks have done it. Besides, it makes sense and
is more useful.

Also take note of NFS Network. Under here are a list of available NFS
(Network File System) Servers, usually UNIX machines, but could be NT
machines being NFS Servers also. The drop down list above it shows
several mount points to server comp1 and the directories I've mounted
from that server. NFS is NOT, unfortunately, bundled with NT.

The methods described here are used in NT 3.51. In NT 4.0, you also have
the Explorer to map network drives.


Network Printing

Several choices exist when printing in the NT environment. A printer
physically connected to your NT machine can be shared with others in the
network. You can also connect to others' similarly shared computers. You
can connect to standalone network printers and then share them with
others on your network.

You can see in the Print Manager screen a bunch of printer names. These
printers are being connected to over a network in several different
ways. What's great is that these can all be pre-set and then never have
to worry about running out of LPT ports. Several of these printers
support TCP/IP and are assigned IP numbers and can be directly printed
to as long as I know their IP addresses. Some of the printers are
connect to via Appletalk.

Connecting to them is similar to using the Apple Chooser. What is better
than using the Chooser is that since the printers are pre-defined they
are all accessible at any given time, as long as they are live on the
network. This represents an advantage over printing from a Mac. When
using a Mac, in order to change printers, you need to go to the Chooser
and select a printer, rather than choosing from a list of printers from
the print dialog window as you can with NT. For you UNIX people, new
with NT 4.0 is the ability to go to the print devices on a Solaris 2.x
UNIX box. Previously NT supported only the BSD print devices


Remote Access

Remote Access is the name of the dial-up networking service (RAS).
Besides dialing out you can also be a Remote Access Server and allow up
to ten dialup sessions at once. NT Server allows 256 dialup connections.
What this means is that with RAS you can dial in from home or on the
road to your computer at work and connect to your network. Once
connected, use file manager or explorer to mount the network as a drive.
Here is telecommuting.

Originally, RAS was created with Windows for Workgroups and Windows NT
users in mind. However, in the age of the Net, this is the perfect tool
for Internet dialup. In Internet mode, RAS can be configured for
different sites and different user ids. RAS supports serial connections
over ISDN as well regular phone lines.

Once you are connected to the Internet via RAS you can use the Internet
tools of your choice.

The Remote Access dial out screen shows several configurations, two for
connecting to the Internet and two for remote access to the network at
work.


Summary and the Future

Windows NT is positioned as a leader in the corporate desktop world and
as the developers OS of choice. It can connect you to the rest of the
world right out of the box. However, NT's big short coming, (also a
gripe of mine) is its interconnectivity with the UNIX world or lack
thereof. Win NT does not natively support NFS, the UNIX method of
sharing/mounting network drives. Next issue I'll look at two ways this
is handled. I will also be looking at network configuration issues for
the shared protocol environment, perhaps of interest to other system
managers.


                       ...........ww...........
Jim Plumb is a System Administrator for a commercial printing
establishment. He has been a Contributor to WindoWatch from its
beginnings and its first WebMaster.


   ww page 6
   Personal Web Servers for Windows 95
  

           Being There: Personal Web Servers at Home and Work
                      Copyright 1996 by Herb Chong


If you've been in computer superstores recently, you will would have
noticed on the ever growing shelves of Internet software something a
little odd. There are an assortment of web servers being sold there. Are
these stores crazy or what? Everyone knows you need to spend a fortune
on phone lines and learn all kinds of arcane languages such as Perl and
CGI, right? Well, maybe! Although such software is targeted toward the
business user who needs to publish a small web site on a private
intranet network, both small business and home users can take advantage
of personal web servers if they want to have a good looking Internet
presence. The most useful function of these web servers is to build and
test a web site, especially one that contains forms or server scripts to
do more than plain HTML can. It is simply more convenient and much
faster to test a site on a nearby computer with its correspondingly
higher speed than through a dialup 33.6 cps modem to an Internet Service
Provider.

If your web page contains nothing more than HTML with simple links from
one page to another, there is no need to use a personal web server other
than convenience. If you are building server scripts or publishing
information, you'll want to test before you publish. Sites that break
are sites that people don't revisit. For the purposes of this article, a
personal web server is software that will run on Windows 95 without
major loss of features and allow you to serve a web browser on the same
machine or through a direct TCP/IP connection to it across a small LAN.
Most of the web servers surveyed will not allow a dialup connection to
them.


What Do You Want and Need?

Even if you plan nothing more than to announce to the world who you are
and how you can be contacted, you need to have an idea of what you want
to accomplish. For instance, just letting the world know you are a Star
Trek Fan might be of vital importance to you. Without a some idea or
focus, it's hard to know what servers can meet your needs. Microsoft's
Front Page Personal Web Server, for example, is very easy to set up and
get running, but it is can handle few simultaneous users and is harder
to configure and expand once you outgrow the basic tools. On the other
hand, O'Reilly's WebSite Pro is as fully or more fully featured and
expandable than most commercial UNIX web server software. It costs more,
takes more effort to manage, and can support a large number of users.

A personal web site is usually a one way means of communication between
you and web surfers visiting your site. This means that feedback via
e-mail is more than adequate. For these kinds of web sites, there are
few demands on the server other than being reliable and fast enough. Any
of the servers surveyed will do a fine job. If you have a preferred HTML
editor, you can use any server you want, including using an ISP hosted
site. However, there are advantages to using authoring software that
cooperates with the server. A server and an authoring tool working
together can find more types of problems in your pages, such as broken
links, or can better assist you in constructing and managing the site.
Intranet sites can be one way only, but usually they have some
requirement for interaction. Technical support or information servers
generally require a more structured environment than plain e-mail
provides. Microsoft's Front Page has server extensions that directly
create and manage these types of sites on several different server
platforms besides Front Page's own Personal Web Server. Mustang
Software's Internet Connection add-on is based on their Wildcat 5 BBS
server, so it intrinsically has support for file download areas and
conferencing, but the server is capable only of serving up files via
HTTP, FTP, or TELNET. If you want more capability, you have to buy more
add-ons. In its favor, MSI's Internet Connection product, because it is
based on Wildcat 5, is the only server that allows easy dialup
connections without additional software. The Commerce Builder Server by
Internet Factory in most respects is a plain, but high performance, web
server with direct newsgroup support for conferencing.

If you intend to conduct business over the Internet and you both want an
out-of-the-box solution and to host your own site, you need to look at
servers which have secure connections. Of the servers I tried, only
WebSite Pro and Luckman Interactive's Web Commander come with Secure
HTTP and Secure Sockets support. No one should conduct credit card
transactions on the Internet without a secure connection or should you
expect anyone to do so without your using a secure server.


Tools for Building and Managing the Site

How much help you need in building and managing your site depends on how
complex it is going to be. Building a few pages of HTML and included
graphics can be done with Notepad. Although possible to do anything in
HTML with nothing other than Notepad, sophisticated pages are much
easier to prepare with an authoring tool. Similarly, a site with a few
pages doesn't need anything special to manage it. Unfortunately, there
are few enough pages that you can remember what's on them!

A site with about eighty pages, a download area, and a discussion area,
like the one I manage at work, needs some helpful software to keep it
all under control. A good management tool is doubly important if you
keep in mind that a site that never stays the same, that changes
frequently and has interesting content, is one that gets revisited.

Of the five web servers in the survey, four of them come with some form
of authoring software. You don't need to use their software, but if you
are just getting started with HTML, it doesn't hurt to use the tools
that come with the servers. Mustang's Wildcat 5 server has the least
specialized editor, Hot Metal, and no special capabilities in the server
to take advantage of it. WebSite Pro provides tools with only loose
coupling between the tools and the server. There is a site manager to
help you keep track of your pages, but you must use it on the machine
that is hosting the site or be directly connected to it across a LAN and
be able to see the file system. Web Commander's degree of coupling is
about the same, but it includes more tools to help author content
automatically and get your site started more quickly. Microsoft's
FrontPage has the tightest integration between the server and the
authoring tool. It allows you to manage nearly all important aspects of
your site remotely, and even with servers other than the Personal Web
Server included in the box. However, its hardcopy documentation is the
most minimal. You are expected to read the online help, buy third party
books, or go to various web sites to get documentation.


Making the Connection

Every one of the Web servers except Wildcat 5 require a TCP/IP
connection to serve up Web pages. Wildcat can serve up pages without
TCP/IP, but you will seldom ever run it that way. If all you are using
your server for is building and testing a site before uploading it to an
ISP or a more official corporate site, you need only to have TCP/IP
installed on Windows 95. No special configuration of TCP/IP need be made
to get these servers working. Uploading your files to the server is your
only problem, and your ISP or central site will tell you how to get the
files onto their server. Similarly, if you are on a LAN that uses TCP/IP
as one of its protocols, someone will tell you how to set up your TCP/IP
to work properly and allow people to connect to your server.

If you are building your own site and want to host it on the Internet
with your own server, you are talking about yet another set of
complications. There are several things you need to do, even assuming
that the cost is within reason. You have to find an ISP to connect to
with some type of high speed line. A 33.6 connection, even if it could
be maintained continuously is nowhere near fast enough for more than one
user at a time of your site. You need to arrange a permanent connection
using at least ISDN speeds, and preferably a fractional T1. You also
need to apply for and receive a domain name and IP address range from
InterNIC, the body that is responsible for these things. A friendly ISP
can advise or take care of such things for you.


Look and Feel

If this web site is a personal site or an intranet site, look and feel
isn't so important as with an Internet site. The latter is visible to
many people and there is a matter of corporate image to maintain. The
former can be designed and laid out by talented or interested
individuals. An external site needs much more attention if it is going
to serve the purpose for which it is intended. It would not be
inappropriate to hire an art consultant for such a job if you are
lacking in personal or in-house expertise. A web site is nothing if
people don't come back to it. Given the choice, people will come back to
a good looking site that is interesting instead of a mediocre looking
site with the same content.


Customization

Once you have settled on look and feel, the next most important thing
about your site is going to be what you can give your web surfers who
visit and what you can get from them in return. Although several of the
servers come with some form of conferencing software, for a corporate
presence on the Internet, you'll want to make your web pages deliver and
capture things that interest you. Also, if your site provides some
unique service that is handled by software outside the server, you will
have to be able to extend the server to talk to your software.

All of the five servers surveyed allow you to extend them. Four of them
can use traditional Common Gateway Interface (CGI) programs to extend
their capabilities. Documentation varies from nonexistent for the
FrontPage server to a three hundred page bound volume for WebSite Pro.
Only the Wildcat 5 server requires you to purchase optional software to
extend its capabilities. Commerce Builder and WebSite Pro come with not
only extensive interface capabilities but also programming languages and
tools to write CGIs and server extensions. FrontPage and Web Commander
allow programming CGI scripts only, but provide no tools or programming
languages to let you do so. In addition to scripting, WebSite Pro allows
you to add modules directly to the server for higher performance.


Just In Case

If you haven't upgraded to Windows 95 yet, you may still be able to find
a copy of Quarterdeck's WebServer. Quarterdeck has discontinued
marketing the product. The software runs on Windows 3.1 or higher (I
have used it successfully under Windows 95) and requires less system
resources to run well than the newer servers. On the other hand, it
doesn't support Long File Names and doesn't come with very many tools to
help you serve up your site. Still, for those who are on a budget or
have smaller needs, it will do a fine job. WebServer provides CGI
support so that you can write all kinds of custom capability into the
server, but you'll have to do it yourself.


Mentioned in Passing

I had requested two other web servers capable of running on Windows 95
for this article, but I am not able to comment on them. Clark
Technologies, the vendors of the PCBoard BBS system, sent press
information for their MetaWorlds server, but no server. TGV Software
sent an evaluation copy of their Cheetah multi-platform web server, but
the evaluation key to unlock the software had expired. Because the Clark
Technologies server is based on PCBoard, it should resemble the Wildcat
5 Web server in many respects. The TGV server should resemble the
Commerce Builder server from Internet Factory.


Summary

Unless you are willing to spend the money to get your own domain name
and to have a permanent high speed connection to the Internet (ISDN is
just barely enough), you'll never want to use any of the servers
mentioned in this article to host a web site on the Internet itself. It
is far more cost effective to pay for some space on a local Internet
Service Provider and have them manage the server for you. When traffic
grows and the costs of an ISP start getting too high, then you can think
about connecting directly. At that point, the higher function and more
efficient servers can make the transition relatively painless. All of
the servers mentioned will do a terrific job of hosting a site on a
corporate intranet of moderate to high traffic on reasonable-sized
machines. The less expensive servers will do an excellent job of page
and script testing for personal pages without costing too much.

Once high speed direct connections from the home to the Internet becomes
cheap and commonplace, hosting your work site without a machine of your
own will become more practical. For now, you're best of letting someone
else do it.


Vendor Information

   Clark Development Company MetaWorlds Server
   http://www.metaworlds.com

   Internet Factory Commerce Builder Web Server
   http://www.ifact.com

   Luckman Interactive Web Commander
   http://www.luckman.com

   Microsoft FrontPage
   http://www.microsoft.com

   Mustang Software International Wildcat 5
   http://www.mustang.com

   O'Reilly Software WebSite Professional
   http://website.ora.com

   Quarterdeck Corporation WebServer
   http://www.qdeck.com

   TGV Software Cheetah
   http://www.tgv.com


                       ...........ww...........
Our talented Contributing Editor, Herb Chong finds time from creating
computer art to surveying Windows95 server software. Herb is a research
man, programmer, computer artist, and writer.



   ww page 7
   Maximizing Word 7 for Windows 95
  


                    Part 3: The Basics of WordBasic
                   Copyright 1996 by Jack Passarella


Introduction

It is something of an irony that one of WinWord's most powerful features
is called WordBasic. While WordBasic owes its name and heritage to past
generations of the basic programming language, WordBasic is powerful
enough to satisfy all but the most hardened C++ programmer. At the same
time, the actual language is close enough to actual English not to
frighten away the uninitiated. Actually, the syntax of the language
mirrors the menu structure of WinWord itself. For example, to Format a
Font through the menu, you select Format, then Font; to do so with
WordBasic, you use the command FormatFont. In other words, if you know
the menu structure of Word, you already know much of WordBasic.

Surprisingly, many veteran WinWord users have never dipped a toe in the
WordBasic pool.

This article certainly isn't intended to teach you everything there is
to know about WordBasic, and it won't teach you everything you need to
know to use WordBasic effectively. You may wonder if you even need
WordBasic to use Word? Tough question. Or at least a relative question.
The answer all depends on how well you want to use Word. You may have
been using Word for years without ever touching the macro functionality.
You should know, however, that there are certain things you can do only
if you use WordBasic, such as custom dialog boxes. But dialog boxes are
a subject for another article. For The Basics of WordBasic , I've
decided to take -- appropriately -- a much simpler approach. Actually,
I'm going to rip a page from the Word Developer's Kit and tackle the
Bold-Italic macro.


The Bold-Italic Macro

The Bold-Italic macro is a simple formatting concept which helps
demonstrates several interesting points about WordBasic. First of all,
everyone can identify with the application of the macro. I have many
occasions where I want to use the combined formatting of bold and
italic, usually in headings. WindoWatch's own sub-heading style is
basically underlined for emphasis since the entire PDF document is
already bold. Underline is more visible on screen, whereas italics is
preferred for printed output, especially in this day of proportional
typefaces.

It is fairly simple to apply first bold, then italics to a heading or
any other text by clicking on the bold, then italics button on the
formatting toolbar. Two steps. You could define a style for a heading
that applies both font formats (see WindoWatch Volume 2, Number 6 for
Always in Styles, my article on WinWord's Styles), just as I've applied
underlining and bold to the Heading 3 style above. Sometimes, though,
you may want to apply bold and italic to a selection or just a word of
text on the fly. At that point, it might be quicker to use the
Bold-Italic macro, which gets assigned to a button (described later in
this article) right next to those for Bold and Italic. Your productivity
will increase in proportion to the amount of times you would have had to
click twice and now need only click once.

So the bold-italic concept is simple to understand and even provides a
modest productivity boost. The progression I'll take in this article is
to first record the macro, then simplify the structure and, finally,
turn the macro into an on-off formatting toggle feature similar to the
other formatting buttons. I'll wrap up the article by showing you how to
add the new format feature as a button to your formatting toolbar.


Recording...

Many first time macro creators are advised to use the record feature to
record a series of keystrokes or menu selections. Usually this works.
It's grossly inefficient, but it works. And once again, there are
certain WordBasic features you can't record, like the creation of those
custom dialog boxes I mentioned in the first section. Recording the
macro will, however, usually give you some useful information about what
type of WordBasic commands you need in a particular type of macro; it
also gives you the syntax of those commands.

There is, however, a better way to learn the syntax and parameters of a
command: WordBasic help. Before you get started experimenting with
WordBasic, make sure you have the file WRDBASIC.HLP in your WinWord
folder (i.e., directory); the file is about 1.8MB. If the file isn't on
your hard drive and you have the MS Office professional CD-ROM, you'll
find it in the WinWord folder. With a floppy disk install, the file may
be compressed. If you did a Custom/Complete install of WinWord, you
should have the file on your hard drive.

With WordBasic help available, you can place the cursor on any valid
WordBasic command in your macro window and tap the F1 key to get a
listing of syntax, parameters and examples for that command. You'll also
see related commands in hyperlinked format which usually gets you to the
command you need for a given task.

Now that you have WordBasic help at your disposal, lets shift our
attention back to recording the macro. From the Tools menu, select Macro
to bring up the macro dialog box.

Type in a name for the macro, such as BoldItalic. You want to make the
name something meaningful, since this name will pop up as a tooltip when
we link the macro to a toolbar button. Note: tooltips have enough
intelligence (intellisense?) to put a space wherever there is an inline
capital letter in the macro name, i.e., between the d and the I.
Unfortunately, the same tooltip feature does not have enough
intellisense to leave well enough alone. If you start your macro name
with a keyword, e.g., Insert or Format, that word is dropped from the
tooltip, leaving whatever text follows.

This BoldItalic macro is probably one that you would want available all
the time, not just in a particular template, so you can select
Normal.dot (Global Template) from the Macros Available In: drop down
list. You can also add an appropriate description for the macro in the
Description: text box. With name, availability and description taken
care of, it's time to click the Record button and go through the motions
of recording the formatting for Bold and Italic. The Record Macro dialog
box pops up with your information already in place. (Note: You could
have just clicked the Record button, then entered the name, etc. here.)

Click on the OK button to begin recording. You'll see a new, two button
toolbar pop up, sporting VCR-like controls. You use this toolbar to stop
recording (left button) or pause recording (right button) of the macro.
You'll also notice that your cursor has the image of a cassette tape
attached to the standard arrow: this is to remind you are recording
practically everything you do. An important reminder, because any menu
selections, etc. you make are being dutifully recorded for your macro,
mistakes and all. Hunting and pecking blindly could give your macro a
bad case of bloat. If you continue to use the recorder, it's good
practice to make a dry run through the command selections you want to
record, although you can clean up the mess later or, if you remember,
pause during.

Now that you are ready to record, select the Format menu, then Font,
then under Font Style:, select the Bold Italic option. Click the OK
button, then the left, STOP button on the recording toolbar. You're
done. Let's look at the macro code you generated.


The Good, the Bad and the Unnecessary

To take a look at the fruits of your labor, you need to go back to Tools
Macro to bring up the Macro dialog box. Click on your BoldItalic macro
and then click on the Edit button. This takes you into a macro window
(you can get back to your current document window by selecting it from
the Window menu) where your recorded macro is now available for review
and modification.

Sub MAIN

FormatFont .Points = "12", .Underline = 0, .Color = 0,
   .Strikethrough = 0, .Superscript = 0, .Subscript = 0, .Hidden = 0,
   .SmallCaps = 0, .AllCaps = 0, .Spacing = "0 pt", .Position = "0 pt",
   .Kerning = 0, .KerningMin = "", .Tab = "0", .Font = "Times New Roman",
   .Bold = 1, .Italic = 1, .Outline = 0, .Shadow = 0
End Sub

The FormatFont line is actually one long line, not several as it appears
here. For the sake of legibility, you would want to use the line
continuation character to split this line up.

Sub MAIN
FormatFont .Points = "12", .Underline = 0, .Color = 0, \
 .Strikethrough = 0, .Superscript = 0, .Subscript = 0, \
 .Hidden = 0, .SmallCaps = 0, .AllCaps = 0, \
 .Spacing = "0 pt", .Position = "0 pt", .Kerning = 0, \
 .KerningMin = "", .Tab = "0", .Font = "Times New Roman", \
 .Bold = 1, .Italic = 1, .Outline = 0, .Shadow = 0
End Sub

This bit of housecleaning -- lining up the starting parameters and
breaking the screen lines between parameters -- makes the macro a little
easier to read. But the macro itself is much more than you need for this
particular task, which demonstrates one of the shortcomings of recording
macros.

Here the intellisense falls short of the mark. You knew you just wanted
Bold and Italic formatting turned on by the macro. Unfortunately, the
recorder wasn't sure which settings in the dialog box were relevant and
which were not. Result? It records every current setting in the Format
Font dialog box. Of the nineteen options, you need only two. This macro
is much longer than it needs to be and therefore bloated and slower than
it absolutely has to be.

If you were writing the macro from scratch _ once you became a little
more comfortable with WordBasic _ you would simply use the following
parameters in your version:

Sub MAIN
FormatFont .Bold = 1, .Italic = 1
End Sub

I'm sure you'll agree this macro is incredibly more manageable and less
intimidating than the record effort. A couple points of clarification.
Every WordBasic macro has Sub MAIN (usually, but not always the first
instruction in the macro, it refers to the main routine of the macro)
and End Sub (usually but not always the last instruction.) When you
create a macro without recording, these two instructions are even
entered for you, with the insertion point placed between them. (Unlike
Visual Basic for Applications, this little bit of formatting is about
all the help WordBasic gives you.) As I mentioned previously, the
WordBasic command to accomplish this font formatting is simply what the
menu selections would be, but without a space between the words:
FormatFont. What follows the command are its parameters. Each parameters
begins with a period and is separated from other parameters by a comma.
Note: the first parameter is not preceded by a comma. A "1" indicates
that the parameter is on ; a "0" indicates the parameter is off.
(Suppose you knew that the Format Font command was FormatFont, but you
couldn't recall the parameters. In the macro window, just type the
command FormatFont and, with the cursor placed within the command, press
the F1 key. This will bring up the aforementioned WordBasic help, with
all the information related to the command. If you type an incorrect
command, then ask for help, you will see the WordBasic help index with a
button for each letter of the alphabet. If you guessed close to the
actual command name, you might spot the command you want from the alpha
list. Tip: Hopping around through the WordBasic help system, checking
out related commands, etc., can give you a better understanding of the
command language.)

So far, you've recorded the macro, learned how to make it more legible
with line breaks using the line continuation character, then trimmed out
all the superfluous commands. You can try out the macro now by selecting
text, then running the macro. If you haven't closed the macro window,
the macro toolbar should be visible: simply click on the right-wedge
play button. Whatever you selected will now be bold and italic. The bold
and italic buttons will both appear depressed. Congratulations, you've
created a functional macro!


The Next Level

The macro works -- or does it? Word's bold and italic buttons work as a
toggle, i.e., click once to turn the formatting on, click again to turn
it off. The existing BoldItalic macro is just an on switch. Think of a
light switch that could only turn your house lights on. Think of the
showroom atmosphere. Think of the electric bill!

Ideally, in Word as in life, you want the right to change your mind.
Before you make the commitment of slapping a BoldItalic button up there
beside the bold and italic buttons, you want it to be a true switch, a
toggle switch. For this, you need to have Word check if the formatting
is turned on or off. If the selection is already bold and italic, turn
it off; if it's not, turn it on.


What If...?

In order to revise the BoldItalic macro with toggle functionality, I
need to introduce two new concepts. (1) The If..End If construction: If
a condition is true, do one thing, otherwise, do something else. (2)
Getting the current values of a Word dialog box (so you can test them!),
using the GetCurValues command. To get the current values of the
FormatFont dialog box, you have to create a dialog record and assign the
current values to this record, sort of like polling the dialog box for
all its current information: name, age, sex, occupation, etc. Two lines
take care of this:

Dim dlg As FormatFont
GetCurValues dlg

The first line creates (Dim is short for dimension) a dialog record --
called dlg here, but you could, basically, use any name for it -- to
match whatever is currently in the FormatFont dialog box; the second
line dumps the current status information into the dialog record. One
more note before I show you the rest of the revised macro. To reference
each piece of information in the dialog record, you preface the
parameter name with a prefix consisting of the dialog record name and a
period. So the bold parameter is referenced as dlg.Bold. Here's the
entire macro:

Sub MAIN
Dim dlg As FormatFont
GetCurValues dlg
If dlg.Bold = 0 And dlg.Italic = 0 Then
     FormatFont .Bold = 1, .Italic = 1
ElseIf dlg.Bold = 1 And dlg.Italic = 1 Then
     FormatFont .Bold = 0, .Italic = 0
End If
End Sub

Now you see the If...Then construction. If bold and italic are both off,
then turn them on. The ElseIf is for the other condition in the toggle
routine: bold and italic are already on, so turn them both off.

Test out the new and improved BoldItalic macro. Select a word and run
the macro. Both should be bold and italic. Run it again and the word
should now have bold and italic turned off.

So we are ready to make a formatting toolbar button for the revised
macro. Right? Not quite yet. One problem is that if the word you
selected was bold but not italic, neither condition is true, so nothing
happens. Same problem if the word was italic but not bold. No change, no
matter how many times you run the macro.

The problem is that the If construct only executes if both conditions
(i.e., bold and italic) are true or if both are false. If only one
formatting condition is true, then neither instruction runs. This can be
remedied easily by changing the two And keywords to Or. Now, if bold is
on, but italic is off, running the macro adds italic to the bold
attribute. Similarly, if italic is on but bold is not, bold will be
turned on. Running the macro a second time turns both on or off,
depending on their current state.


Pushing Your Buttons

Save the current version of the macro by clicking on the disk icon on
the standard toolbar. You can Save the Copy of the macro using the File
menu, but this just saves the macro text; the macro itself is saved
inside Normal.dot.

What you want to do now is assign your macro creation to the formatting
toolbar. To add a button to the formatting toolbar, right-click anywhere
on a visible toolbar, then select Customize from the context menu that
appears. In the Customize dialog box, scroll down the Categories: list
and select Macros; In the Macros: list, select BoldItalic; make sure
that the Save Changes In: drop down list box is displaying Normal.dot.

With the BoldItalic macro selected, click-and-drag the macro name to the
toolbar where you want it, probably to the right of the bold and italic
buttons. Don't worry, it will shove aside the buttons to the left and
right to squeeze itself in place.

When you let go of the mouse button, you will be able to designate the
new button as a text button. The default text is BoldItalic, but the
button width will grow to accommodate any text you may enter. Or you can
select from the meager supply of graphic buttons. For now, just pick any
of the graphic buttons. You'll change it in a moment.

With the Customize window still open, right-click on the italic button
and select Copy Button Image from the context menu; now right-click on
the silly little graphic you chose earlier and select Paste Button
Image.

You'll have two identical buttons side by side, so you need to
differentiate between them. Right click on the second one (the
BoldItalic button) and select Edit Button Image. What I did was use
Word's simple button editor to add some depth to the slanted `I' to
indicate the bold attribute, then added a gray `B' to the upper left
corner and a gray `I' to the lower right. You can attempt to duplicate
mine or create a new button as your heart desires... within the
limitations of 16 colors and the 16 by 16 pixel grid. When you're
finished customizing your button, click OK, then click the Close button
on the Customize window.


Conclusion and Limitations

You now have a macro that toggles bold and italic on or off; if one or
the other attribute is applied, the macro toggles the other on as well;
you've assigned the macro to a toolbar button on your formatting
toolbar. All's right in the world. Or is it?

You may notice that when you click your new BoldItalic button, you get
the correct formatting, but instead of the BoldItalic button appearing
depressed, as either the Bold or the Italic will do if you apply them
individually, both the Bold and Italic buttons depress, while your
combination button pops back up, unchanged. Unfortunately, I haven't
figured out how or if we humble Word users can change the appearance of
custom buttons on the fly. However, even if the new toggle button
doesn't look like the other toggle buttons, it works like a charm.



                       ...........ww...........
Jack Passarella has been providing Winword support on Ilink as a
conference host for some time. When one has a Word for Windows problem
this is the guy you turn to for help. We recently discovered he has an
artistic side as well. But more on that at another time. When he's not
writing authoritative Word for Windows articles he is a systems man for
a large commercial printing establishment.



   ww page 8
   An Introduction to the Mobile Computing Features of Notes R4, Part II
  

               Taking Lotus Notes R4 Home and On the Road

                   Copyright 1996 by Paul Williamson


The heart of Lotus Notes R4 Mobile computing feature is the new
Replicator Tab. This feature gives users access to a set of options that
greatly increases the flexibility and range of control they can use over
replication and mail routing.

The Replicator Tab provides an easy to use graphical interface for
background operations that control various mobile related features for
replication management and calling mail and data servers. Much of the
guesswork end users had with previous versions of Notes is replaced with
a simple, concise interface. Unlike other tabs on the Notes workspace,
the Replicator Tab cannot be removed nor renamed.


Replicas and Replication

First, we need to define what replication is, in the Notes context.
Replication is the process of exchanging modifications between replicas.
A replica is a special type of copy of a database. Through replication,
Notes makes all of the replicas essentially identical over time. For
example, users in one office can make changes to a replica on their
server at the same time that users in another office make changes to a
replica of the same database on their server. When the servers
replicate, each replica is updated with the information from the replica
on the other server.

A replica has the same replica ID as the original database. This
distinguishes a replica from a copy of a database because the common ID
lets you replicate changes between the replica and the original
database.

Replication can occur between two servers or between a workstation and a
server, for example, between a laptop and a server. Replication can also
occur in one or both directions between replicas. That is, you can set
up replication so that two replicas receive updates from each other, or
so that only one replica receives updates from the other.

Notes lets you choose which databases you want to replicate and when to
replicate them. Replication can occur automatically according to a
schedule you specify, or manually through server or workstation commands
you specify. Replication between servers generally occurs automatically
on a schedule specified by a database manager or network administrator,
whereas replication between a workstation and a server generally occurs
manually when a user needs to replicate updates.


The Replicator Tab Contents

The Replicator workspace page lets you manage replication of your local
databases in one place. With the Replicator page, you can replicate
multiple databases with one or more servers with a single command. When
you use the Replicator page, Notes replicates in the background so you
can do other work while Notes replicates.

When you use Notes away from the office, you can have Replicator call
each server you want to replicate with automatically. If you're using a
passthru server or a remote LAN server, you can have Replicator make a
single call and replicate all of your local databases at one time, even
if they're on different servers.

The Replicator page also lets you customize replication depending on
where you're working. For example, you could set up a local database to
receive full documents when you replicate at the office (on a network)
and receive shortened documents when you replicate away from the office
(using a modem). The Replicator page also provides additional ways to
replicate; for example, you can assign high priority to selected
databases and replicate only those databases.

The Replicator page is always the last page on your workspace; you
cannot delete it. It automatically contains the following types of
entries:

   Database - The Replicator page contains a database entry for each
   local replica you have.

   Start replication at - You can use this entry to specify a
   replication schedule and enable scheduled replication. This entry is
   always first and cannot be deleted.

   Database templates - You can use this entry to refresh the designs of
   template-based databases. This entry cannot be deleted.

   Send outgoing mail - You can use this entry to send all pending
   messages from your local MAIL.BOX database. This entry cannot be
   deleted.

You can also create the following types of entries for mobile locations
(such as Home and Travel):

   Call - You can use a call entry to connect to a server. (See Calling
   Into a Server below for more information.)

   Hangup - You can use a hangup entry to end a connection with a
   server.

Most types of entries on the Replicator page contain action buttons
which you can use to specify replication options. For example, you can
use the arrow button on a database entry to specify the direction you
want to replicate in and the server you want to replicate with.

When you replicate, the status bar at the bottom of the Replicator page
displays current replication information, such as call attempt
information, the database currently being replicated, and the number of
updates that have been replicated.

After replication, the Replicator page displays replication statistics
for individual entries such as the server replicated with and the date
and time of replication.


Replicator and locations

Notes lets you set up the Replicator page in a different way at each of
your locations. This way, you don't have to change replication settings
every time you work at a different location. For example:

  You could set up a database entry at your Office location so that it
   sends and receives documents when you're at the office and you
   could deselect the same database entry at your Travel location so
   that it never replicates when you're on the road.

  You could replicate all of your local databases on a schedule at
   your Office location and replicate only your mail on an as-needed
   basis at your Home location.

  You could arrange database entries in one order at your Travel
   location and arrange them in a different order at your Home location
   so that you replicate in a different order at each location.


Calling Into a Server

When calling into a server, you may want to configure a Call Server
entry. This isn't necessary since Notes will use the Connection document
to determine the path to the server, but is useful to specify a
particular server to call. If there isn't a Call Server entry already on
the Replicator page, it can be easily added by clicking on the Create
menu item and selecting Call Entry.

Once the entry is added, you simply click on the button with the picture
of the phone to receive a list of all the servers to which you can
connect from the current location. Just select the appropriate server
and click OK. To enable this function, be sure the small box at the left
of the line is checked.

When you select the Actions/Start menu function or press the Start
button, the Replicator will execute the enabled tasks in the order in
which they appear on the page. Since this is a background replication
program, you can still access menus and continue to work within Notes or
other applications.

When the process starts, the first thing that appears is a pointing
finger icon pointing to the task that is currently active or running. A
textual description of what is taking place will be shown along the bar
at the bottom of the page. You will be able to see the status as Notes
initializes the modem and makes the call based on the calling rules
specified for the current location. Additionally, you will see graphical
images that illustrate the entire replication process as Notes moves
from connecting to the server, searching the server for the database,
extracting the data from the server, sending data to the server and
finally ending in an idle state. During replication, the status bar
indicating progress will also be shown.

1. By using different locations, you can easily maintain different
   combinations of replication options for any individual database.
   As you switch between locations, the Replicator Tab displays a page
   with options specific to that location. This includes the individual
   database options that were last used at that location. This allows
   you to maintain one location that sends and receives full documents
   while maintaining another location that only receives headlines or
   a limited amount of data.

2. This concept can be expanded to maintain different work modes.
   Because the line entries on the Replicator Tab page change their
   settings as you change locations, you can use Named Locations for
   more than just different physical locations. For example, you have a
   location called "Support" and have icons selected for replicating
   certain databases with support information. Switching to that
   location would allow easy replication of only those databases.

3. For quick mail transfer, you can use the Actions/Send Outgoing Mail
   menu choice, which ignores any Replicator tasks and only sends mail.

4. To minimize the time it takes to perform the initial replication,
   and thus minimize the possible access costs associated with long
   distance telephone charges, and possible hotel charges, make a local
   replica copy of the databases you want to access later. This will
   save considerable time over making the replica via phone calls.

5. Notes R4 accomplishes replication at the field level by assigning
   attributes to fields that were previously assigned only to entire
   documents. Notes R4 first detects if a change has been made to a
   document as a whole and then determines which individual fields have
   been modified. If a field hasn't been changed, there's no need to
   replicate it. This feature will greatly improve life for the mobile
   user. Another benefit of field level replication is that it
   drastically cuts down on the number of replication conflicts. In
   Notes R3, even if two separate fields are modified within the same
   document on two different replica copies of a database, when
   replication occurs a replication conflict is created for the entire
   document. These conflicts have to be resolved manually, which are
   time consuming and quite often a very difficult process.

Final Words

If you haven't installed a local copy of the Help database, you should
install the Help Lite database, HELPLT4.NSF, locally so you can get help
on mobile Notes and other topics while you're away from the office.


                       ...........ww...........
Paul Williamson is a Vice-President at Chase Manhattan bank. He has
contributed his computer knowledge and talent to WindoWatch from the day
of our first issue. He sits on on The WindoWatch editorial board.



   ww page 9
   Issues of HTML Presentations!
  
No, this is a story 'bout a man named Jed
A poor mountaineer barely kept his family fed...


                      Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks

                     Copyright 1996 by Gregg Hommel


Whoa! Hold on just a second! Who put that tape in? That's for the wrong
channel, wrong programme! Heck, it's even the wrong technology!

Although maybe not so wrong, to listen to all the pundits talk about the
gold in them thar hills - the Internet?. Of course, for you and me, the
average Joe Blo personal user of the Internet, such gold is not within
our grasp, unless we happen to get very lucky, but still, the Internet,
and in particular, the World Wide Web, is at the least, available to
most of us for a home page, and is simple enough to use and access, with
the standard HTML language.

And that is what we are going to discuss: the HTML language.

For some time now, I've had my own personal home page. Actually, that
should read pages as there are several of them, divided by topics of
interest for visitors, including pages for my shareware applications for
Procomm Plus for Windows. Nothing fancy, but still, a way for people to
find out more about me, and my applications if they are interested.

As I said, nothing fancy! Indeed, I kept them as simple as possible, in
order to accommodate as many browsers as possible. But as is normal in
life, all things change, sometimes whether we want them to or not. In my
case, the changes to my pages came about for two reasons...

1) discussions of framed pages in the ILink HTML conference, and
2) the availability of Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE) 3.0,
     in beta form.

I used MSIE, but since version 2.0 did not support frames, and since
Netscape did not support the marquee tag from MSIE 2.0, I used neither
HTML extension for my pages. But, with the advent of MSIE 3.0 beta,
which supported frames, and discussion of both frames and marquees in
the Ilink HTML conference, I decided to look at changing my pages into
something more current and up to date.

I had used Netscape 2.0 for a while and had viewed a few framed pages,
but in all honesty, I wasn't impressed. The ones I had looked at were
not exactly spectacular, and indeed, the use of frames seemed to detract
from them more than it enhanced them. As a result, and because I had
switched to MSIE 2.0, I didn't bother with frames on my pages. But, with
MSIE 3.0, I began visiting a few other sites that used frames, some
having a very nice approach, such as shareware.com. As a result, I began
paying closer attention to discussions of style and technique when using
frames that were going on in the ILink HTML conference. It was then that
I began thinking about how I might use frames to enhance my Web site.

Just a note here... today. We aren't going to get into a lot of HTML
coding for frames or marquees. We'll reserve that for a future
discussion. What we will look at is some of the thinking that went into
my use of frames, and the how and why of them.

Many of you may have been to sites on the Web that have multiple pages
and too often find a lack consistency in terms of unity of style in
these pages. It can also be annoying to have to go back and forth from
one page to another, with links between pages in random places, if they
exist at all. More than once, I found myself on someone's sub-page, with
no way back to one of their other pages, other than using the browser's
Back button. which, depending upon where you are on the site, can be
tiresome to use.

I try to avoid this annoyance on my site, but it isn't easy, and one
isn't always successful. This is where our discussion of frames came
into play. The folks on ILink, for the most part, agreed that many
framed sites just weren't worth the time involved. The members'
discussion of using frames more usefully, led to development of the
basic concept of unifying the look of the various sub pages while easing
navigation between them. Frames turned out to be rather well suited to
this, if they were used with care and discretion, so we decided in
conference discussions, and did not become an overpowering feature of
the page. Too often frames slowed down access, rather than simplifying
it, and made moving from page to page more cumbersome rather than less.


Thinking about this, I came up with what I thought was a simple, yet
useful, framed page concept, that would serve the purposes we had been
discussing, and allow for easier navigation of my home page. My artistic
skills are about on a par with my writing ability, but let's see if I
can get something here for you to show the concept anyway...

         Ŀ
                                                           
                              FRAME A                      
                                                           
         
         ĿĿ
                                                         
                                                         
                                                         
          FRAME B                FRAME C                 
                                                         
                                                         
                                                         
                                                         
         
         Ŀ
                                                           
                              FRAME D                      
                                                           
         

This is what I decided upon, and we'll get into the coding that creates
it, next month. For now, we'll just look at what is in each frame...


FRAME A is a title bar, and it never changes. Remember, I want most of
the page to be consistent, in order to maintain the same look throughout
my site. It contains an HTML file which is a graphic title for the page,
and a Microsoft Internet Explorer marquee description. The marquee code
is designed inside a table, so that the text in the marquee will appear
even if the browser being used does not support marquees, such as
Netscape. More on that next month.

FRAME D is similar to FRAME A, in that it also never changes, and holds
a small table which displays two basic items.. a mailto: URL so that
people can send me email from the page if they wish, and my Web Counter
display showing the number of visitors to the main page, to date.

FRAME B is also unchanging, usually, - unless I add a new sub-page, but
is the navigation tool for my site. It is a vertical table of links to
various sub-pages available, which can be displayed when clicked on.
Those sub-pages are displayed in....

FRAME C is the most changeable frame on the page. It's size and location
does not change, but, since it is the display area for my various
sub-pages, the content will change often, at least that's my hope.


When a user visits my page with a browser which supports frames, like
MSIE 3.0 or Netscape 2.x/3.0, he sees a consistent interface for all
pages, in the form of the framed layout. The page which he has selected
is displayed in FRAME C. Navigation between sub-pages is simple, since
all he has to do is click on one of the topics in FRAME B, and that page
is displayed for him. No worries about BACK buttons, or going backwards
through multiple pages to get to the one he wants as a simple click with
the mouse takes him there.

The more I thought about this, the more I liked the idea of having what
almost appears to be a single page to the remote user, but still
displays the various topics that I wanted available. As an aside, the
above wasn't my first framed layout, but rather a process which led me
to the above version. In next month's column, we'll get into the ever
important detail. The point I'm making is that deciding upon the layout
was the easy part. In one way getting the code for that layout and
making it work as I wanted, turned out to be far more difficult than I
ever imagined but far simpler in another. Next month, we'll get onto the
road traveled to develop the code necessary to make the page work.


                       ...........ww...........
Gregg Hommel has taken on the editorial responsibility for our HTML
focus. He is an experienced programmer and Aspect script developer.
Given his familiarity and skill with programming tools he was a natural.
He continues his interest in Prowin as an Ilink Host and in Windows
issues generally as the Rime co-host for Windows. Gregg has been a
contributing writer for WindoWatch from its very beginning.


   ww page 10
    The NT 4 Controversy:
  


                        A Software Switch Hitter
                   Copyright 1996 by Lois B. Laulicht


  [As we go to press, the Dept. of Justice is looking into allegations of
   anti-trust violations relating to Microsoft business practices. lbl]


The Argument: O'Reilly Associates dropped a small bomb mid September
when those on their mailing list were informed that the distance between
the NT4 Workstation to NT4 Server was only two small registry settings
away. The lines of code to make this registry change are well hidden and
inaccessible by design. O'Reilly has made available at their web site,
replicas for study along with a very fine article by their senior editor
Andrew Schulman. The O'Reilly consultant, Mark Russinovich, took the
next logical step and created, with Bryce Cogswell, a registry spying
utility to verify the O'Reilly claim of sameness of workstation and
server kernels. Subsequently, Microsoft conceded that although the
kernels are indeed the same, a kernel does not a server make. But we are
getting ahead of ourselves!

Wisely, O'Reilly took their findings and a small conversion utility to
PC Week Labs for independent testing. PCWeek confirmed that the O'Reilly
claims were right on the money and the newly converted server does
exactly what the O'Reilly folks are saying. Additionally, it is very
clear that O'Reilly is NOT going to release their conversion utility
to the public and they shouldn't. To be clear: We have seen no
encouragement from O'Reilly to holders of NT workstation licenses to
violate the conditions of those agreements.

The context: O'Reilly has recently released Inside the Windows95
Registry by Ron Petrusha with which Andrew Schulman was very involved.
Schulman wrote the forward and expects to develop an online resource for
the '95 Registry. These are not amateurs! The book is well written and
understandable, even though primarily addressed to programming types.

One must also say, that the O'Reilly finding occurs within the context
of controversy surrounding the Microsoft NT workstation license and the
number of incoming connections the client is legally allowed to support.
Microsoft changed NT 4 workstation from both 3.51 and the version 4
betas, in their final release by limiting incoming support to ten IP
connections when using the workstation as a server. Responding to
negative press, MS announced that their original open connection policy
would be re-instituted even though the work station license remains
unchanged.

Software already developed for NT Workstation and written with certain
understandings and assumptions based upon the earlier versions has been
severely disadvantaged because of these changes in the final NT
workstation release.

This last minute change effectively reduces the robustness of award
winning O'Reilly web server, WebSite, as well as its potential sales.
Additionally, the David-Goliath overtones of this ongoing Internet
jockeying for sales and Internet influence can also be tied to the well
publicized browser wars and the public side of a conflict defined as a
struggle to dominate the Internet. As a result, this disclosure cannot
be isolated from the formal complaint to the Dept. of Justice by
Netscape over issues of anti-trust violation(s).

An interesting characterization of these events from a respected
programmer of my acquaintance: "I think the NT stuff is purely a move
from MS to force people to buy NT server. Removing a function that used
to be there is good grounds for an anti-trust suit. It's really stupid
and arrogant!"

Are the NTs Separate Products? The WindoWatch NT team, particularly
people with long experience using NT like Linda Rosenbaum, or someone
integrating multiple operating systems, like Jim Plumb tell me that they
knew that the NT kernels were the same. Jim went on to say that, "Now
that this information has been widely publicized, MS should sell WS as
the base product and charge for keys or licenses to unlock the server
and other management tools.

The high-end publishing software I use, Interleaf and Xyvision, come
with license managers controlling the options one can use, how many
people can run the software and the availability selections
simultaneously. When you want to add more options, you pay for them and
get a revised license file to install. That's all there is to it!" He
went on to say that "There's no reason MS shouldn't package a server
bundle separate from a WS package but they should be up front with their
customers about it."

Linda Rosenbaum has been using NT on a small home network with three
other clients for husband and children. Her reaction was very similar to
Jim's. She believes that MS is giving something of extra value with the
Server, referring to the extra software and components, or management
tools that come only with Server. What remains unclear to her, is how
much these extras are worth. She went on to say that it has always been
her understanding that there was very little difference between the two
in terms of base operating system. Or was she surprised to learn that
the different options could be activated using settings in the registry.

A Microsoft marketing bulletin clearly points up some of the installed
differences, a somewhat different spin than the base kernel comparison.
Each of the NT4 operating systems has its own strengths and weaknesses
which Microsoft carefully explains in the preamble of their revised
Market Bulletin dated Summer 1996:

    Microsoft(r) Windows NT(r) 4.0
    Market Bulletin, Summer 1996

    Differences Between Windows NT Workstation 4.0 and
    Windows NT Server 4.0

    Since the first release of the Windows NT platform in 1993,
    Microsoft has followed a strategy of providing the same kernel
    architecture, user interface and Application Programming Interface
    (API) across both the Windows NT Workstation and Server products,
    while optimizing, pricing, and licensing the products for two
    specific segments - the interactive desktop operating system and
    the high performance server. Consistent with that strategy, the
    Windows NT 4.0 platform is available in two versions: Windows NT
    Server 4.0 and Windows NT Workstation 4.0.


Aside from the bundled management tools, of debatable dollar value,
there are important differences how each system is optimized. One of
the fundamental differences is how memory is used or cached for each.
In very simplistic terms, memory is primarily cached for rapid response
for the WS while it is made completely available for file access and the
primary i/o functions of the Server.

Prioritization of tasks or time slicing of the CPU is the other major
difference. The workstation is optimized at installation to divide its
attention into short slices for rapid foreground usage and the loading
and unloading of multitasks. The server requires longer timeslices to
deal with multiple network requests efficiently. What is critical to
remember, however, is that it is the workstation or server designation
which sets off the cascade of multiple options for each installation.

In any case, this latest Internet argument represents still more
jockeying for dominance over who is going to create the standards for
future Internet software development. Indeed, the NT workstation fight
could be over before it has even begun. The street price for an NT 4
workstation upgrade has already dropped to around $100 putting the
product solidly in the hands of individual users and in competition with
OS/2 and '95! Market pressure could well even the playing field.

The Internet Temperature: Even though Internet WebServers are the focus
of the O'Reilly-MS conflict, the Internet I frequent doesn't seem to
have noticed. (My observations are drawn from news groups discussing NT
and operating system issues.) It seems those people have taken a pass
and the argument in question is producing a big yawn. Obviously there is
some discussion but it is quite limited and has become a repetition of
the major points stated above. There is, however, a single important
exception: "Has Microsoft acted ethically?"


Insatiable Appetites: When Microsoft originally developed NT it was to
compete for parts of the corporate market. Networking, cross platform
interfaces or interconnectivity are the guts of competition within the
corporate scene. Heavy network demands for memory, advanced processing,
reliability and security were product issues four years ago and still
are. In contrast, planning for Windows 95 was geared to satisfy needs
for 32bit and legacy software support. This was and continues to be an
important issue for desktop users with limited installed hardware.

But! All of this changed in a relatively short time and for at least two
important reasons: The decreasing cost of hardware and the emergence of
the Internet with its rapid exchange of highly specialized computer and
related information. As a result, Windows95 users were motivated to
upgrade their hardware so that migration to NT was not the huge leap
originally contemplated. The flourishing of the Internet has
fundamentally changed how sophisticated computer information is
exchanged and disseminated. The newly available desk top search engine
bots take this phenomena even a step further. WindoWatch suggested (*1)
recently that the Internet is potentially the computer appliance while
Byte Magazine has referred to the Internet as,-the computer. "

In any case, the Internet, email and web pages have become an every day
fact of life for many and for quite some time. Those of us coming from
academic and defense establishment environments who saw the early
Internet beginnings never thought that this was the genesis of main
stream computing. When Microsoft woke up to this new reality it found a
culture of very independent artisans receptive to new ideas, and
functioning within a very open if noisy environment.

It also found a counter culture where product on the Internet is free or
almost free. Coupled with the steady drop of the cost of hardware, as
IBM, an earlier Microsoft competitor discovered, lots of garage
enterprises had the talent to create innovation. And as the hardware
industry has learned painfully, standardization of components makes my
homebrew Pentium running an NT 4.0 server not very difficult to
construct or to upgrade.


Tinkering with Code: Depending upon clout or budget, computer users at
various skill levels have been customizing their software from the days
of the autoexec.bat and the config.sys. I hear Microsoft defenders
beginning to use language like bootleg and license violation as it
relates to this NT controversy but have never whispered a word
heretofore, as it relates to tinkering with other OS configurations. Do
I need a separate license to customize or create dual or triple Win or
System.inis for quite different functions. Microsoft made it very clear
that it would not support changes of the registry in Windows95 but many
of us do. It was never said that this represented illegal practice. I,
for one, would welcome a shareware routine to alter the registry on my
'95 boxes to make the complete re-installation of all resident
applications no longer a necessity when opting for NT. Presently dual
booting is the recommended solution although not an option for me. If I
were able to create such an alternative for myself, would I be in
violation of my license?

At the time of the 4.0 release, users were told that the two registries
were so different and structurally incompatible that it was an
impossible upgrading task. Anyone who has thought about this for more
than a few minutes knows that assertion is not just over stated but
apparently untrue. For whatever the reasons the `95 upgrade is a low
priority for Microsoft planners and will not be made available for `95
users wanting to upgrade to NT4 until late `97 or early `98. Too late
for my time table and perhaps too late for others as well.


The Ethics of Big Guy Practices: The Big Guys in my world of Intel
microprocessors were IBM, Novell, Microsoft, Intel, Lotus, and then of
course there is Apple. The customers of the Big Guys are even Bigger
Guys! Bigger Guys like the government, banks, insurance companies,
financial institutions, and utilities write their own ticket when they
purchase software, -at least they think they do. These are the plum
accounts of main frame purchases, mega hardware and network
installations, dumb terminals, zillions of licenses, and seminar
training. The corporate model, at least in the early days, honestly
required TA (technical assistance) in order to make the obtuse
technology useable. There has developed a paternalistic tradition where
the Big Guys tell the Bigger Guys what they need to buy. Microsoft has
successfully become the biggest Big Guy and has already achieved the
status of becoming a Bigger Guy in its own right. That's how business is
conducted not just in the USA but around the world.

What made Microsoft a Big Guy were not enterprise customers but rather
small and medium size business where MS specialized in operating system
software. As hardware costs began to decline, more and more individuals
purchased computers for their own use, and the MS star began to rise.
Very powerful desktop computers were coming to market at a time when big
business was consolidating and redefining their computer needs.
Ultimately this trend reduced the demand for Bigger Guy services. On the
other hand Microsoft was providing reasonably priced and quality
software for their, (and it is theirs) rapidly expanding operating
system market. It seems to me that here lies the dilemma. Can Microsoft
maintain their efforts to develop and increase their enterprise business
while keeping happy their traditional but much smaller and less
technologically demanding customer base? MS has the entrepreneurial
right to design software for whatever market where they perceive a
demand and to price it accordingly. However, you as an individual or
small business don't have to like these artificial marketing standards.

As the NT controversy emerged so have accusations that Microsoft has
short changed its customers primarily around the question of duplicate
kernels used in both workstation and NT server. What is being discussed
are perceptions of truth which in reality turn upon the class of
customer you are. If you are a developer like O'Reilly with a
substantial investment in programming resources I would guess you would
be more than a bit angry at having WebSite's rosy future diminished. If
you are using workstation from home or home office you have no beef in
my view. If you've paid a lot of money for server software and you see
lesser licensees making hay with essentially cheaper workstation
installations having the same functions, you might be furious at such
sloppiness from a major developer.

In terms of the O'Reilly beef, I don't know how unusual it is for
primary software houses to change signals on developers using their
product. I would guess that this event does not represent a first as
these things go. Obviously concessions are made to good and loyal
customers, all a legitimate part of business dealings. Bottom line: How
often does a software house distribute their own software on the same CD
that effectively cripples their competitors' offering as in the case of
WebSite?

In terms of server customers, Microsoft has bundled management tools
which, it is said, are reasonably priced and which function seamlessly
and with stability. I really don't think lack of faith accusations work
here at all. Nonetheless the O'Reilly finding has certainly grabbed the
attention of those of us who are drawn to the ins and outs of operating
systems. Further O'Reilly's award winning WebSite server viability
depends upon the open incoming IP connections available in prior
workstation versions. Not reassuring when one is in direct competition
with a software giant!


What Happens Now: It must be said, given this articulated puzzle that
there are many fine Windows programmers who might find themselves
professionally challenged and attempt to replicate the O'Reilly steps to
create a conversion utility. Not a boot legged copy, because O'Reilly
will sit on theirs, but a unique though similar approach for solving the
same problem. Call it re-engineering, tinkering, or tuning one's system.
Obviously not rocket science if you're comfortable with the registry
database or, in fact, particularly unusual within the software industry.
It has been whispered more than once that the big guys have been guilty
of re-engineering code originally designed by small but independent
software developers!

For the short term the combatants will cool it and probably should.
However, the basic fight, over unilateral control of software standards
and development, which the O'Reilly and Netscape fracas underscore, is
not going to go away any time soon. If Internetters are forced to use
developer selected software, by implication the developer's own, with
the developer employing either contradicting license conditions or code
manipulation, users are going to react negatively and actively support
legal options. There have been recent rumblings relating to browser
software which do exactly that.

But that, my friends, is an article for another day.

                    (*1) Is the Future Almost Now? by Lois B. Laulicht;
                         WindoWatch Jan 1996, Vol.2 No.1



                       ...........ww...........
Lois Laulicht is the Editor Publisher of WindoWatch.




   ww page 11
   Space Travel
  


                             Stellar Alice
                  Copyright 1996 by Peter Neuendorffer


I heard it from Alice, my friend the inventor! She is working on an idea
for interstellar travel. She feels that the answer is to place a theme
park in deep space and people will find a way to get to it. She is also
somewhat discouraged about the dwindling species in our environment and
the ultimate effect on the food chain, necessitating colonization of
space sooner than we are ready for it.

I pointed out to her that deep space was probably uninhabitable, unless
you can live in an environment of hydrogen. She pointed out that all we
need is to bring some plants along and we will have oxygen. But what
about carbon, I asked? She says that if people bring a lot of pencils
along that things will all adjust properly. Whatever else is needed can
be grown as necessary.

I asked her if she had heard about the new idea of 1 hr. travel around
the earth by going into space briefly. She says she thinks this is great
but questioned whether the tickets might be a little too expensive for
most people. However, she says she still thinks if people want to go
somewhere badly enough, they will find a way to get there.

Positive thinking goes a long way toward one's travel plans, she added.
The trick is to ignore bills, and buy the ticket. I asked her what type
of travel would be interstellar, and she said, "The longest journey
starts with a single step." That's a lot of steps, if you ask me. She
says the models are encouraging and a recent market survey shows many
people would enjoy a long trip to anywhere. This all reminds me of a 3D
cereal box comic book of my childhood wherein Donald Duck travels by
rocket to the land of potatoes.


                       ...........ww...........
Peter Neuendorffer is the creator of my friend Alice and her many
adventures and pronouncements. He is also a Windows programmer and a
regular WindoWatch contributor. His homepage can be seen at
http://www.users.channel1.com/petern



   ww page 12
   Internet Humor
  


Signs of the Times:

  A woman at our interactive advertising agency recently returned from
  her maternity leave and sent the following e-mail:

    Whoever used the milk in the small plastic container that was in
    the refrigerator yesterday, please do NOT own up to it. I would
    find it forever after difficult to meet your gaze across a
    cafeteria table whilst having a discussion about java applets or
    brand identity. Just be aware that that milk was EXPRESSLY for my
    son if you get my drift. I will label these things from now on,
    but if you found your coffee tasted just a little bit special, you
    might think of calling your mom and telling her you love her.


MURPHY'S LAWS ON WORK

  A pat on the back is only a few centimeters from a kick in the pants.

  Don't be irreplaceable, if you can't be replaced, you can't be
  promoted.

  You can go anywhere you want if you look serious and carry a clipboard.

  Eat one live toad the first thing in the morning and nothing worse will
  happen to you the rest of the day.

  Never ask two questions in a business letter. The reply will discuss
  the one you are least interested in, and say nothing about the other.

  When the bosses talk about improving productivity, they are never
  talking about themselves.

  If at first you don't succeed, try again. Then quit. No use being a
  silly fool about it.

  There will always be beer cans rolling on the floor of your car when
  the boss asks for a ride home from the office.

  Mother said there would be days like this, but she never said there
  would be so many.

  Never delay the ending of a meeting or the beginning of a cocktail hour.

  To err is human, to forgive is not company policy.

  Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn't the work he is
  supposed to be doing.

  Important letters that contain no errors will develop errors in the
  mail.

  The last person that quit or was fired will be the one held responsible
  for everything that goes wrong - until the next person quits or is
  fired.



   ww page 13
   WordPerfect 7.0                              The Corel Suite   Part I
  


                             Welcome Back!
                    Copyright 1996 by Frank McGowan


In the beginning was the... WordPerfect? Well, maybe the first was
WordStar, or some other pioneer, but in terms of dominance, the early
champion was WordPerfect. It stood astride the word processing world
like a Colossus. Only in recent years has the Microsoft juggernaut
overtaken the old champ, relegating it to a runner-up position in the
field. And that's too bad. There's still a lot of life in the old boy,
as I discovered when I started looking into the latest iteration,
Version 7.0 for Windows 95.

Most of us buy a word processor because we need to (surprise) process
words. In the old days, these software applications were called text
processors. Just when the differentiation between words and text was
defined, or by whom, is a mystery probably not worth solving. I suspect
it has something to do with ASCII vs. formatted text, but I'll leave
that to the historians. In the meantime, in real life, the question of
which word processor to buy is certainly not academic. In some ways,
it's probably determined by early upbringing or conditioning, much as
there are Ford drivers and Chevy drivers.

My orientation is towards Word. My wife's is towards WordPerfect. The
memories are still fresh of her struggle to master the complexities of
the DOS version, with its function keys, Ctrl, Alt, and Shift keys, and
their bewildering combinations. It amazed me that anyone could have the
patience or brainpower to figure all this out, much less use it on a
daily basis. My admiration for her mental prowess, already high, went up
exponentially.

By the time I entered the fray, Windows was here and DOS was,
thankfully, fading into the background. I got started on Word, and never
looked elsewhere, so my review of V7 WordPerfect must necessarily have
that slant. Much of what I marvel at in the following paragraphs will
probably strike veteran WordPerfectionists as old hat, but to me it's
new and thrilling, well, a little at least. So bear with me, as I plunge
into (for me) uncharted waters. I'll start with the first thing I
confronted, namely...


User Documentation

I may be atypical in this regard, or it may be the result of my time
spent as a technical writer, but I believe user documentation is the
window (no pun intended) into a software program, and has a profound
effect on a user's experience with a program. Lousy documentation has
been the undoing of many an excellent software product. For the most
part, WordPerfect's documentation creates a positive impression. Kudos
to the writers, editors and production staff (and their management).

As with most applications, WordPerfect's user documentation takes two
forms: paper (hard copy) and electronic (Help). Try as we might, we
still haven't reached that long-sought paperless society.


Hard Copy

The hard copy version, the user manual, is neatly put together, laid out
well and written clearly and simply. Key points are easy to spot on the
well-designed pages, and the diction is directed at a literate adult of
normal intelligence. The book's written in second-person, active voice,
according to the dictates of good technical writing. The index is
complete without being overstuffed, so things are easy to find.

Naturally, I can't let it go without a little fault-finding. On page 45,
in the description of Typeover, the word proceeding is used incorrectly
in place of preceding ; but even if the writer/editor had gotten the
right word, the meaning of the sentence would be wrong, since the text
that's replace by Typeover is that which follows, not that which
precedes. I am also disturbed by the use of un as the all-purpose
negation device, so when I found unmark on page 52 the editor in me
bristled. Surely a professional writer shouldn't be too hard-pressed to
come up with a better word, clear , for one. But then, I find the use of
Unfreeze in Excel appalling too, so I guess that makes me an
equal-opportunity carper.


Help

WordPerfect's on-line documentation is very comprehensive indeed!
Besides the list of Help topics and contents, there's a How Do I feature
which invokes a WordPerfect expert, or wizard if you prefer, that takes
you through a hand-holding process for whatever it is that has you
baffled.

I was also impressed by the availability of SGML, and the care taken to
include it in Help as a separate topic. I'm not sure what I'd do with
it, not being an SGML user, but I'm sure there are many of you out there
who can and will put it to good use.


Features

There are a lot of good things in WordPerfect 7.0, including some clever
tools that should make your life as a wordsmith easier.


Timed Backup

From the perspective of a Word person, like myself, it wasn't obvious
where I would find the Autosave feature. Thankfully, the manual's index
led me to Timed Backup, which is what it's called in Word-Perfect. It's
there by default, and is set to spring into action every ten minutes, a
la Word. So, except for the name, it's still a rose, and smells as
sweet. You can, of course, control the time between saves. If you're
super-paranoid about losing work, you can reduce it from ten to, say,
five, which will ensure that you lose no more than five minutes' worth
of editing. The problem is that while the save is in progress, you can't
work on the file, so being interrupted every five minutes can become
annoying and inefficient, especially when the file is large, and, just
to compound the problem, you're saving to diskette.


Formatting

I really like the feature that lets you control paragraph formatting
directly from the work screen, rather than forcing you to enter via the
Format menu (or restrict you to a few buttons on the toolbar). By
clicking on the symbol in the margin next to the paragraph you access a
set of formatting choices, including indentation, alignment, bullets,
numbering, fonts, etc. And, having set up a format, you can save it with
its own name. Neat.


Speller

Like Word 7.0, WordPerfect 7.0 underlines typos as they occur, so you
can fix them as you go. You can turn this off it you find it
distracting, by going into the Tools menu and turning off the "Spell As
You Go" feature.

If you prefer to wait and get 'em in batch mode, the Spell program is
available. Like Word's, the Spell program flags text that doesn't match
the contents of its dictionary and provides a list of replacements.
Sometimes, these are a bit odd and make you wonder what the implementors
had in mind, such as suggesting "Opencast" as a replacement for a
misspelled "Appearances." Where in the world did that come from? And
wouldn't it be logical to accept WordPerfect's tool names? In which
case, QuickCorrect wouldn't be flagged as a typo. Spell checking is
turned on automatically, but you can override this by selecting an
option from the Tools menu. You can also ask that the program to
announce a misspelled word by beeping! I don't know about you, but I
already have enough extraneous noise around me to want to use this
option.


QuickCorrect

This is what the automatic correction feature is called, and it works
much like Autocorrect. Again, I can't let it go by without picking a few
nits, such as including "acomodate," but not the more popular
"accomodate." One automatic fix to be aware of is that any word
following a period, or other sentence terminator is automatically given
an initial cap. So, if you include an abbreviation, such as "etc." in
the middle of a sentence, the next word will be capitalized. Not a big
deal, but something to be aware of.


Address Book

This goes hand-in-hand with the emphasis on connectivity that's being
stressed in so many application programs. WordPerfect 7.0 includes the
ability to create a list of addresses you can use to send your documents
via Email or Internet. It's a nifty feature, with lots of flexibility,
so you can tailor the addresses as you wish. You can create several,
each dedicated to a particular group of addressees with common
interests. You can also have the program dial a phone number for you,
right from the Address book.


Undo/Redo

I thought Word had reached the ultimate pinnacle here, with 100 levels
of Undo, but WordPerfect 7.0 really makes it hard to go too far wrong:
you can undo the last 300 actions you've taken! While this may be
reassuring to some, I think we may have reached the point of diminishing
returns in this regard. It would be like setting up a directory for
every file on your disk. After you've undone 300 actions, you're
probably at the point of retyping the whole file. And, you should
probably consider getting into a different line of work.


Toolbars

The standard toolbar contains some buttons we Worders have gotten used
to finding on the Formatting toolbar (no problem there). Also, what Word
calls the Formatting toolbar is called the Power Bar, which makes it
sound like a high-energy snack food.


Table Creation

This is an area where WordPerfect 7.0 really shines. There's not enough
space to enumerate all the terrific features included in creating and
formatting tables, but for starters, you can: format individual cells by
clicking on a button that appears within each cell when it's selected;
click on a QuickSum option to add numbers in columns (much like the
Formula option in Word, but much faster); specify borders in an
astonishing number of formats, for each cell or for the entire table;
specify a dizzying array of text alignment within cells (both in
vertical and horizontal alignment and rotation of text within a cell);
put in diagonal lines; and on and on it goes! I was extremely impressed
with the Table feature, but I do have to wonder whether once again
things have been taken to extremes. All these bells and whistles seem a
little overdone. Still, I suppose you can't have too much of a good
thing.


Summary

With WordPerfect 7.0, Corel has made a bold move into continuing the
progression from pure word processing to word processor as desktop
publishing tool. I was dazzled by the power and flexibility of this
program, and anticipate that Microsoft will include some similar
features in the next release of Word.

Now, if they've done the same with the other programs in their suite,
they're in position to give Microsoft Office a serious run for its
money. Tune in next month.


                       ...........ww...........
Frank McGowan has become the Swami of Software suites! In his next life
I doubt if he will ever touch these again. In this life, however, he is
a teacher, a science writer, and a computer consultant as well as a
regular WindoWatch contributor



   ww page 14
   What's Really New?
  


                      Reflections of a ModemJunkie

                   Copyright 1996 by Leonard Grossman



Computers are amazing. Every day we are impressed by the number of
things we can do with computers that we simply couldn't do before.

For example:

Wait a minute. That next sentence should come easily. Each day there are
stories in the newspapers about the computer industry. The stock markets
follow closely the latest news in the browser wars or chip development.
Yet, finding something really new eludes us.

There was a story in the New York Times the other day about a small
company on the east coast that was proving invaluable in sorting out
claims of various purported eye witnesses to the TWA Flight 800
disaster. According to this story, there is a gap in the information
provided by Air Traffic Control and by the flight crew itself during the
last few minutes of a flight as the crews prepare to land and the final
runway decisions are made. Because of these delays, ground crews could
be unable to prepare for the actual landings and support services could
be severely delayed.

However, it appears that this small firm has found an answer using
information provided by transponders on each plane which are required by
the FAA. By using computers, it is able to use a form of triangulation
to identify each plane and give ground crews much more accurate
information as to the location of each plane and to also provide much
more accurate estimates of actual landing times than is available from
other sources. In the case of the TWA crash the data provided precise
information as to when the engines on Flight 800 ceased operation, while
conventional radar continued to show the path of the jet, even after the
explosion.

In addition this ability proved particularly useful in analyzing eye
witness information surrounding the crash of TWA Flight 800. By
reviewing its records, the firm was able to determine the precise
position and path of each plane in the area at the time of the crash.
Using this information, crash investigators were able to evaluate the
quality of the eye witness information provided by crews and passengers
in the vicinity at the time.

This information is recorded at a number of airports around the country
and except for the firms, like United, which have contracted for the
information, few people are aware that such records are kept. The firm
has become a silent monitor for a number of airports around the country.
This time, the information they quietly stored was available for a quite
unintended and unexpected purpose.

How amazing I thought. Where would we be without computers? Then I read
Snow Falling on Cedars the magnificent novel I referred to in last
month's column. In that novel, a young Japanese-American is accused of a
maritime murder. The prosecutor has everything: motive, opportunity,
weapon. Everything but a witness to the act itself. The reader knows
something isn't right. But in the face of such overwhelming
circumstantial evidence, how can this young man possibly be acquitted?
The novelist carefully develops the character of the major figures. The
reader doesn't want to believe that the young man is guilty. Yet the
overwhelming evidence seems to convict him. If only there were some
independent evidence to corroborate or contradict the circumstantial
evidence.

Well (I hope I am not ruining this book for anyone; it's been out in
paper for years), there was a silent witness that night too.

It turns out that at a lonely lighthouse on this island off Puget Sound,
a Coast Guard employee regularly made a manual log of the soundings
made that foggy night. The logs would reveal just which boats were in
the ship channel that night and how close to one another they passed.

One way or another they would reveal the truth.

No one ever looked at those notes. They were just silently filed away.
At the last minute, a major character in the novel discovers these logs
and presents them to the court. Compared to the sophisticated
transponders and computer analysis used in the crash of Flight 800,
these manual logs were decidedly low tech. But the technique was
essentially quite similar. When I read the novel, I had a strange sense
of deja vu. I immediately understood the technique being described. At
first I didn't realize why. Then I remembered the New York Times story.

Unfortunately, all of our modern technology hasn't provided the answers
to the crash of Flight 800, at least not as of this writing. But it is
comforting to know that there is truly nothing new under the sun.


                       ...........ww...........
Leonard Grossman in an attorney who works for the government. He is a
WindoWatch regular and has been contributing "Reflections" for some
time. Leonard's home page was chosen as a "Best o'
comp.infosystems.www.announce" site during April 1996. He is also
president of his local user group. Comments can be sent to
grossman@mcs.com or leonard.grossman@syslink.mcs.com




   ww page 15
   PGP and Beyond                         The Ongoing Encryption Debate
  

    [Late in the legislative session both the House and Senate heard
    testimony  on  issues  of  encryption  legislation.  This debate
    promises to heat up immediately after the election no matter who
    takes  the  White  House.  The  following  testimony  from  Phil
    Zimmerman lays out the more important arguments.]



   Testimony of Philip R. Zimmermann to the Subcommittee on Science,
   Technology, and Space of the US Senate Committee on Commerce,
   Science, and Transportation 26 June 1996:

Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, my name is Philip Zimmermann,
and I'm Chairman and Chief Technology Officer for PGP Inc, a
newly-formed company that provides cryptographic products.

I'm here to talk to you today about S.1726 and the need to change US
export control policy for cryptographic software. I want to thank you
for the opportunity to be here to speak in favor of this bill.

I'm the creator of PGP (Pretty Good Privacy), a public-key encryption
software package for the protection of electronic mail. Since PGP was
published domestically as freeware in June of 1991, it has spread
organically all over the world, and has since become the de facto
worldwide standard for encryption of E-mail, winning numerous industry
awards along the way. For three years I was the target of a criminal
investigation by the US Customs Service, who assumed that laws were
broken when PGP spread outside the US.

That investigation was closed without indictment in January 1996.

Computers were developed in secret back in World War II mainly to break
codes. Ordinary people did not have access to computers, because they
were few in number and too expensive. Some people postulated that there
would never be a need for more than half a dozen computers in the
country, and assumed that ordinary people would never have a need for
computers. Some of the government's attitude toward cryptography today
were formed in that period, and mirrors the old attitudes toward
computers. Why would ordinary people need to have access to good
cryptography?

In addition to the limited availability of computers, another problem
with cryptography in those days was that cryptographic keys had to be
distributed over secure channels so that both parties could send
encrypted traffic over insecure channels.

Governments solved that problem by dispatching key couriers with
satchels handcuffed to their wrists. Governments could afford to send
guys like these to their embassies overseas. But the great masses of
ordinary people would never have access to practical cryptography if
keys had to be distributed this way. No matter how cheap and powerful
personal computers might someday become, you just can't send the keys
electronically without the risk of interception. This widened the
feasibility gap between government and personal access to cryptography.

Today, we live in a new world that has had two major breakthroughs that
have an impact on this state of affairs. The first is the coming of the
personal computer and the information age. The second breakthrough is
public-key cryptography.

With the first breakthrough comes cheap ubiquitous personal computers,
modems, FAX machines, the Internet, E-mail, the World-Wide Web, digital
cellular phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), wireless digital
networks, ISDN, cable TV, and the data superhighway. This information
revolution is catalyzing the emergence of a global economy.

But this renaissance in electronic digital communication brings with it
a disturbing erosion of our privacy. In the past, if the government
wanted to violate the privacy of ordinary citizens, it had to expend a
certain amount of effort to intercept and steam open and read paper
mail, and listen to and possibly transcribe spoken telephone
conversation. This is analogous to catching fish with a hook and a line,
one fish at a time. Fortunately for freedom and democracy, this kind of
labor-intensive monitoring is not practical on a large scale.

Today, electronic mail is gradually replacing conventional paper mail,
and is soon to be the norm for everyone, not the novelty it is today.
Unlike paper mail, E-mail messages are just too easy to intercept and
scan for interesting keywords. This can be done easily, routinely,
automatically, and undetectably on a grand scale. This is analogous to
driftnet fishing -- making a quantitative and qualitative Orwellian
difference to the health of democracy.

The second breakthrough came in the late 1970s with the mathematics of
public key cryptography. This allows people to communicate securely and
conveniently with people they've never met, with no prior exchange of
keys over secure channels. No more special key couriers with black bags.
This, coupled with the trappings of the information age, means the
great masses of people can at last use cryptography. This new technology
also provides digital signatures to authenticate transactions and
messages, and allows for digital money, with all the implications that
has for an electronic digital economy.

This convergence of technology -- cheap ubiquitous PCs, modems, FAX,
digital phones, information superhighways, et cetera -- is all part of
the information revolution. Encryption is just simple arithmetic to
all this digital hardware. All these devices will be using encryption.
The rest of the world uses it, and they laugh at the US because we are
railing against nature, trying to stop it. Trying to stop this is like
trying to legislate the tides and the weather. It's like the buggy whip
manufacturers trying to stop the cars -- even with the NSA and the FBI
on their side, it's still impossible. The information revolution is good
for democracy -- good for a free market and trade. It contributed to the
fall of the Soviet empire. They couldn't stop it either.

Today, every off-the-shelf multimedia PC can become a secure voice
telephone, through the use of freely available software such as PGPfone.
When you combine that with the strong political will that exists in the
American people to have their privacy, it's going to require extreme
measures to control this technology. What does this mean for the
government's Clipper chip and key escrow systems?

Like every new technology, this comes at some cost. Cars pollute the air
and cause traffic jams. Cryptography can help criminals hide their
activities. People in the law enforcement and intelligence communities
are going to look at this only in their own terms. But even with these
costs, we still can't stop this from happening in a free market global
economy. Most people I talk to outside of government feel that the net
result of providing privacy will be positive.

Law enforcement and intelligence interests in the government have
attempted many times to suppress the availability of strong domestic
encryption technology.

In 1991, Senate Bill 266 included a non-binding resolution, which if it
had become real law, would have forced manufacturers of secure
communications equipment to insert special "trap doors" in their
products, so that the government could read anyone's encrypted messages.
Before that measure was defeated, I wrote and released Pretty Good
Privacy. I did it because I wanted cryptography to be made available to
the American public before it became illegal to use it. I gave it away
for free so that it would achieve wide dispersal, to inoculate the body
politic.

The 1994 Digital Telephony bill mandated that phone companies install
remote wiretapping ports into their central office digital switches,
creating a new technology infrastructure for "point-and-click"
wiretapping, so that federal agents no longer have to go out and attach
alligator clips to phone lines. Now they'll be able to sit in their
headquarters in Washington and listen in to your phone calls. Of course,
the law still requires a court order for a wiretap. But while technology
infrastructures tend to persist for generations, laws and policies can
change overnight.

Once a communications infrastructure optimized for surveillance becomes
entrenched, a shift in political conditions may lead to abuse of this
new-found power. Political conditions may shift with the election of a
new government, or perhaps more abruptly from the bombing of a Federal
building.

A year after the 1994 Digital Telephony bill passed, the FBI disclosed
plans to require the phone companies to build into their infrastructure
the capacity to simultaneously wiretap one percent of all phone calls in
all major US cities. This would represent more than a thousandfold
increase over previous levels in the number of phones that could be
wiretapped. In previous years, there were only about 1000 court-ordered
wiretaps in the US per year, at the federal, state, and local levels
combined. It's hard to see how the government could even employ enough
judges to sign enough wiretap orders to wiretap 1% of all our phone
calls, much less hire enough federal agents to sit and listen to all
that traffic in real time. The only plausible way of processing that
amount of traffic is a massive Orwellian application of automated voice
recognition technology to sift through it all, searching for interesting
keywords or searching for a particular speaker's voice. If the
government doesn't find the target in the first 1% sample, the wiretaps
can be shifted over to a different 1% until the target is found, or
until everyone's phone line has been checked for subversive traffic. The
FBI says they need this capacity to plan for the future. This plan
sparked such outrage that it was defeated in Congress, at least this
time around, in 1995. But the mere fact that the FBI even asked for
these broad powers is revealing of their agenda. And the defeat of this
plan isn't so reassuring when you consider that the 1994 Digital
Telephony bill was also defeated the first time it was introduced, in
1993.

Advances in technology will not permit the maintenance of the status
quo, as far as privacy is concerned. The status quo is unstable. If we
do nothing, new technologies will give the government new automatic
surveillance capabilities that Stalin could never have dreamed of. The
only way to hold the line on privacy in the information age is strong
cryptography. Cryptography strong enough to keep out major governments.

The government has a track record that does not inspire confidence that
they will never abuse our civil liberties. The FBI's COINTELPRO program
targeted groups that opposed government policies. They spied on the
anti-war movement and the civil rights movement. They wiretapped Martin
Luther King's phone. Nixon had his enemies list. And then there was the
Watergate mess. The War on Drugs has given America the world's largest
per-capita incarceration rate in the world, a distinction formerly held
by South Africa, before we surpassed them during the eighties even when
apartheid was in full swing. Recently, we've seen the images and sounds
of the Rodney King beatings, Detective Mark Fuhrman's tapes boasting of
police abuses, and the disturbing events of the Ruby Ridge case. And now
Congress and the Clinton administration seem intent on passing laws
curtailing our civil liberties on the Internet. At no time in the past
century has public distrust of the government been so broadly
distributed across the political spectrum, as it is today.

The Clinton Administration seems to be attempting to deploy and entrench
a communications infrastructure that would deny the citizenry the
ability to protect its privacy. This is unsettling because in a
democracy, it is possible for bad people to occasionally get elected--
sometimes very bad people. Normally, a well-functioning democracy has
ways to remove these people from power. But the wrong technology
infrastructure could allow such a future government to watch every move
anyone makes to oppose it. It could very well be the last government we
ever elect.

When making public policy decisions about new technologies for the
government, I think one should ask oneself which technologies would best
strengthen the hand of a police state. Then, do not allow the government
to deploy those technologies. This is simply a matter of good civic
hygiene.

In addition to the human rights arguments, there are technological
reasons why the current export control regime makes no sense anymore.

There has been considerable debate about allowing the export of
implementations of the full 56-bit Data Encryption Standard (DES). At an
academic cryptography conference in 1993, Michael Wiener of Northern
Telecom in Ottawa presented a paper on how to crack the DES with a
special machine. He has fully designed and tested a chip that guesses
DES keys at high speed until it finds the right one.

Although he has refrained from building the real chips so far, he can
get these chips manufactured for $10.50 each, and can build 57000 of
them into a special machine for $1 million that can try every DES key in
7 hours, averaging a solution in 3.5 hours. $1 million can be hidden in
the budget of many companies. For $10 million, it takes 21 minutes to
crack, and for $100 million, just two minutes. That's full 56-bit DES,
cracked in just two minutes.

I'm sure the NSA can do it in seconds, with their budget. This means
that DES is now effectively dead for purposes of serious data security
applications. If Congress acts now to enable the export of full DES
products, it will be a day late and a dollar short.

Knowledge of cryptography is becoming so widespread, that export
controls are no longer effective at controlling the spread of this
technology. People everywhere can and do write good cryptographic
software, and we import it here but cannot export it, to the detriment
of our indigenous software industry.

I wrote PGP from information in the open literature, putting it into a
convenient package that everyone can use in a desktop or palmtop
computer. Then I gave it away for free, for the good of democracy. This
could have popped up anywhere and spread. Other people could have and
would have done it. And are doing it. Again and again. All over the
planet. This technology belongs to everybody.

PGP has spread like a prairie fire, fanned by countless people who
fervently want their privacy restored in the information age.

Today, human rights organizations are using PGP to protect their people
overseas. Amnesty International uses it. The human rights group in the
American Association for the Advancement of Science uses it. It is used
to protect witnesses who report human rights abuses in the Balkans, in
Burma, in Guatemala, in Tibet.

Some Americans don't understand why I should be this concerned about the
power of government. But talking to people in Eastern Europe, you don't
have to explain it to them. They already get it-- and they don't
understand why we don't.

I want to read you a quote from some E-mail I got in October 1993 from
someone in Latvia, on the day that Boris Yeltsin was shelling his
Parliament building:

"Phil I wish you to know: let it never be, but if dictatorship takes
over Russia your PGP is widespread from Baltic to Far East now and will
help democratic people if necessary.

Thanks."

Copyright 1996 Pretty Good Privacy, Inc., All Rights Reserved
PGP and Pretty Good are registered trademarks of PGP, Inc.
Pretty Good Privacy is a trademark of PGP, Inc.

Pretty Good Privacy, Inc.
555 Twin Dolphin Dr., Suite 570
Redwood Shores, CA 94065-2102
tel: (415) 631-1747
fax: (415) 631-0599
http://www.pgp.com



   ww page 16
   Getting Your Feet Wet!                             Delphi Programming
  


                   Writing a First Program in Delphi
                  Copyright 1996 by Peter Neuendorffer


In the past I've written about the theory of programming. This article
is meant to be a hands on look at how to write a simple Windows program
in Delphi. You can rapidly add controls to your Window and give them
processing by double-clicking the controls and writing code. You will
need a working copy of Delphi 1.0 and the ability to use the help
system.

In Delphi, when you are writing code, if you are using a procedure or
variable that is part of the language library, you can position the
cursor on the word and type F1.

Here is a description of how to create a simple program using Delphi.
Our problem is to maintain a short list of words in alphabetical order.
Before firing up Delphi, set up a directory on your hard drive for this
project. Then bring up Delphi, and choose File/New Project. Form1
appears.

Click on File/Saveas and give your project a name. Specify the new
directory you created. Delphi creates a single standalone .EXE with the
project name + .exe.

There are many things you can do during design time. Often you can
directly see your controls as you add them to the screen. The size and
position of the controls can be changed with the mouse.

We may want to change the name of this form. Whenever referring to the
form, we use it's name. To do this, the name property, and many other
properties of the form may be edited with the Object inspector. Click
once on the form, then press Alt-V-O to get the property editor.

Select color and click on the color for the form. This, like many other
properties, can also be set from within your program. For example, to
change the form's color to Aqua, we would use the line
form1.color:=clAqua;

Windows Controls can be positioned and configured from the main form
screen. The toolbar for controls is at the top - or where ever you drag
it. Double click on the Button control and it will appear on the form.
Put two other buttons on the form as well. Click on the first button
once, then Alt-V-O for the property editor. Change the caption on the
button. If you put an ampersand (&) before any letter in this caption,
that is the accelerator Alt- hot key to activate the control when the
program is running -at runtime.

Drag one button to the top right of the form. Change it's caption to
&Close. Put the second button slightly to the left and below the first.
Change the caption to A&dd. Put the third button at the bottom right.
Change it's caption to &Delete.

We will use two other controls: the edit box and the listbox. Move the
mouse slowly over the toolbar icons to get the help message naming each
control. Position the edit box - this is for user data entry - at the
top left even with the Add button.

Position the listbox at the bottom left. You should have something like

                     Close

       edit box      add

       listbox       delete

Design time is when you are designing your screens, and writing code.
Run time is when the program is actually running.

This program will have two types of input. Adding words by the user
typing in a word in the edit box and clicking on add. Also, selecting a
word in the listbox and clicking on delete. Technically, another input
would be clicking on the Close button to end the program.

Output is adding or deleting words in the listbox. To coordinate this
processing, the main thing we need do is write code in the controls
indicating what to do if the user clicks on each control. I'm assuming
here you left the name of the form as "form1".

Additional processing is associating our word list with a file on disk
so it will display the next time the program is run.


Filling in the code for the button events:

Close button:

Double click on the Close button. This brings up the procedure that will
be run when the CLose button is clicked at the run time of your program.
We say the button has been "fired" when it is clicked. This OnClose
procedure only needs one line: form1.close. Since form1 is the main form
for the program, the program will end when the Close button is clicked.


Properties of Edit box and listbox:

We now need to change one property in the edit box. Alt-V-O to get the
object inspector. Set the maxcharacters to 15. This limits input to 15
characters. We may wish to size the listbox to be big enough for 15
character words. We do this by clicking on the listbox control and
dragging the edges. Select the listbox and go to the object inspector
(Alt-V-O). Select the sorted property and set it to true. That way our
list will be maintained in alphabetical order.


Add button:

This is how the program adds words to the list in the list box. The code
for this button is what processing the program will do on the current
contents of the edit box (the word the user wishes to add.) We need to
validate this data - see if it is acceptable, and prepare it for adding
to the list. This involves trimming off leading and trailing blank
characters - blanks that start or end the edit box contents. Also
converting it to lower case. If the word is not already in the list, we
will add it to the list. All this requires only a few lines of code, but
it does require a subordinate procedure editstring to trim leading and
trailing blanks.

So double click on the Add button to get to the procedure that fires
when the user clicks the Add button. The name of the button may vary
depending on the order you set up the buttons when placing them on the
form.

The code for the add button looks something like this: (Note that when
we put words inside braces, they are comments and are ignored by the
computer.)

  procedure form1.Button1Click(Sender:Object);
    var {the var signals that we are going to declare the variable
           thestring}
      thestring:string;
  {------------------------------------------------------------------}
  {sub} procedure editstring(var thestr:string); {this removes leading
             and trailing blanks and converts the string to lowercase}
    var
       found:boolean; {a true or false variable}
       x:byte; {a counter for the loop}

    Begin
       found:=false;
       for x:=1 to length(thestr) do
         if thestr[x]<>' '  {not a space}  then
            begin
              found:=true;
              thestr:=copy(thestr,x,400);
              break;
            end;
         if not found then thestr:='' {all spaces}
         else
            begin
              for x:=length(thestr) downto 1 do
                if thestr[x]<>' ' {not a space} then
                  begin
                    thestr:=copy(thestr,1,x);
                    break;
                  end;
                thestr:=lowercase(thestr);{convert to lower case}
            end;
  {------------------------------------------------------------------}
    Begin {main part of button click procedure}
       thestring:=edit1.text;
       editstring(thestring);
       if thestring='' then
         exit; {we are not going to add this because it is all blanks}
       if listbox1.items.indexof(thestring)<0 then
         listbox1.items.add(thestr);
    End;
  {------------------------------------------------------------------}


Now what is all that? The main part at the bottom is executed first when
the user clicks the Add button. The contents of the edit control are
copied to our variable thestring using an assignment statement.

The := sign means that "the contents of the variable named thestring are
replaced with the contents of edit1.text" We then call our editstring
procedure to remove leading and trailing blanks. We pass by value the
actual variable thestring to the editstring procedure. If the string is
now empty ('') then we exit without further processing.

Finally, we check that the word is not already in the list. A return in
the indexeof of zero or greater would indicate it is in fact already in
the list, so the final if statement checks for that.

The subordinate editstring procedure looks at the beginning and the end
of the string in a loop. A for x:=1 to 6 loop counts x six times. The
loop would be done 6 times, or until the code calls a "break" to break
out of the loop. The lowercase() conversion comes with the language, so
we do not have to write that.


Delete button:

Here our processing is to delete the current selected item in the list.

This procedure - remember to double click the button to get to the dock
- is much simpler. We need only check that an item in the listbox is
selected so that we do not delete "garbage".

The line is:

   if listbox1.itemindex>=0  {the current selected line starts with zero}
     then
       listbox1.items.delete(listbox1.itemindex);


Restoring and Saving our list to disk:

Click on the form. Now get the object inspector with Alt-V-O. Select
from the bottom EVENTS. We will be filling in code for two events:
OnActivate, and OnClose. It is a safe bet for this program that when and
only when the user starts the program, the OnActivate will trigger.

This event is where we want to read the list from disk. The OnClose
event will trigger when the user ends the program. This is where we will
save the list to disk.

Select each procedure from the event list in the object inspector for
the main form. (Click on the main form and type Alt-V-O and select
events):

    form1.activate code:
          listbox1.items.loadfromfile('myfile.dat');

    form1.close code:
          listbox1.items.savetofile('myfile.dat');


There is one hazardous open end we have left. The first time the program
is run, there will be no file myfile.dat to load. This will cause an
error. One solution is to check first if the file exists. This may not
be the most elegant solution, but this is the one I use.

    form1.activate code:
        var
          fil:file;
          Iocode:integer; {stores the error}
        begin
          Assignfile(fil,'myfile.dat');
          {$I-}  {turn on error checking}
          Reset(fil);
          Iocode:=Ioresult;
          {$I+} {turn off error checking}
          if Iocode<>0  {not found} then
                exit; {get out without loading}
          Closefile(fil);
          listbox1.items.loadfromfile('myfile.dat');
        end;


Running your program

You must compile your program. Select Compile/Compile from the main menu
(Alt-C-C). If all is not correct in your grammar, you may get error
messages. Correct these as needed. The most common one is "unknown
identifier" usually caused by spelling a variable incorrectly, or not
declaring a variable you use (in the var block of the code.)

To run the program from within Delphi, select Run/Run (Alt-R-R).

The big problem about writing this article for me is that a lot of it is
second nature to me. Exploring the help system in Delphi can solve many
of the problems. I also recommend getting books about versions of Turbo
Pascal 6.0-7.0. A large part of the Pascal language is learning how to
"think" in Pascal. A firm foundation in the base language can mean that
you can write your own procedures to solve problems as they arise in the
quest of better programs.


                       ...........ww...........
Peter is the author of a number of Windows shareware programs as well as
being a regular WindoWatch contributing writer. He has the distinction
of being the creator of the ever popular AliceA, a truly unique
character! Peter's homepage is located at
http://www.channel1.com/users/petern and he can be emailed at
petern@channel1.com



   ww page 17
   More on Internet Addiction!
  

                        Contributed by Jon Helis


You know you are addicted to the Internet when:

 * You actually wore a blue ribbon to protest the Communications
   Decency Act.

 * Your bookmark takes 15 minutes to scroll from top to bottom.

 * Your eyeglasses have a web site burned in on them.

 * You refuse to go to a vacation spot with no electricity and no phone
   lines.

 * You finally do take that vacation, but only after buying a cellular
   modem and a laptop.

 * You spend half of the plane trip with your laptop on your lap and
   your child in the overhead compartment.

 * You find yourself typing "com" after every period when using a word
   processor.com

 * You turn off your modem and get this awful empty feeling, just as
   tho' you had just pulled the plug on a loved one.

 * You start introducing yourself as "Jim at I-I-Net dot net dot au."

 * You step out of your room and realize that your parents have moved
   and you don't have a clue when it happened.

 * You turn on your intercom when leaving the room so you can hear if
   new e-mail arrives.

 * All of your friends have an @ in their names.

 * Your dog has it's own home page.

 * You can't call your mother...she doesn't have a modem.

 * You check your mail. It says "no new messages." So you check
   it again.

 * You refer to your age as 3.x. (Or maybe pushing '95?)

 * You have commandeered your teenager's phone line for the net and even
   his friends know not to call on his line anymore.

 * Your phone bill comes to your doorstep in a box.

 * You code your homework in HTML and give your instructor the URL.

 * You don't know what sex three of your closest friends are, because
   they have neutral nicknames and you never bothered to ask.

 * You name your children Eudora, Mozilla and Dotcom.

 * You laugh at people with 2400 baud modems.

 * You move into a new house and decide to Netscape before you landscape.

 * You tell the cab driver you live at
           http://123.elm.street/house/bluetrim.html

 * Your virtual girlfriend finds a new net sweetheart with a larger
   bandwidth.

 * You tell the kids they can't use the computer because "Daddy's got
   work to do" and you don't even have a job.

 * You buy a Captain Kirk chair with a built-in keyboard and mouse!

 * Your wife makes a new rule:  "The computer cannot come to bed".

 * You are so familiar with the WWW that you find the search
   engines useless.

 * You get a tattoo that says "This body best viewed with Netscape 2. +
   or higher."

 * You never have to deal with busy signals when calling your ISP...
   because you never log off.

 * You leave the modem speaker on after connecting because you think
   it sounds like the ocean wind, the perfect soundtrack for "surfing
   the net".

 * Your wife says communication is important in a marriage...so you
   buy another computer and install a second phone line so the two of
   you can chat.

 * As your car crashes through the guardrail on a mountain road,
   your first instinct is to search for the back button.

 * The last time you looked at the clock it was 11:30pm, and in what
   seems only a few seconds later, your sister runs past to catch her
   7am school bus.

 * Your hard drive crashes and you haven't logged on in two hours.
   You start to twitch. You pick up the phone and manually dial your
   ISP's access number. You try to hum to communicate with it.
   You succeed.


Jonathan Helis
Baton Rouge, Louisiana



   ww page 18
   By Way of Introduction: A Friend of a Friend!
  

    [Russ Jensen and I share a good friend in John M. Campbell. They,
    in  turn,  share a passion for  all  things pinball. This doesn't
    make  either  of  them  either  frivolous  or  merely uncommitted
    computer  dilettantes.  Quite  the contrary!  Russ  is getting an
    article   ready  for  us  and  we  thought  you  might  find  his
    relationship to computers as interesting a read as I did.    lbl]


                   RUSS JENSEN'S  COMPUTER HISTORY


I am a retired Electrical Engineer who got my degree from UCLA in 1958
and worked as a civilian employee for the Navy for thirty-six years. I
was always interested in computers and took several computer courses in
college, including machine language programming for the pioneer computer
SWAC (National Bureau Of Standards Western Automatic Computer) which had
been retired to UCLA several years earlier. That machine had a Cathode
Ray Tube memory where data bits were stored as dots on a CRT.

Also during my college years (1954-1958) I was introduced to one of the
earliest personal computers which was used in our Engineering Economics
class by students having to solve an economics problem by creating a
program (using an Interpreter) on it. That computer was the Bendix G-15,
about the size and shape of a refrigerator and used vacuum tube plug-in
modules and a magnetic drum main memory. The Input\Output consisted of a
paper tape reader/punch and an IBM electric typewriter.

After graduating in 1958 I got a job at a Navy missile range in the
Pulse and Digital Branch. There I first worked with another early
personal computer, the IBM 610. That machine was about the size and
shape of a desk, was partly electronic and partly relay, used an IBM
typewriter, of course, for I/O. It was programmed by a punched paper
tape which duplicated itself in order to perform extra passes through
the code; subroutines, such as Trig functions, being programmed on a
removable wired patch board. The 610, incidentally, was not made by the
Computer Division of IBM, but by the Time Clock Division.

A co-worker and I were placed in charge of this machine which was used
as an open shop computer facility where engineers and scientists could
solve problems they were working on. The two of us, as our first junior
engineering project, were asked to design and build an off-line paper
tape punch control unit to use with the IBM 610. The pinball circuit
experience I had as a kid helped in that project. The device we made I
later purchased at a base surplus sale and still have lurking in the
rafters of my garage.

Due to my past experience with the Bendix G-15, I recommended that that
computer later be purchased to replace the IBM 610 as the department's
open shop computer. This was subsequently done and my associate and I
were again in charge of that operation. I was sent to both the machine
language programming and hardware maintenance schools and became an
expert on the machine.

When later a computer was needed to perform radar tracking calculations
on a missile tracking ship, a G-15 was used and went to sea.

Incidentally, I still have several instruction and technical manuals for
both the IBM 610 and Bendix G-15. Also, Bendix Computer Division who
made the G-15 was taken over by the newly formed Control Data
Corporation in the mid-1960's and they produced the machine for a short
time afterwards.

As far as main frame computers at the missile range were concerned, when
I first started working there in 1958 they had a brand new IBM 650 which
stored data using the biquinary number system. This was later replaced
by a 709, using vacuum tubes, and still later by the new transistorized
computer, - the 7090.

They also had a specially built large computer called the RAYDAC. It was
a vacuum tube machine designed especially for the facility by Raytheon
in Massachusetts. That computer had a mercury delay line main memory and
used some very unusual magnetic tape units which had binary coded ink
marks on the tape used for performing fast searches for data. That
computer was dismantled in the early 1960's and our branch used some of
the surplus electronic modules to build other equipment.

At that point in my career my direct involvement with computers came to
an end as my assignments were involved with acceptance testing of
input/output buffering hardware used on ships to interface with on-board
computers. I did, however, witness changes in the UNIVAC military
shipboard computers in the 1970's which used transistorized plug-in
modules and magnetic core memories.

My next direct involvement with computers in my career came in the early
1980's when I volunteered to be trained in computer program maintenance,
again involving UNIVAC shipboard military computers. I learned about
compilers at that time. Also at around the same time I had my first
introduction to a time sharing system called SHARE 7 which ran on a
UNIVAC AN/UYK-7 military computer. We could log onto that system from
various terminals in our offices and access databases or use a word
processor. I also could access time sharing functions on our mainframe
DEC VAX computer.

A few years after that the organization I worked for decided to go to
office automation. First they purchased a slew of Tandy TRS-80's
distributing them around the offices. I attended at that time a course
in VISACALC and was introduced to the wonderful world of spreadsheets. I
also worked with a larger Tandy computer running UNIX.

Sometime later they decided to let a contract for a networked office
automation system. The winning contractor was Hewlett Packard who
provided a host of Vectra (286) personal computers all connected to an
H.P. 3000 minicomputer, one per each department, which were
interconnected to each other. Each department assigned a System Manager
and I was selected as ours.

The system also consisted of standard software to run on the PC's
including a word processor, a spreadsheet, a database, and a graphics
package. An email system was also provided on the HP3000's accessible
from the PC's. My main task was to help the secretaries, administrative
personnel, etc., to learn how to use the system and it's software to
better perform their duties.

After a year or so our department started slowly upgrading the PC's to
386's with Windows, etc.. Well, being only a support person, I had a
little trouble getting a new machine, but I finally convinced the powers
that be that if I was to help people who were using Windows I should
have one myself.

Well, I was given a 386 with Windows, was sent to a one week class, and
soon became an instant Windows expert. Our department also installed a
LAN and our PC's were interfaced with that which led to the elimination
of the HP3000 network. A year or so later I retired from the Federal
Civil Service after we were offered a $25K bonus to do so.


                       ...........ww...........
Among other talents Russ is a well known writer contributing regularly
to pinball magazines.



   ww page 19
   Herb's Art Gallery
  

This month Herb is offering us another video: a biggie, almost a 3.0 Meg
*.avi file. It is available for download on the WindoWatch homepage and
is called FLYBY4.AVI. The download took about twenty minutes in the dead
of the night with very fast T1 connections and a 33.600 modem. The
magazine is showing the very tiny thumbnails, merely a taste of what the
video offers. The video is Herb's best to date and I urge you to get it.





   ww page 20
   The Last Word                                    A WindoWatch Feature
  

                    Copyright 1996 by Ben M. Schorr


We hope he's back for good!

Well, first let me apologize for my three month absence! I received a
very generous offer from a firm in Honolulu, Hawaii to take over their
Information Services Department and decided to leave private practice in
California for the even sunnier shores of Oahu and the excitement and
generous benefits of the corporate environment.

From this side of the table, however, it is even more evident how inept
some vendors seem to be. We've received some rather incredible proposals
so far; some of them from firms that claim expertise yet propose systems
that are obviously doomed to problems from the onset. I can now see how
a lot of companies get themselves into trouble by inexperienced IS
managers who don't spot these flaws. They find themselves sucked in by
low prices and just as suddenly find themselves left holding a solution
that needs to be fixed.

Another thing that I've noticed, and maybe this is true for all IS
people and I just never noticed, is that most of the vendors who pitch
me products seem to have, as the thrust of their presentation, the
primary concern of saving my job. Don't get me wrong, I find that
extremely noble; it's just that I'm trying to find technology that will
help my firm be more profitable and provide better service to our
clients... while most of these vendors are trying to pitch me safe
solutions. Their selling point seems to be, "These choices may not be
the best, but at least they won't get you fired"

Every vendor I meet wants to be my friend. They wants to protect me from
the corporate "black helicopters" that seem to be hovering outside my
office window. Of course, that's just a metaphor; I don't actually HAVE
an office window...and I'm pretty sure they don't let helicopters hover
in the midst of downtown, but that's a whole different column.

My question is: What brought on this sudden paranoia? Could it be that
computers have become too pervasive; that even the average home user has
experienced plugging in a modem and connecting to America OnLine and now
believes that Information Systems is easy? Any system failure or
shortcoming must be the fault of the incompetent IS staff who obviously
aren't very bright because administering Netware couldn't be any harder
than finding your way around AOL?

Maybe it comes back to the vendors. As I said, about half of them
proposed flawed systems and oddly, they were roughly the same group that
said they were worried about saving my job; so go figure! Could it be
that IS managers have bought enough of these flawed systems, and paid
the consequences, so that now they find themselves ever vigilant against
the dangers of the uninformed vendor?

Surely there must be a reason for this fear? Am I so naive as to think
that if I work hard and bring in a solution that is well-suited to the
task and really helps our firm do even better that I'm taking a chance
with my job? It occurs to me that every day I walk in the door I take a
chance on losing my job. Any number of things can happen, some of them
beyond my control that could result in my being fired. So I move boldly
ahead, blind perhaps to the dangers, seeking the Holy Grail of
successful technology. I tell myself that one of these days I'll be the
one featured on the cover of The American Lawyer's Technology Magazine;
Cheshire Cat grin on my face, comfortable slacks, casually posed on a
desk in front of a 17" monitor.

I've always vowed that I never want to be so busy keeping my job that I
don't have time to DO my job. But still, as I flip through my copy of
"The Dilbert Principle" I wonder if all of these who are actually
vendors know something that I don't. It's been a long time since I sat
on this side of the desk, I think to myself, glancing furtively under my
chair for a trap door or the chalk outline of the fellow who had this
job previously. Does today's information system professional really have
to live in constant fear of the pink slip? Has that ALWAYS been the way
it is, or is it a new development? You tell me. E-mail me at
bms@hawaiilawyer.com I'll be in the lounge with the classifieds...

Aloha!


                       ...........ww...........
Ben M. Schorr is the Director of Information Services, for now, for
Damon Key Bocken Leong Kupchak in Honolulu, Hawaii. He is surrounded and
outnumbered by a Netware LAN and Win95 workstations but expects WinNT
Server reinforcements any time now. He can be reached at
bms@hawaiilawyer.com



   ww 

EDITORIAL

Editor:                              Lois B. Laulicht
Contributing Editor:                 Herb Chong
Home Page Editor                     Paul Kinnaly
Ascii Edition Editor                 Lin Sprague

Contributing Writers:                Derek Buchler, John M. Campbell,
                                     Leonard Grossman, Gregg Hommel,
                                     Jerry Laulicht, Frank McGowan,
                                     Peter Neuendorffer, Jack Passarella,
                                     Jim Plumb, Linda Rosenbaum,
                                     Ben Schorr, Paul Williamson


EDITORIAL BOARD                      Herb Chong, Gregg Hommel, Lois
                                     Laulicht, Paul Williamson, Paul
                                     Kinnaly

SUBMISSIONS and REQUESTS

Email:                               editor@windowatch.com
                                     lois.laulicht@channel1.com
                                     Editor: WindoWatch
                                     Valley Head, WV 26294

Submissions remain the intellectual property of the author. Manuscripts
will NOT be returned if not used.

Electronic File Access:        All back issues are available from
                               the WindoWatch homepage. See Back
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                               FTP://206.151.74.157
                               www.shareware.com  Search under the
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                               FTP>coast.net/Simtel/Vendors.html


Comments, letters, and requests can be sent to lois.laulicht@channel1.com
                                               editor@windowatch.com


WindoWatch (c) 1994, 1995, 1996 all rights reserved, is the property of
Lois B. Laulicht and CCC of WV Valley Head, WV 26294


  
  Vol.2 No.8 ww End

