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Meets 4th Sunday of each month, 6.30 pm,..
Note change of times below.....
Veteran's Memorial Building.....
Room 1613A,.....
Corner of Robie and Jubilee Road....
Opening Topic- Beginners corner this meeting will have Rob MacCara
talking about the latest in computer memory. At 6.30 pm. And then followed by
Q & A which will be moderated by Rob MacCara.
The feature event will be guest speaker, Ken-Porter, from K-PC Lte
talking about new and upcoming developments in computer technology at 7.15 pm.
A short note on the Veterans Memorial Building, An item in the Canadian Armed Forces in house publication , the "Warrior" , The VMB will be renamed The Camp Hill Veterans' Memorial Building. The Camp Hill name is part of a tradition dating back to 1758. Here is a link to: Canada's Veteran's affairs web suite where one can browse information related to Canada's fallen. and links to other sites related to Canada's military traditions.
In an other item in the press the Queen has entered cyberspace and the
link is: The British Monarchy-The Official web Site.
It is worth checking out.
The Bluenose, a fishing schooner, is an icon of down east history.
Find more on the story at Bluenose II Home Port Page
The next general meeting will be June 22th at 6.30 at the Camp Hill Veterans Memorial Building on Jubilee Rd.
The HAPCS has two kinds of meetings. There is the regular Sunday night
meeting which most members attend regularly, and there is the monthly (approximately)
Planning meeting which organizes the business of the Society, including what happens
on the Sundays. The planning meeting is held on Monday , a week after the regular
meeting in Room 1602 of the Camp Hill Veteran's Memorial Building on Jubilee Road.
( the same building as the regular meetings; different room). All members of the
Society are urged to attend.
At the planning meetings, we discuss feature speakers for regular meetings, finances,
membership, training, and other computer related subjects.
....Bill Marchant
Articles can be submitted in almost any format, ASCII text, AMI Pro, MS Word, Windows Write, WordStar and of course WordPerfect.
Internet addicted
More on SCSI
Minutes of General Meeting
Membership Questionnaire
This document is mailed to all paid up members and to anyone who
has attended a meeting within the past three months. Yearly
membership dues are $15.00.
Society Mailing Address -
P.O. Box 29008, Halifax N.S., B3L 4T8
Chairperson: David Potter
Vice-Chair: Bill Marchant
Treasurer: Rob MacCara
Web Librarian: Thayne MacLean
Secretary/Newsletter Editor: Colin Stuart
Membership Promotion:Pat Conen
and the following members who assist
in planning our monthly meetings. Norman DeForest, Henry Hill and Diane Smith.
We have only a few announcements for this month's issue.
Membership Expiry Dates
For those of you who are not already aware, the membership expiry dates are printed in the upper right corner of your newsletter mailing label. If you wish to continue to receive this newsletter and know what interesting meetings are coming up, you either have to renew ($15 per year) or come to the meetings and put your name on the list that is passed around.
DELPHI
The Delphi User's Group meets on the first Tuesday of each month. The meetings are held at the CCL Group building 2669 Dutch Village Road in Halifax, at 7:00PM.
Advertising and Want Ads
We don't charge for small individual want ads like the one above. That is any
Society member or other interested person with some computer related item that
they wish to sell, trade, or give away can contact the editor to place an ad in
the newsletter. We would expect that more commercially oriented advertising
provide the Society with some remuneration for carrying the ad.
An ad will normally only appear once but let me know if you reed it repeated.
Ads can be given to me at meetings or give me a call two weeks to ten days
before the next general meeting(newsletter deadline).
"You Know You Are Addicted to the Internet When..."
I wrote a bit about SCSI (pronounced 'scuzzy') a few months ago. I spend a lot of time working
with SCSI devices at work, usually in file servers and similar computers. One thing I like about
SCSI is that you don't need a driver for each device. You need a driver for each type of device and
one for each controller. I have one computer with 22 SCSI devices in it (21 CD-ROM drives and
one hard drive)on four controllers. It uses one driver for each controller, one for the hard drive and
one for the CD-ROMs. There are four different makes of CD-ROM drives in this setup. I had to
replace a defective drive one day with a new drive made by a completely different manufacturer
(Plextor 4x replaced by Toshiba 15x) and there were no changes required to the software
configuration. Neat.
Proceeding on with a slightly different aspect of SCSI hardware, in a any network environment it
is important to ensure that the data saved on the file servers is protected from loss. There are a
number of ways to lose data but I will only talk here about the possible loss from hardware failure.
A good backup is essential, but it can take time to replace hardware and restore the files. And that
is only as good as your last backup.
Some of the systems at work are configured with RAID arrays. More acronyms - see Bill's
article, so what is RAID, and SCSI for that matter? SCSI stands for Small Computer System
Interface and RAID is Redundant Array of Inexpensive Devices. RAID is a method of providing
fault tolerance for the storage of your important data.
First I will mention two methods of providing fault tolerance. One is mirroring, where two drives
are connected to the same controller and contain exactly the same information. This protects you
in case one of the drives fail. The other is disk duplexing. Here there are two controllers and each
has a drive(s) containing the same data. This protects also from losing a controller.
RAID is more advanced than these two. There are various levels of RAID, from 0 which is no
data redundancy, to the most common, level 5. Here, data is stored across a group of drives with
no drive containing the same information as another drive. One drive is used to store encoded
information that can be used to rebuild any lost drive in the array. It can be rebuilt from the
information on the other drives. You can have a spare drive already to go in the system, just
waiting to take over in the event of a drive failure. Some are 'hot-swapable', which means that
the drive can be changed without shutting down the system. This is just what the bosses need so
they are able to safely save all the important things they are downloading off the Internet.
RAID requires special controllers and these can be rather expensive, as the controller has to do
calculations for every file that is saved to disk. They would typically have their own CPU and
RAM. The ones I use cost about $1500 each. One has five 2 Gig drives hanging off of it spread
across two SCSI channels. The two channels are supposed to make things faster as the controller
can send/receive data on both at the same time.
I have recently rebuilt a drive on this array. We had everything powered off one day and when it
was restarted, the controller came up with a message something like - 'target 0 on channel 1 is
dead, you should replace this soon'. Soon to me meant right away, which I did (I have spares). It
was quite interesting to watch. It was very much faster than the new drive restore from backup
route which I have also done. Another difference is that the RAID would have brought the system
back up with the dead drive still in place. It does need to be replaced soon as the loss of another
drive would be a real problem.
To really get fancy you could do duplexed RAID 5 arrays. This would be two complete sets of
controller - drive combinations. Not for normal home us.
Newsletter Articles
We are almost always in need of good articles. If anyone has
something that they feel would make a good article, an
interesting story to tell, or even a good meeting topic, please
don't hesitate to pass it on.
Articles can be submitted in almost any format, ASCII text, AMI
Pro, MS Word, Windows Write, WordStar and of course WordPerfect.
It does work, that is how a number of articles in previous
month's editions were received, but if you are sending a file
attachment to your message, it should be UUencoded and not a mime attachment.
Newsletter Production Notes
As usual , for those who may be interested, the newsletter was
formatted this month with WordPerfect for Windows 6.1 running on
either a 386SX-25 or a 486DX-33 (each has 8mb of RAM). Much of
the clipart used is from Novell (formerly WordPerfect) Presentations 3.0.
The original was printed at 600 dots per inch resolution on a HP
Laserjet 4M. If I don't have access to this printer then we
print it on an Okidata 850 at Bits and Bytes on Queen Street in
Dartmouth where they allow the Society to print the originals at no charge.
The main body of the newsletter is set in 10 point Palatino with
the article headings being 14 point bold. The title on the first
page is ITC Zapf Chancery Medium Italic 19.2 and 16 points.
There was about the same number of copies made this month as
compared with the last few months, with about 80 copies produced
of which around just under 50 were mailed out. Any extra copies
from the previous few months issues that I have will be brought
to the next meeting for those who are new to the group or may not
be in regular attendance.
I do have a complete set of all the previous newsletters and if
someone wanted to look through these, let me know and I can bring
them to the next meeting.
We decide on the meeting dates for upcoming year at the last planning meeting. The dates for these are listed below:
June 22th
As in previous years, the December meeting is moved to the early
part of January due Christmas Eve being the fourth Sunday of the month.
The planning meetings are normally held on the second Monday (8
days) after the general meeting. They are also located at Veterans
Memorial Building. Anyone is welcome to assist in the planning of future meetings or events.
Any changes to the scheduled dates will be announced where
possible at the regular monthly meetings and/or in this newsletter.
Members who attended were: Bill Marchant, Norman DeForest, Thane Maclean,
Ken Gilmour, Rob MacCara, Henry Hill and Pat Conen.
1. Opening remarks by Vice Chairman
The Chairman David Potter is unable to attend, being away on business.
The proposed agenda was distributed to the members.
The matter of principle concern to the club is its declining
membership. Measures to increase membership must be taken if the
club is not to collapse, or be reduced to the status of a coffee
group for six or seven people.
Pat Conen distributed a memo in which he addressed the same membership
problem, and suggested some solutions.
2. Minutes of the last AGM
There were no minutes of the last meeting.
3. New Agenda items
The matter of our future meeting place was added.
4. Nomination and election of officers.
The following officers will hold office for the coming year:
Chairman David Potter
Vice Chairman Bill Marchant
Treasurer Rob MacCara (From Colin Stuart)
Secretary and Newsletter Editor Colin Stuart
Web Librarian Thane MacLean (former Disk Librarian)
Membership Promotion Pat Conen
Directors
Some individuals now listed as directors will be dropped as
they are no longer members of the club. Ken Gilmour and
Bill Lane will be added to the list of Directors.
5. Business:
Membership: It was agreed that increasing the membership of the
club is the most important single issue facing us. Many ideas
were suggested by those present. Including the appointment of
a Membership Coordinator and Promoter. Pat Conen has agreed to
take on this task.
Ideas included:
Including more Question and Answer type sessions at our meetings.
Review of Application Programs by those who have used them.
with suggestions for those who might wish to use them.
Wider advertising in the local press.
Request local computer dealers to distribute our pamphlets to computer buyers.
Liaison with schools through teachers or others/
Establish an essay contest for students to attract younger people.
Refer to the organization as a CLUB instead of a SOCIETY. It was felt that the
SOCIETY label was a turn off for some people.
Use of a Questionnaire to all current and new members, to determine interests and
expectations of the club.
Dates of next year's meetings: The following dates are believed to be relatively conflict
free and are therefore proposed:
1997
28 September
26 October
23 November
1998
4 January (this date instead of conflict with Christmas holiday is also the Annual Swap meet and Flea Market)
25 January
22 February
22 March
26 April
24 May (Victoria Day is 18 May, hence no conflict)
28 June
It was suggested that members be permitted (encouraged) to bring
items for sale, gift or exchange to any meeting. The Annual
Swap meet would continue, and would be the meeting where dealers
are also encouraged to attend.
The meeting place for next year was briefly discussed.
The Vice Chairman will write a letter to the QE II Hospital
authorities requesting our continued use of the facilities for
the next year.
It was proposed that we publish our list of members, for the use of the membership. The
list should include telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and areas of expertise or interest for each
member. This would enable members to easily contact each other for mutual help. We would of
course include only those members who had specifically given their consent to be included on the
list.
Rob MacCara and Pat Conen have undertaken to investigate the idea of an essay contest
for younger members. Tentatively we would aim the contest at school or high school students.
We would offer free membership to anyone entering the contest. There would be substantial
prizes. A panel of judges consisting of knowledgeable people would pick the winners. The club
should get the right to publish the essays in the Newsletter.
Last Name:
First Name:
Address:
Computer type, make, model
Operating systems used:
DOS
Windows 3.x
Windows 95
OS/2
Other
Application programs used: (Name the application and its version where applicable below)
Word Processing
Spreadsheets
Database
Internet
Drawing
Programming
Other
e-mail address
phone number
Area(s) of interest in computing
Area(s) of expertise or knowledge in computing
What do you expect the Computer Club to do for you?
What can you do for the Computer Club?
Are you willing to have your name, e-mail address, phone number and interests made available to
other club members?
Any other comments.
