Vol. 20 number 10 December 2003 The newsletter of the Ottawa PC Users' Group Calendar OPCUG General Meeting National Museum of Science and Technology 1867 St. Laurent Blvd. Second Wednesday of each month, 7:30pm Dec 10: Harley Bloom, What's New for the Holidays? Jan 14: Joe Donnelly, Hamera Photo-Objects Feb 12: Corel Smart Graphics Studio and SVG Mar 10: Peter Bauer, CD Mastering and Production Apr 14: Peter Andrews of SoftMap Publishing, Digital Maps Internet SIG (I-SIG) After the OPCUG General Meeting, at the Museum. Orphan SIG After the OPCUG General Meeting, at the Museum. Developers SIG After the OPCUG General Meeting, at the Museum, and occasionally at other locations in the region. Delphi User Group, 8:00 p.m. To Be Announced PIG (or Wing?) SIG, after all the other SIGs, at 10 p.m. Chances "R", 1365 Woodroffe (at Baseline), College Square Please note that unless otherwise noted, SIGs meet at 9:00 p.m. (immediately following the OPCUG General Meeting). ____________________________ Coming Up Harley Bloom of Bloom Microtech in Ottawa is back this season with all that is big and bright for the holidays. Brace yourself as Harley shows you a myriad of items that will have you chanting: "I want that, I NEED that!" over and over again. Your loved ones will be lucky if you even consider anything for them! See you December 10th. ____________________________ December Raffle At the December general meeting, due to the generosity of McAfee Canada, we have a copy of SpamKiller 4.0. This anti- spam program will work with any POP3 or MAPI e-mail account. See this issue of the Ottawa PC News for Alan German's review of the program. Raffle tickets are $1 for one, $2 for three, or $5 for ten. Help keep your membership dues low and take a chance (or 10) on this prize, valued at approximately $40. ____________________________ Orphans' SIG Word from the Interim Coordinator There will be a meeting of the Orphans' SIG following the club's regular monthly meeting on December 10, 2003. OPCUG's orphan computer users are invited to install a CD-RW drive (CD-burner) in the SIG Coordinator's computer. Anyone want to volunteer to be the SIG Coordinator? If not, the interim Coordinator needs to have a burner installed on his machine so we can still have a (very) hands-on session. If you have never taken the cover off your machine, have never pulled a cable off a device, have never installed a new peripheral, or have never configured your machine's BIOS settings, then this session is for you! Seriously though, the Orphans' SIG still needs a permanent coordinator. The group has a list of topics that Orphans need to know about and we are working through this list slowly. There are still lots of issues to cover, and we just need someone to take charge, and identify a knowledgeable OPCUG member who can provide some useful tips on any given topic. Many of the topics still on the list were covered at the recent Beginners' Workshop 2003, so various members of OPCUG's Board of Directors could be cajoled into spicing up their presentation a little and giving it to the Orphans' SIG at a future meeting. So, the Coordinator's job is almost done! Please contact me, or any other member of the Board, if you would like to assist in coordinating this SIG. Alan German ____________________________ Club News Beginners' Workshop a Success by Chris Taylor The OPCUG Beginners' Workshop 2003 was held on November 22nd. It featured 9 sessions given by 6 presenters on everything from basic use of applications to hardware, security and more. The cost was only $30 for those who pre- registered, $35 at the door. And that included a CD-R with all the presentation materials and some software as well as a one-year membership in the OPCUG! We had 84 people pre-register. Four of those who pre- registered were not able to make it and three people who had not pre-registered managed to get seats. About 5 people who had not pre-registered saw the crowds and did not even try to get in. We had a remarkably good level of attendance from people who were not already members of the OPCUG. We now have 56 new members of the OPCUG, the biggest boost in membership in a very long time. Welcome to all you new members. To those who pre-registered, paid their fee, and were unable to attend, please see Mark, our membership chairman, at one of the general meetings to pick up your CD-R. The overall reaction to the workshop was very positive with most attendees finding the sessions valuable, informative and an excellent value. Just a few of the comments: "All workshops were great!", "Would definitely attend other workshops", "All presenters were very knowledgeable and presented well", "You all did a sterling job, and are to be congratulated", and "Well done and very useful and a learning experience". On the negative side, most found the room was quite crowded. Some found the location a bit out of the way. And many found that there was too much information for a single day. The comment sheets included lots of suggestions for future workshops. In any future workshops, I think we will aim for a smaller group, perhaps cutting off registration at 50 or 60 rather than exceeding 80. We will also aim for fewer topics that go into a bit more depth. And we will consider having half-day workshops which will give people a better chance of absorbing the information. Having said all that, I think the Beginners' Workshop 2003 was a great success overall. My thanks to all who helped organize, presented, and attended the workshop! On behalf of the OPCUG, I would like to extend my thanks to Monitor Magazine as well as Elliot Finkelman, host of the Practical Computing Radio Show on CFRA for helping to get out the word about the workshop. Without their assistance, we would not have had nearly as many attendees. A special thanks to Alan German for coming up with the idea of having a beginners' workshop, bringing it to the board of directors and then seeing it through to completion. In closing, I think the most satisfying comment I received was someone who came up to me at the end of the day and said he had learned a lot and hoped that he would be able to pass on what he learned to others. Now that is "Users Helping Users", the OPCUG motto! ____________________________ Product Review SpamKiller by Alan German I may not be the best person to review McAfee's SpamKiller program. I certainly get lots of Spam, but most of it is filtered by my ISP's mail server before it can reach my inbox. So, poor old SpamKiller has to deal with (presumably) the tough stuff that creeps through the initial filtering system. On the other hand, this may well be the situation for many users, so it may not be such a bad real- world test of the software's capabilities. My interest in the program was certainly sparked by the fact that, over time, more and more Spam is squeezing through my ISP's filters, so I need some additional help in trapping unwanted messages. The basic premise for SpamKiller seems reasonable for the purpose. Each day, when I connect to the Internet through my ISP, SpamKiller goes to McAfee's web server and downloads an up-to-date set of mail filters. The program subsequently applies these filters in order to separate all the incoming mail into valid messages and Spam. SpamKiller's installation process is simplicity itself. The program is relatively small and installs very rapidly, taking less than a minute on my machine. Particularly impressive is the fact that many of the required settings are determined automatically. Firstly, the getting-started wizard gave me the option of importing my address book as a set of "friends", messages from whom would automatically be accepted. I actually chose to bypass this option because I use a fairly large E-mail distribution list such that most of the entries in my address book are for outgoing rather than incoming mail. The wizard next found that I had Outlook, Outlook Express and Eudora installed on my machine, had E-mail accounts set up on two of these, and asked which account I wished SpamKiller to filter. I selected my regularly used Eudora account. While automatically retrieving the account name and logon ID from the values already being used by Eudora, the wizard asked me to enter my password as this was not permanently set in my mail program. Next I indicated that I had dial-up rather than a direct connection to the Internet, and selected the appropriate telephone number to call from a pick list determined by the wizard. Finally, I was reminded to turn off automatic mail checking by my mailer since SpamKiller wants to be the first to look at and filter all incoming mail. SpamKiller was now all set to go. But, before we look at the program itself, there's another feature that deserves a word - McAfee.com SecurityCenter. This application loads itself into the Window's toolbar and, provides quite a nice interface for obtaining updates, accessing on-line information about viruses and news about various security threats. It provides a set of coloured bars indicating the level of protection present on the computer against viruses, hackers, Spam and something it calls "abuse". My anti-abuse index was 1.0, and in the red, not surprising since this is the first I had heard of "anti- abuse" software! The issue seems to be vulnerability to malicious web sites stealing personal information when an individual visits such a site. Of course, McAfee were more than willing to offer a solution to my new dilemma since they have such software available for purchase. On the positive side, my anti-virus, anti-hacker, and anti- Spam indices were all 10.0, with a full green bar highlighting the good news. While SpamKiller had a green circle indicating that it was protecting my mail system, VirusScan Online and Personal Firewall Plus both were red- circled as not installed. My high security levels here evidently were due to the fact that I have VirusScan installed (but not the on-line version) and ZoneAlarm (the competition!) in use as a firewall. Information provided on the latter is that the version was up to date; however, this isn't too accurate. The particular version of ZoneAlarm I am using is actually an old one since a couple of updates that I tried seemed to install correctly, but prevented me from running any other applications under Windows 2000. Consequently, I reverted back to a version that didn't have such problems. The older version doesn't seem to be a problem. I ran SecurityCenter's probe (http://www.hackerwatch.org/probe/) and everything checked out as secure, hence the pretty green bar for my anti-hacker system. While this is a nice interface, I doubt that I would make much use of it. SpamKiller also has an update button so I could use this directly without using SecurityCenter. After a while SecurityCenter became a bit of a nag, always wanting to check for updates, and occasionally popping-up a "Medium Virus Advisory" message, providing background information on some virus or other, but nothing to do with any actual threat. The good news is that you can configure SecurityCenter and turn off the automatic check for updates. Anyway, enough of the extraneous stuff, let's see how SpamKiller actually performs... The program has a toolbar across the top of the window that includes icons for checking mail in the active account, checking all accounts, deleting and printing messages, running the default E-mail program, and accessing on-line help. There is also a set of icons down the left side of the window that allow the user to check settings for SpamKiller and the available E-mail accounts; view lists of the mail filters and updates that have been received, and a list of designated friends. Finally, there are icons to view either killed mail items (Spam) or live mail items (messages that have passed through the current set of filters and are available on the mail server). Manually checking the default settings after installation of the program showed that SpamKiller was to report new E-mail, possible Spam, and killed Spam; all new filters were set to kill Spam, and the program was to check for updated filters automatically. There was an option to receive mail "from friends only" that I left unchecked. Messages larger than 100KB were to be skipped, but I opted to turn this off. Copies of killed messages were to be retained for 30 days and then automatically deleted. Checking the settings for my ISP's E-mail account showed that the address of the POP3 server for incoming mail, and that of the SMTP server for outgoing mail, had been pre- determined from the values set in Eudora. Mail checking was set to take place when an ISP connection was established, and every 10 minutes thereafter. I reset this to manual checking only since this is the way I normally access my mail. A quick look at the current set of filters showed a long list of items, including trapping mail from users with names containing xxx, or being blank, and coming from domains ending with admail.com, centerfoldslive.com, onestopshop.net, and so forth. So, it's pretty clear how SpamKiller tries to filter out unwanted mail. My first attempt to use SpamKiller proved interesting. There were nine incoming messages; two were trapped as Spam, and seven were supposedly valid messages. Neither of the "Spam" items was in fact Spam. One was a daily message from my ISP providing me with the headers of Spam mail that their filters had trapped. This was caught by SpamKiller because the "message" contained the F-word which, of course, was actually in the header of a Spam message that had already been filtered out of the message stream. Quite impressive really, because the word was spelled out, interleaved with hyphens, along the lines of: F-U-*-*-I-N-G. The fix to this minor problem was to add the address of my ISP's messaging system to my list of friends. The second message was trapped because "From was not a valid address". Viewing the details of the message header showed that the problem was a double period in the sender's E-mail address. This particular message came from a listserver and I'm not sure if this was a typographical error or an attempt by the sender to mask his true E-mail address. Either way, SpamKiller's filters didn't like the invalid format. SpamKiller is supposed to allow such false positives to be rescued; however, in my case, hitting the "Rescue message" button produced: "Mail transfer error, code 501. 501 Syntactically invalid HELO argument(s)". More on this problem later. Having downloaded the seven "valid" mail messages from my ISP, using Eudora as usual, it was evident that SpamKiller had actually missed one obvious piece of Spam, an advert for an on-line pharmacy. Valid messages can also be viewed in SpamKiller using the Live Mail option. So, I could see that the message had merely been flagged as possible Spam because it was addressed to an entirely different user on my ISP's domain, giving the warning: "To does not equal any of your user names". Other pieces of truly valid E-mail had been similarly flagged with warnings because, in one, the "Message text contains 1-800" and, for another, the "Subject is uppercase". The automatic update process for the mail filters seemed to have worked as advertised since ten updates were listed for the current date including filters for: Subject contains 'homeowner? (we can help)' and Message text contains 'very naughty girls! click below'. Over the next few days, SpamKiller provided a very similar experience. Without trying to tweak the filters manually, some Spam messages passed through the screening process, while some real mail was trapped and killed. For me, the strangest message to get past SpamKiller was one for which the subject line contained "VIAGARA: 69.95". Can it really be that McAfee don't consider messages about Viagara to be Spam? In contrast, a perfectly valid message was trapped because my correspondent had jokingly added "Of course, that's not a money back guarantee :)" at the end of his message. Another interesting situation was a friend's message, trapped because it contained "hgh". I eventually realized that this text string was actually present in a MIME-encoded attached file. Searching through the coded information using Notepad, showed that hgh occurred on no fewer than three occasions in a relatively long series of ASCII codes. Google tells me that hgh is an abbreviation for human growth hormone, which no doubt, is the subject of lots of Spam. However, it seems likely that this short text string will frequently occur in ASCII encoded binary files, which makes me wonder why the search engine is looking inside the code. And, perhaps most interesting for OPCUG members was a piece of mail trapped when coming from the well-known Ottawa "Spammer", Jocelyn Doire. His mail sending me the latest version of Ottawa PC News was trapped because: "Message text contains: address: ________". The irony of the latter was that the specific phrase was part of the registration form for OPCUG's Beginner's Workshop, asking potential registrants for their name, address, telephone number, and E-mail address, a document that I had originally created. Thus, poor old Jocelyn was being branded as a spammer because of a string of text being sent to me that I had actually written. Weird and wonderful things, Spam filters! I suppose that most such problems can be avoided by fine tuning the program by adding friends, and tweaking filters for specific messages but, for me, life is too short to spend much time on such items. There are other ways to reduce the amount of Spam that ends up in my in-box and, personally, I find these alternatives preferable. One major problem I had with SpamKiller was my inability to rescue messages incorrectly killed as Spam. It seemed that the "501" error encountered was very specific; however, there was no mention of any such problem or error code in the hard copy manual, nor in the program's help menu. Nor did logging on to McAfee's web site and searching their on- line databases provide much useful information. The most similar problem report on the web site was "Why aren't rescued messages showing up in my inbox?" This suggested that the SMTP settings must be incorrect. However, if you recall, these were set by the installation routine, based on perfectly valid data being successfully used by Eudora. The address for my ISP's SMTP server was the same as that for the POP3 server, and the latter was downloading mail to SpamKiller correctly. Similarly, the server port number for incoming mail was set automatically to 110, and that for outgoing mail to 25, and my ISP confirmed that these are the correct values. So, it was time to seek additional help directly from McAfee. I filled in the on-line E-mail help form in the technical support section of the web site but it crashed, nominally on my telephone number. I was unable to find a set of numbers and/or a format for the area code and telephone number, that it liked. Without a "valid" telephone number I was unable to submit the form. So, onto the next option, that of contacting a live technician... I tried this feature on several occasions. The system responded with various messages on different days. Initially, it forecast a one minute waiting period, but this stretched to more than 10 minutes before I gave up. The second time I was 10th in the queue, then 9th... before I gave up. Finally, late one night, I held the chat session open for quite some time. This time the system was reporting -- all our agents are busy, please wait, thank you for your patience. So, I started writing this article, using Word in an on-screen window, and keeping one eye on the McAfee chat window... Finally, I had a nice chat to a live technician. The bottom line was that he had me delete my mail account in SpamKiller, and reset it manually by checking the option: "My E-mail account is not shown in the list above". This basically ran a wizard prompting me to manually enter all of the parameters related to the ISP E-mail account. Once I had provided all of these data elements, and relayed the input to the technician, he indicated that rescue would now work, and had me test it. Of course, removing the mail account, deleted the entries in the killed mail box, and three new messages downloaded from my ISP at that time of night all showed up as live mail rather than Spam, so an actual test to rescue a killed message could not be conducted. First thing the next morning, killed mail was identified, and rescue failed with the error message: "Mail transfer error, code 501. 501 Syntactically invalid HELO argument(s)". Aagh!!! McAfee were good enough to (automatically) E-mail me a link to an on-line questionnaire to gather feedback on my experience with their problem-solving system. I basically fed back the above scenarios, with a number of associated comments on how they might consider making a few improvements. I wonder if anyone reads such stuff and, if so, do they actually take any action? As far as I can tell, SpamKiller runs essentially in stand- alone mode, independent of your usual E-mail program. When activated, SpamKiller goes directly to your ISP's mail server, logs onto your E-mail account, and downloads copies of all the incoming mail to your computer. The Spam filters are applied and the mail is sorted into a "live mail" and "killed mail". SpamKiller then goes back to your ISP's mail server and deletes the messages that have been identified as Spam, leaving the other messages on the server to be subsequently downloaded by your regular mail program. SpamKiller stores copies of all the messages in directories named "inbox" and "killed" on the local computer's hard drive. Each message is saved as a set of two files, with each set of files being sequentially numbered. One of the files has a txt extension and contains the body of the message together with the encoded version of any attached file. The second file has an hdr extension. This too is a text file and contains the message header. These are the files that are viewed in SpamKiller's window when the Killed Mail/Live Mail and View Details buttons are pressed. SpamKiller has a number of additional features that I didn't use. These include the ability to send a message of complaint to a spammer's ISP, or to send an error message to the spammer essentially "bouncing" the message and pretending that it was not received due to an invalid address. You can also configure many aspects of how the program works, such as how frequently mail should be checked, specifying multiple accounts, how you are notified when new mail is received, and customizing complaint and error messages. As I indicated at the outset, my situation may not be typical for most E-mail users. The E-mail address I use most is posted on a web site and so, since it is readily available to robots and spiders, it receives lots of unwanted mail. A rough count shows some 40-60 Spam messages being filtered out each day by my ISP, leaving SpamKiller to deal with the remaining 15-25 messages. One difficulty I have with my running SpamKiller is that it is yet another layer on top of what I already do to read my mail. I currently use E-Remove (http://opcug.ca/public/Reviews/Mail%20Remover.html) to pre- scan message headers, and to manually tag messages for deletion from the mail server before actually downloading them in Eudora. A particular advantage of this system is that I can delete junk messages with large attached files, thus avoiding the long download times for such messages over a dial-up connection. SpamKiller effectively fulfills the same purpose because you can delete items from the Live Mail box, which in turn removes them from the mail server. However, by default, SpamKiller downloads the entire message and any attachment, and has no facility to just download the message headers and perhaps a few lines of text. So, if long messages and/or large attached files arrive, you have to wait while they are downloaded. SpamKiller has the supposed advantage of using constantly updated mail filters but, for me, the fatal downside was my inability to be able to rescue false positives. It seems to me that SpamKiller needs to become a full- featured mailer rather than being just an intermediate between the ISP mail server and the user's regular mail program. It has most of the basic components for receiving and sending mail, so it doesn't seem to be too much of a stretch for McAfee to add some further functionality. The idea of constantly updated filters seems fairly reasonable but, by their very nature, such filters are fairly simplistic and sometimes get it wrong. In addition, the filters can't know about "new" Spam until the people writing the filters receive it, so they will never be able to catch everything. But, for many users, such a relatively hands- free system might be much better than nothing. Despite the huge number of filters applied by SpamKiller, real messages are trapped and Spam messages slip through the net. In my current situation, my ISP filters out most of the junk; in fact, I have yet to see a valid piece of mail trapped by their filters. The use of E-Remove allows me to quickly scan the residual mail and tag any obvious Spam for deletion. So perhaps, a more effective solution in my particular case would be try tweaking my ISP's mail filtering system to see if I can eliminate even more junk at source. Anyway, for what it's worth, that's my next tactic. Anybody need a slightly-used copy of SpamKiller? Bottom Line: SpamKiller Version 4.0.47.1 US $39.99 (downloaded version) McAfee Security/Network Associates Web Site: http://us.mcafee.com/ ----------------------------------------- Club Life Accessing PUB II - Part 3 by Chris Taylor In the October issue of Ottawa PC News I described the Group's communications server - PUB II and how to set up an account so you have full access. In the November issue, I described the most complete interface - through a web browser. In this issue, I will continue with another method that provides access to just the conference areas through a newsreader. Newsreaders refer to what they access as newsgroups. What they are actually accessing on PUB II are the conference areas. I will use these terms interchangeably in this article. The conference areas on PUB II contain messages on a variety of topics. There is a catch-all conference area called General Messages which may be used for pretty much any topic. There are topic specific areas such as Announcements and Buy & Sell and areas for each special interest group (SIG) such as Internet SIG, and Orphans SIG. There are conference areas for the newsletter in both Adobe Reader format (PDF) and plain text. There is even an old conference area called HTML Course that contains the messages that were posted in late 1998 and early 1999 regarding a course that was given on creating web sites. Most of the conference areas are read/write in that anyone in the Group can post items and read what is already posted. A few of them, such as Announcements, Newsletter PDF format, and Newsletter Text Format are read-only. You can read anything posted there, but you cannot create new items. To start, you must make sure you have an account on PUB II and that it is functioning properly. You can verify this by referring to the previous two articles. If you don't have a hard copy, you can access them through our web site at http://opcug.ca. Click the Articles button in the left frame. I will use Outlook Express as an example newsreader, but you can use any newsreader such as Netscape, Mozilla, Forté's Agent, WinVN, etc. Load Outlook Express and select the menu option Tools | Accounts. Click the News tab and click the Add button and select News. You will be prompted for your name. Type it in and click Next. You are prompted for your email address. Put in any valid email address for you, such as your PUB II email address, which takes the form firstname.lastname@opcug.ca. When prompted for the news or NNTP server, put in opcug.ca and check the box labelled My news server requires me to logon on. Click Next. You will be prompted for the logon information. Enter your username on PUB II. Include a space between first and last name. If your newsreader does not like spaces in usernames, you can use a period between first and last names. If you don't want to be prompted for your password every time you access the conference areas through your newsreader, input your password in the appropriate box and check the Remember password box. Click on Next and then Finish. Close the Internet Accounts dialog box. You will be prompted Would you like to download newsgroups from the news account you added? Click Yes. Outlook Express will list all available newsgroups, which are the conference areas on PUB II. You can select any or all and click the Subscribe button. Click the OK button when done. In the left pane of Outlook Express, you will now see a top level entry opcug.ca and beneath that will be the list of conference areas. Click any one to download the messages in that particular conference area. Note that Outlook Express defaults to downloading a maximum of 300 messages at a time. Areas such as General Messages contain more than 300, so you can either change Outlook Express to download more (through the menu Tools | Options) or simply click on the Headers button until the status bar at the bottom no longer shows xxx not downloaded. After you have downloaded the messages, you can read them just as you would read your email. Outlook Express will, by default, delete messages from the newsreader portion 5 days after they are downloaded to your computer. If you don't want this to happen, you can change it in the Tools | Options | Maintenance section. You can simply remove the check mark from the delete news messages... section, or change the number of days to any value you choose. Outlook Express will automatically remove messages once they are no longer on PUB II. For most public areas on PUB II, messages are automatically removed 365 days after then have been posted. From some areas, such as the Newsletter PDF Format, Newsletter Text Format and Announcements, we do not purge old postings. To enter a new message into one of the conference areas, select the area and click on New Post. A window will open that looks very much like a new mail message, except the top line says New Server: and the second line says Newsgroups:. The current group name should already be entered. Simply enter a subject line and body text as you would with an email message. When you are done, click on the Send button and your message will be posted. As a courtesy to those who are reading messages on PUB II using a means that does not support HTML messaging, I suggest you ensure you post in plain text. You can do this on an individual message basis by clicking on Format | Plain Text while composing the message. You can set Outlook Express to default to using plain text by going to the main Outlook Express screen and choosing Tools | Options | Send tab. Select Plain Text in the News Sending Format section. A newsreader can be a very convenient way of accessing the conference areas on PUB II. Try it out and see how you like it. If you have any questions, try posting them to the General Messages area. If you are having problems that preclude the ability to post messages contact me directly, either by email at Chris.Taylor@@opcug.ca or in person at one of the general meetings. Remember, PUB II is there for your benefit. If you are having problems, just want to chat about computers, or want to see if someone else is having problems that you might be able to help with, drop on by and get involved in the conference areas. ____________________________ OPCUG History Rewind... by Ted May, OPCUG Historian 10 years ago. The first article "Defragging NT" by Chris Taylor discussed fragmentation on NT hard disks using both FAT and NTFS file systems and the fact that no defragmentation tool was provided with Windows NT. It wrote about Diskeeper 3.0 from Executive Software as an excellent defragmentation tool. All be it, with some limitations as mentioned in the article. The club news item "Coming up in December" mentioned the upcoming presentation on computer games, just in time for Christmas. The next item - Calendar - lists the OPCUG meetings and times including the general meeting, The Ottawa Paradox Users Group, the Fox Pro/Developers SIG, and the PIG SIG. The next article "Tax on safe computing" by Terrance P. Mahoney with research contributed by Micheline Johnson discussed the taxes we pay on things like DAT tapes, CD-R/RW disks and other forms of removable media. The next item "Contact your MP" by Micheline Johnson explained how to get the e-mail address of your MP. In Dunc Petrie's Corner. An article called "Mask Plugins" which are plugins for Photo Shop and Corel PhotoPaint, as well as other applications that support the Adobe Plugin standard. They are used to improve the quality of digital photos. Another article in Dunc Petrie's Corner is "Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Software". Two leading OCR applications are Xerox' TextBridge and Caere's OmniPage Pro in then version 8. The article described the operation of OCR applications in general. It also mentioned Adobe Capture, a module within Adobe's Acrobat suite. The next item Computer Swap advertised the upcoming swap meet on January 9, 1999. The last article "Drive Copy evaluation" by me gave an evaluation of Drive Copy and some problems I had using it. 10 years ago. The first article "Finding files on the PUB" by Chris Taylor, sysop, described methods of finding files in the file areas of the PUB, such as the List command and the FolioView PUB30NFO.ZIP besides the ALL-FILES.ZIP which can be searched with an editor or file viewer. (PUB30NFO.ZIP is no longer available.) There was a Correction notice about an error in the review of the October meeting incorrectly naming the presenters at that meeting. The next article "Multimedia: A moving experience" by Lynda Simons discussed how Greg Philliban of local company Computer Aided Design will answered the question 'What is Multimedia?'. The next item was the Calendar of events and location where they were held. The item at the bottom of page 3 was: "A sad loss: club secretary Robert Parkinson dies". He died of lung cancer on Friday, November 26, 1993 at 10:50 a.m. The next article "New Fox tools" by Andrew Ross McNeill discussed the most innovative tool for Fox Pro called GENSCRNX. It discussed how Fox Pro painted screens and the improvements the GENSCRNX toolset provided. Under the National Capital Freenet banner was the article "A different kind of bulletin board" by Dave Loan (member of the BOD) discussed the planning and setup of the NCF and the fact that it was text only at that time. The next article "Understanding your system: part 4, Printers" by Eric Clyde discussed the three kinds of printer; dot matrix, laser and ink-jet printers. 15 years ago. There was no December meeting and, therefore, no newsletter. The January 1989 issue is missing. ____________________________ All Points Bulletin (APB): We are looking for the mystery man who approached Ted May, our club historian, with an offer of back issues of the Ottawa PC News. Please contact Ted by e-mail at tamay@@rogers.com or approach him again at the next meeting with your contact information or perhaps the back issues in question. Thank you. ____________________________ OTTAWA PC NEWS Ottawa PC News is the newsletter of the Ottawa PC Users' Group (OPCUG), and is published monthly except in July and August. The opinions expressed in this newsletter may not necessarily represent the views of the club or its members. Member participation is encouraged! If you would like to contribute an article to Ottawa PC News, please submit it to the newsletter editor (contact info below). Deadline for submissions is three Saturdays before the General Meeting. Group meetings OPCUG normally meets on the first Wednesday in the month, except in July and August, at the National Museum of Science and Technology, 1867 St. Laurent Blvd, Ottawa. Meetings are 7:30-9:00 p.m. and Special Interest Groups go until 10 p.m. Fees: OPCUG annual membership: $25 per year. Mailing address: 3 Thatcher St., Nepean, Ontario, K2G 1S6 Web address: http://opcug.ca/ President and System Administrator: Chris Taylor, chris.taylor@@opcug.ca, 727-5453 Meeting Coordinator Bob Gowan, bob.gowan@@opcug.ca Treasurer: Vince Pizzamiglio, vince@@monisys.ca Webmaster Brigitte Lord, opcug-webmaster@@opcug.ca Secretary: (Mr.) Jocelyn Doire, jocelyn.doire@@opcug.ca Membership Chairman: Mark Cayer, Mark.Cayer@@opcug.ca, 823-0354 Newsletter: Brigitte Lord, brigitte.lord@@opcug.ca Email: (Mr.)Jocelyn Doire, Jocelyn.Doire@@opcug.ca Public Relations: Morris Turpin, morris.turpin@@opcug.ca, 729-6955 Historian: Ted May, tamay@@rogers.com Directors without portfolio Alan German, alan.german@@opcug.ca Facilities: Bob Walker, skywalk@@iname.ca, 489-2084 Beginners' and Windows SIG coordinator: Duncan Petrie, gdpetr@@hotmail.com, 841-6119 Internet SIG coordinator: Norm Dafoe, ndafoe@@sirius.ca Delphi SIG coordinator Martin Pagnan, mpagnan@@cyberus.ca Orphan SIG Coordinator We are looking for a volunteer. Developers' SIG Bob Thomas, BobThomas@@msn.com Note: We added an extra "@" to the emails to reduce spam. (c) OPCUG 2003. Reprints permission is granted* to non- profit organizations, provided credits is given to the author and The Ottawa PC News. OPCUG request a copy of the newsletter in which reprints appear. *Permission is granted only for articles written by OPCUG members, and not copyrighted by the author. ____________________________ Newsletter by email: To receive the newsletter by e-mail, send a message to listserve@@opcug.ca with the plain text "subscribe NewsletterTXT" or "subscribe NewsletterPDF" (without quotes nor HTML code) in the body of the message. No subject line is required. Cancelling the Paper Newsletter: You can help the environment and save us some costs by sending an email to Mark.Cayer@@opcug.ca asking to cancel the delivery of the paper version of the newsletter (or ask him in person - Mark is usually at the back of the auditorium at General Meetings). Announcements Mailing List: To subscribe to the Announcements List send an email to listserve@@opcug.ca, leave the subject blank and in the body of the message put "subscribe announcements" (without the quotes nor HTML code). Within a couple of minutes you will receive a confirmation message from the list server. OPCUG mugs and multi-tools: Check out these great thermal coffee mugs and multi-tools sporting our club logo at the back of the auditorium at General Meetings! OPCUG insulated mugs are $15 and OPCUG multi-tools are $20. Reuse, recycle: Bring your old computer books, software, hardware, and paraphernalia you want to GIVE AWAY to the general meetings, and leave them at the table near the auditorium's entrance. Please limit your magazines to publication dates of less than two years old. If you don't bring something, you may want to TAKE AWAY something of interest, so look in on this area. Any item left over at the end of the meeting will be sent to the... recycle bin.