Vol. 21 number 8 October 2004 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 Sep 08 Speaker TBA (check our website - opcug.ca) Oct 13 Gord Hopkins - Digital Image Processing - Selections and Masks Nov 10 Ian Stewart - GMC Guardian Mobility Corporation - Global Positioning System applications Dec 08 Harley Bloom & associates - BMT MicroTech - 6th Annual Christmas Wish List Internet SIG (I-SIG) After the OPCUG General Meeting, at the Museum. Orphan SIG After the OPCUG General Meeting, at the Museum. Digital Imaging 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... October 13 Digital Image Processing: Selections and Masks Presenter: Gord Hopkins This presentation will cover the basic selection tools available in Photoshop (marquis, lasso, magic and, colour range, extract filter, etc.) and how to determine which one or combination is appropriate for your photo editing needs. Demonstrations will also include taking the mystery out of using masks, quick masks, and partial selections to get composite images to blend together smoothly or for making elective adjustments to colour and/or tone of your images. Gord is an active member of the RA Photo Club and has been involved in photography for over 40 years, switching completely to digital photography 5 years ago. He is a recognized digital photography expert and teaches workshops on digital photography, Photoshop editing, photographic restoration, digital workflow and colour management. He also produces digital audio/video presentations. His photographs have recently been on display in exhibitions at the National Press Club, the MOTH Gallery in Merrickville and the Foyer Gallery in Nepean. Gord does all his own printing, matting and framing. ____________________________ October Raffle X1 Technologies has kindly donated a raffle copy of X1 Search, the tool with the slogan Breaking the Found Barrier. X1 Search can help you quickly find information anywhere in your files or email. See the review in this issue of Ottawa PC News. Raffle tickets are $1 for one, $2 for three, or $5 for ten. ____________________________ WORKSHOP 2004 Are you tired of providing free computer technical support to your relatives and friends? The OPCUG can help you; the 2004 Workshop will take place Saturday, November 20th, 2004 at the Heron Community Centre, 1480 Heron Rd. from 9 AM to 4 PM. There will be presentations covering computer security, office applications, digital imaging and hardware selection and upgrade. Knowledgeable OPCUG members will share their wisdom and bring a ray of hope to the uninitiated looking for a safe and enjoyable computer experience. The cost is $45 and will include lunch plus a one-year OPCUG membership and a CD with presentation material and related software. Please visit the OPCUG website for more details, http://opcug.ca, click on the 'Workshop' button. ____________________________ Club Life Election Notice by (Mr.) Jocelyn Doire, OPCUG Secretary Once a year, the OPCUG holds elections for the 9-member Board of Directors. We are once again coming up to this annual event. I encourage all members to consider running for a board position or getting involved in some other manner in the operations of the OPCUG. If you want more information about what is involved, please talk to any current or past board member. As well, we need a member to come forward to act as the head of the election committee. The duties are minimal. All you need to do is collect nominations by e-mail, postal mail, or in person at general meetings. If more than nine nominations are received, you would then need to select two other members to join you in an election committee and oversee the actual elections. If you are interested, please let one of the existing board members know. ____________________________ Club Life The OPCUG history page is still growing. by Jocelyn Doire Ever wondered when we had a given topic at our OPCUG meetings? Or when a given company visited us? Well now you can check the latest addition to the history web page called "General Meeting's Topics" available at http://opcug.ca/public/history/topics.htm. Note that you can access many lists from the history page, including all the minutes of your Board of Directors, the newsletters, the pictures, and more. If there are things you would like added to the history page, don't hesitate to contact me (contact info at bottom). The easiest way to access the history page is to click on the "History" button from the OPCUG web page, at http://opcug.ca. ____________________________ Product Review X1 Search by Chris Taylor Did you ever wonder why you can find information stored on a web server anywhere in the world in seconds but you can't find a specific file or email on your own computer? I always found that truism to be very frustrating. Yes, Outlook and Outlook Express - the two mail programs I use - have search functions. But they are slow and limited. It's not easy to find an email from Sam, with holiday in the subject line and an attachment containing the words Marshall Islands. Then throw in files on your local hard disk. Try finding that document in Adobe Reader format, downloaded last year from a web site, talking about how to tune your computer. You're sure it contained the words registry and Ethernet. Or was it a PowerPoint presentation file? Or was it network rather than Ethernet? There are ways to find those elusive needles in haystacks, but sometimes they are so hard or time consuming that you may just decide the information was not really all that important after all. What if you had a program that maintained an up-to-date index of all your files, all your emails (including the contents of file attachments), your address book contacts, and more? Have I grabbed your interest? I found this in a program called X1 Search from X1 Technologies. File system By default, X1 indexes the file name, size, date and time stamp, and location for all files on all local hard drives. Also by default, it will index full content for 21 common file types such as dbf, doc, htm, html, pdf, ppt, rtf, txt, wpd, xls, and will even sniff out files in most archive formats such as zip and lzh. However, you are not limited to those file types. File viewing technology from Stellent (makers of Quick View Plus) is embedded in X1. This means that not only can X1 display just about every file for you, but with a little tweaking, you can have it index the text found in any of over 255 file types. X1 provides considerable control over what gets indexed. You can open a tree view of folders on your drives and choose: ignore the folder; index file names and sizes; index file names, sizes, and full contents for specified file extensions; or index everything regardless of file extension. You can also add network locations, either as mapped drive letters or UNC specifications. On my computer, a total of 259,358 files have been indexed for filename, size, date/time stamp, and path. Of those, 33,315 have been indexed for content, which is currently using the default set of 21 file extensions. Email and newsgroups I use Outlook 2003 when accessing my work email and Outlook Express for my OPCUG POP3 account. X1 handles both of these mailers as well as Eudora and Netscape Mail. I have a lot of email. In addition to emails, X1 has indexed the full contents of the newsgroups on PUB II - the conference areas on PUB II are also published as newsgroups - as well as some newsgroups I follow at Microsoft. As I write this, X1 tells me I have a total of 58,492 emails/newsgroup postings indexed. The numbers would be a bit higher, but I excluded some folders and newsgroups I never need to search. In addition to the emails themselves, I have 5,912 file attachments in emails that have also been indexed. All my email contacts have been indexed, including the many thousands of entries in the Global Address List on the Exchange Servers at work. Currently in development, X1 can also index other Outlook content: Calendar, Notes, Tasks, and Journal. I have not run into any problems, but theses indexes are currently unsupported. Ask me if you need instructions on enabling those indexes. Raison d'être - searching Searching in X1 is limited to a single index at a time; email, attachments, files, contacts, calendar, notes, tasks, or journal. You can enter a general search term and all meta-data as well as full content will be searched. For example, a search in the files index for zip might find a file called readme.zip, all files in a directory called c:\downloads\zip files and a Word document that contains the words zippity do dah. Additionally, X1 provides field searches for each of the indexes. This helps to narrow searches. For example, you could search for files with song in the filename, down in the pathname, and zip anywhere. You can sort the results of any search by any field name by simply clicking on the field header. You can also re-arrange the fields by dragging and dropping field headers. Available fields vary according to the index. For example, when using the email index, some of the fields are from, to, subject, date/time, email client, and folder name. Phrase searching, proximity searching, exact word match, and Boolean operators are all available to help expand or narrow searches. As you enter search terms, the list of items matching your search appears in the left pane. Clicking on any item will display its contents in the viewer pane on the right. Given the excellent file viewers built into X1, the content will normally appear very similar to how it would appear in its native application. If you want to do more than just look at the items found, right clicking the item in the file list will display a pop- up menu listing common actions. For files, there are options such as Open (which acts the same as double-clicking on a file in Windows Explorer), Print, Delete, Locate on Disk (which opens Windows Explorer with the file selected), and Send by Email. For email, options include Open, View Folder, Reply, Reply to All, Forward, Move to Folder, Mark as Read, Print, Open Attachments and Delete. The other indexes include relevant action options. If you have complex searches that you repeat frequently, they can be saved and made available from a pick list for instant retrieval. X1 is fast! As quickly as you can type in search terms, X1 is narrowing the list of items matching your search. Search terms are highlighted in the list and viewer panes. If you enter multiple search terms, X1 chooses a different colour to highlight each search term. I worried about the performance hit X1 might take on my computer. I was very pleasantly surprised. The first full indexing took less than 2 hours. I have X1 set to update the indexes for files every 10 minutes, email every 20 minutes, contacts once a day, and calendar, notes, and tasks every 2 hours. Updating each index generally takes less than half a minute. X1 will yield CPU cycles to other applications if needed, so X1 should rarely cause a noticeable slowdown. Of course, any index takes up disk space. But X1 seems pretty good in this regard. My Exchange Server mailbox at work is about 280MB. My local files for Outlook Express total about 300MB. My local disks have about a quarter million files taking up 60GB of space, although how much space is being used by the 33,315 files that have full content indexed is anyone's guess. The end result is that the indexes for X1 are taking just under 900MB. Not too shabby. What doesn't work While I am impressed with X1 overall, there are a few things I found annoying. X1 has a very nifty auto-hide feature. If this is enabled, you just have to move the mouse pointer to the top of the screen and a header bar appears with the index category tabs and the main search box. Click anywhere in this header and the entire X1 interface appears. But if you have a multiple- monitor configuration, you can end up with weird effects such as part of the header appearing on one monitor and the rest on another. The size field is only moderately useful. You can sort on that field and you can look for precise matches, but you cannot search for things like files greater than 1MB or files between 100K and 500K. There is a toolbar at the top of the viewer pane, but the colours chosen do not make it easy to distinguish between active and inactive icons. If you tell X1 to delete a file within a zip file, the file disappears from the file list in X1, but the file is not actually deleted from within the ZIP file. There is no error message indicating the file wasn't deleted. In a previous build of X1, the file would not be deleted, but you received a somewhat confusing error message indicating the file could not be deleted. I reported it as a bug, saying I thought the error message could be clearer. It is strange that the folks at X1 decided to "fix" the problem by simply removing the confusing error message rather than fix the real problem. If you include Outlook Express newsgroups in your index, any attachments to news postings will not be indexed. And newsgroups were the one area I ran into a serious bug. When X1 tries to index the newsgroup with OPCUG newsletters in Acrobat Reader format - which is only a 45MB file with 30 postings - it bogs completely down and never stops trying to index the postings. Given that X1 does not actually index the attachments for Outlook Express newsgroup postings, it did not make sense to index this group anyway, so I simply excluded the newsgroup and X1 returned to its normal performance. Happy camper I have come to depend quite heavily on X1. It has turned searching for items into a simple, quick task instead of something I dread having to do. If you spend inordinate amounts of time searching for things, or give up because it is simply too hard to do, take a look at X1 Search. You can download a 15-day, fully functional trial version from the X1 web site. System requirements: Windows 98SE/ME/2K/XP, 128MB RAM (256MB recommended), disk space depends on content being indexed. Mail clients supported: Outlook, Outlook Express, Netscape Mail, and Eudora. X1 Search is available from the web at www.x1.com for US$99.00. Members of the OPCUG can get a 20% discount until the end of 2004. Contact me by email (contact info at bottom) for instructions on how you can obtain the discount. The X1 license allows the product to be used on 2 computers. ____________________________ Product Review Zoo Tycoon Complete Collection by Chris Taylor Do you think you could run a major business? Buy and sell the things you need? Manage staff and satisfy customers? You get to try in Zoo Tycoon Complete Collection, a simulation game from Microsoft. It combines the original Zoo Tycoon with the two expansion packs Marine Mania and Dinosaur Digs. Overall, you have over 100 animals to populate a zoo that you build from a selection of over 500 objects. To get up to speed, I ran through the on-line tutorials, which explained the basics in clear and sometimes humorous steps. At the end of the final tutorial, I decided to take the lazy route and continue with the existing zoo. I took a break for supper and neglected to pause the game. I came back a couple of hours later to find that all my animals had broken out of their enclosures and escaped. There were no guests left. For all I knew, they had been eaten. My zoo was bankrupt. Lesson number one - do not neglect your zoo. I started again from scratch. I chose a medium-sized site and was given $75,000 to begin. I built slowly, with a few animal exhibits and then adding some food carts and a restaurant. I built some rides for the kids. Then I started really concentrating on adding more animals. When you adopt animals, you have to provide what they need and like. If your animals are happy, your guests will sense it and appreciate your zoo. Zoo Tycoon is all about happiness. Your aim is to maximize the satisfaction of your animals and guests, as well as get a high rating for your zoo. The zoo rating seems to come from a number of factors, but if you run a good, profitable zoo and manage to attract a lot of guests, your zoo rating will be high. How do you know what animals need or like? Zoo Tycoon has information screens about each animal available for adoption. As well, as you modify aspects of a habitat, animals living there will show their approval or displeasure with little green happy faces or red sad faces rising off them. You can also select an animal in your zoo and ask the zookeeper's advice. The zookeeper will provide hints on how their habitat may be improved. The 45-page manual can also help. As well, there is a huge, 209-page Strategies & Secrets manual provided on disk in Adobe Reader format. For overall terrain elevation, most animals are happy on flat ground. But some prefer hills or cliffs. For a price, you can modify the ground. Also, the groundcover must be selected. There are lots of choices, such as sand, fresh or salt water, rainforest, dirt, grass, etc. A polar bear on sand is an obvious bad choice. African buffalo are happy with a mix of savannah grass, dirt, sand, and water. You have to provide above-ground amenities appropriate for your animals. There are lots of different types of trees and bushes and you have to choose the right kind. Some, like chimps, are very unhappy if you don't provide them with lots of trees. Camels, on the other hand, prefer rather sparse vegetation. You can also buy various rock formations. Lions love big rocks they can climb up on. Shelters are a must. Your hoofed animals might like a lean- to. Elephants need something more substantial. Warthogs like burrows in the ground. All are available at a price. Of course, your animals need food. You must hire zookeepers who will feed and care for the animals. They know what the animals like to eat and, as long as you hire enough zookeepers, you don't have to worry about food. By now, you might be thinking that running a zoo is a quick way to the poor-house. But there are lots of ways to make money as well. Right up front, there is an admission fee to get in the zoo. And you can build a wide variety of things for your lucky guests to spend their hard-earned cash on, such as restaurants, rides, food carts, souvenir stands and shops, cotton candy stands, drink machines and much more. You get to set prices, but I advise you to start with the default prices. Most of your guests don't seem to object to them. You don't have to gouge your guests for every little thing. For a price, you can provide them with other niceties to make their visit more enjoyable. On the small side, there are things like park benches, picnic tables, trash cans, and lamps. At the other end of the scale you can buy a Japanese garden for your guests to relax in. Along about game year five, I started noticing occasional fences were breaking and animals were getting out. I would chase them down and put them back in their cages and replace the broken section of fence. Then I discovered that maintenance staff would repair fences. I had a couple walking around the park sweeping up and emptying trash cans, but I guess they were too busy to get to all the fences. Of course, what's more important? Picking up garbage or preventing a lion from snacking on your guests? I finally hired four more maintenance staff, dedicated them to fixing fences and rarely had to be concerned about fences after that. The work never stops at the zoo. You have to always be on the lookout for developing situations. Animals give birth. If enclosures get too crowded, the animals get unhappy, so you have to sell some of them. Animals can also die of old age and have to be replaced. If you don't have enough maintenance workers, the trash cans overflow and guests start complaining and getting grumpy. You should spend some money on research. If you do, every now and then new items or capabilities become available. You can get toys for your animals, new shelters, education for your staff so the animals are better cared for, tricks for performing animals, and more. I had lots of fun just building free-form zoos. But if you like a challenge, Zoo Tycoon includes three dozen scenarios with defined goals. For example, one of the beginner scenarios is a small zoo with 3 well-designed exhibits and 3 animal types ready for adoption. The goal is to have 6 exhibits with a suitability rating of at least 60 and an animal satisfaction rating of at least 80 within 6 months (a year in Zoo Tycoon takes about 75 minutes). As you progress to more advanced levels, these scenarios get quite challenging. And if you get bored, try dropping some of your guests in with the woolly mammoth or crocodiles. Or try taking out a section of the lions' cage as a big crowd of guests go walking by. Make sure your speakers are turned on. I find Zoo Tycoon to be a fascinating, engaging game. Highly recommended. System requirements: Win98/ME/2K/XP, 64MB RAM (128MB RAM for XP), 233Mhz processor, 1.4GB disk space, 4MB video card with 2D. Street price in Ottawa - $50 ____________________________ Tips & Tricks Safe Mode Boot Option in Windows XP Home Edition by Ted May Last month's tip for adding a Safe Mode option to the Windows XP Pro Boot Menu can also be used with Windows XP Home. The line to be modified will read: WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition" /fastdetect, instead of WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect Just make the same changes as specified for Windows XP Pro. That is: change it to WINDOWS="Safe Mode" /fastdetect /safeboot:minimal /sos /bootleg Then follow the rest of the directions as given in last month's article: Text: http://opcug.ca/public/Articles/0409.txt PDF: http://opcug.ca/public/Articles/0409.pdf ____________________________ Prize Winners At the meeting of June 16th, OPCUG member John Walsh won our door prize copy of Corel Office and Chris Taylor took home the raffle prize of a Microsoft wireless keyboard and mouse. On September 8th, OPCUG member John Cocklin won a copy of the McAfee Spam Killer as the door prize. The raffle draw prize, a copy of the Microsoft Digital Image Suite, went home with John Reid. And a big thanks to Corel corporation for the box of "inkblot" t-shirts they sent along for distribution at the meeting. ____________________________ 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 second 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: Alan German, alan.german@@opcug.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 Vince Pizzamiglio, vince@@monisys.ca Tim Mahoney, timothy.mahoney@@opcug.ca Facilities: Bob Walker, 489-2084 Beginners' and Windows SIG coordinator: Duncan Petrie, gdpetr@@hotmail.com, 841-6119 Internet SIG coordinator: Eric Clyde, eclyde@@rogers.com, 749-2387 Delphi SIG coordinator Martin Pagnan, mpagnan@@cyberus.ca Orphan SIG Coordinator Ted May, tamay@@rogers.com Developers' SIG Bob Thomas, BobThomas@@msn.com Digital Imaging SIG Chris Taylor, chris.taylor@@opcug.ca, 727-5453 Note: We added an extra "@" to the emails to reduce spam. (c) OPCUG 2004. 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.