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Our January 25th meeting Sgt B. Cowper of the Halifax Regional Municipality Police will be the guest speaker. "Internet Cybercop' And will be held a7.00 pm at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, 1675 Lower Water Street, Halifax
NOTE NEW MEETING FACILITIES
The HAPCC general meeting is on 4th Sunday of
each month. The HAPCC has a new meeting place at: Maritime Museum
of the Atlantic 1675 Lower Water Street , Halifax, NS.
Meeting time 7:00 - 9:00 pm.
Parking available in the nearby Government
parking lot or in the Museum parking lot. Access to the building
is via the Night Entrance Doors, located just to the right of the
regular front doors. If door is locked, use the bell on upper
left side of the Night Entrance Doors.
The meeting room is on the second floor and
has a theater type of layout. Washrooms are located close by.
Elevator service is available. Coffee served.
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
Newsletter Editor Diane Smith
Membership Promotion Pat Conen
and the following members who assist in planning our monthly
meetings: Norman DeForest, Henry Hill, Ken Gilmour,and Colin Stuart.
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 HAPCS has two kinds of meetings. Firstly
the regular Sunday night meeting which most members attend
regularly, secondly 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 which all members of the
Society are urged to attend. At the planning meeting, 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.
The year 2000 Problem by Bill Marchant
Online too long? From the net
Windows 95 Whom works for whom by Bill Marchant
Meeting schedule for the upcoming year
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 new or renew 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. For
more information call Carey Rolfe at 462-4551 or on e-mail
crolfe@fox.nstn.ns. ca. or Dave Hackett at 835-3894.
Advertising and Want Ads - we do not charge for,
like the small individual want ad above. That is, any Society
member or other interested person with computer related items
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 their ad. Ads will normally only
appear once unless otherwise stated when placing the original ad.
You can choose give to me at a meeting, call me two weeks before the
next general meeting(newsletter deadline).
Everyone, it seems is writing or talking about this potential computer catastrophe, so why should I be an exception?
There are a number of aspects to it some of which are foolish and some of which are deadly serious.
To deal with the foolish first, the thing is abbreviated as the Y2P. Another acronym to remember. Then there is
always the person who will remind us that since there was no year zero, the third millennium does not start until 1
January 2001. While this is true, no-one really knows if the counting started in the right year in any case. In
other words, how old was Jesus when the first millennium began? The right answer seems to be 'certainly not zero'.
Besides, those who wait until Jan 01, are going to miss the big party in Jan 00.
The more serious stuff relates to how computers will behave when the year 99 finally rolls over. To this part,
I see several potential traps. Potential problems occur when dates are used in calculating things like; given my
birth date, when do I start getting a pension? And if my mortgage runs from 1 Jan 1998 to 1 Jan 2003, does it end
before it begins? And do I get charged interest for 95 years? And what about the poor guy whose pension suddenly
stops because the computer determined that his records went back to 1900, had to be obsolete, and were automatically
erased?
First, is the enormous amount of stuff stored in old mainframe computers in the form of six digit dates. In the old
days when storage was very expensive, doing dates this way made economic sense. No-one then imagined that the work
they were doing would last till the end of the century. This aspect of the problem means that anyone who corresponds
with, or uses data from one of these older computers will hope that the owner of that computer will fix the problem.
Any one of us accessing data for fun on the internet could get bad data in this way. Any terminal on any system even
remotely accessing such a computer could be affected. There is nothing any home user can do about it except hope that
the computer masters will do their job.
Second, many of us use programs which permit us to enter the year with only two numbers. The programs we are
using then translate that date into a number and stores it. This number is sometimes referred to as a Julian
date although it really isn't. True Julian dates are serial numbers beginning some 6000 odd years ago, and are used
in astronomy. Lotus 123 started using Julian dates with its earliest versions nearly fifteen years ago.
(I am sure Lotus were not the first to do this, I just happen to know about it.) Day one was taken as the 1 January
1900. So 18 Jan 1998 is stored as 35807. Dates prior to 1 Jan 1900 are stored as negative numbers. Actually
Lotus made a stupid mistake when they put an extra day in February 1900, so all their dates after 28 Feb 1900 are one
day out. The year 1900 was not a leap year. (They have probably corrected this by now). The problem with this
system occurs when we enter only two digits for a year in one of our applications. What does the application do
with it. A fool proof solution is to always enter four digit years after the end of 1999.
The HELP file on Date 2000 in Quattro Pro 8 is actually helpful. Here it explains that year dates from 00 to 50
will always be taken as in the 21st century. Dates from 50 to 99 will be assumed to be in the 1900s. The help
goes on to suggest that four digit dates can always be used to avoid confusion. I suspect that all applications
of recent years have adopted a system such as this. One of the programmers tool boxes associated with the Delphi
Programming system allows the programmer to select an "epoch" for his program. Using it, I can chose to start my
two digit year numbering system any place I like. For several database systems I have done lately I, like Quattro
chose the year 1950. If anyone is still using one of my programs in the year 2050, then good luck to them.
Third, date stamps on files is not a problem. DOS, which started its career in 1980 adopted a storage regime which
will last until 2099. So any files you generate will be correctly stamped until then. Presumably, by then other
systems will have taken over.
Fourth, the internal clocks of the computers we use. I did some tests on my machine (two years old and counting).
In DOS mode under Windows 95 I changed the date from 01-12-1998 to 01-01-01. The system refused to accept it.
When I entered 01-01-2001, the new date was accepted. While the date was changed, I typed and saved a small test
file. The test file date showed 01-01-01 when I did a DIR command. (See Third above).
I did not investigate when the epoch started for my hardware, but since the manufacturers have chosen to
recognize the end of the century, I feel confident that I will no longer be using the machine when the epoch runs
out.
Fifth (and last), I see by the recent news that the Nova Scotia Government has finally hired
consultants to deal with the Y2P. (See first paragraph for the acronym). Given that they now have less than
two years, are they going to be completed on time? I hope so. What happens if they find a problem they didn't
anticipate? The computer world is full of such problems. A friend of mine recently was hired by a local
company as a COBOL programmer. Her employer stated that her work would be in connection with Y2P. This is her
first job as a programmer in eight years. So the companies are beginning to hunt for talent. If there aren't
enough people to do the work in the time left, we all have a problem.
Sixth (and finally last), I once wrote a piece for the newsletter where I exposed the foolishness of depending on a
number system to control so many things like special birthdays and anniversaries. If we were using hexadecimal
numbers to count the years, 2000 would be 7D0. In Octal it would be 3720 and in binary 11111010000. If we had
been born with three hands of five fingers each there would be still another number to deal with so there!
YOU KNOW YOU'VE BEEN ONLINE TOO LONG IF:
1. Tech Support calls "YOU" for help.
2. Someone at work tells you a joke and you say 'LOL' out loud.
3. You find yourself trying to cock your head 90 degrees when you try and smile.
4. You have called out someone's screen name while making love to your significant other.
5. You keep begging your friends to get an account so 'we can hang out'.
Most people who buy a computer make the assumption that their operating system is capable of looking after all the
things that need looking after in order to give them trouble free use of the machine. It may be considered a tribute
to Windows 95 that it achieves as much as it does while so many of its users remain ignorant of what is really going on
inside their machines.
There are so many things which computer users never find out about their machines. Most people discover how to do a
task, and then always do it the same way from then on, in spite of the fact that an easier way exists. There is so much
stuff in the windows Help documents that the incentive to look for an easier way does not exist. Reading the Help file on
a casual basis is not a past time we associate pleasurably with using a computer. It seems Help Files were written for the
person who wrote them, and not for the computer user. Often the key word is completely different from the one we think
of.
I was reminded of this the other day when I read in a computer magazine about a computer professional who began
having problems. He was getting C:\-drive-full warnings, and his machine kept crashing. Finally after several tries at
saving disk space, he remembered the cache used by Internet Explorer. He looked in the folder and discovered to his
horror that over 400 Mbytes of space was occupied by files still cached; in spite of the fact that he no longer needed
them. Even more annoying to him was the six level procedure he had to go through to get to the delete command inside
the Internet Explorer.
I sometimes enjoy searching through Windows itself to see what I can find. I suppose it is the Cyber equivalent of
wandering through the woods as opposed to reading a book about the woods. The other day I wandered through the
Windows folder on my C: drive. I discovered a couple of new (to me) varieties of mushrooms.
In C:\Windows, there is a folder called 'SendTo'. In here I discovered a shortcut to the A: drive. I was reminded of the
Send To item which appears on the floating menu when a file name is clicked with the right mouse button. Sure enough,
this folder is where that menu item comes from. I added shortcuts to C:\TEMP, D:\TEMP and E:\TEMP in this folder.
Now I have the option of sending files to each of these places, when the occasion demands. When the shortcut goes into
the folder the system names it simply 'TEMP'. You have to rename it in order to tell which drive it belongs to. I
presume that the same could be done for a ZIP drive, although I have not tried it.
I also placed a shortcut to the Recycle Bin in the SendTo folder. An interesting thing about this is the fact that when an
file is sent to one of the TEMP folders from this menu, a copy is made of it. The original file stays in it's original folder,
but when a file is sent to the Recycle Bin, it is MOVED. This is a handy alternative to using the DELETE. It saves a
button click by not asking if you are sure. Of course if you were not sure, you could still recover the file from the
recycle bin, but it is better to be sure in the first place.
The C:\Windows\Recent folder contains shortcuts to the documents which appear when you use DOCUMENTS under
the Start button. Some users in offices may wish to conceal the fact that they are working on certain documents. By
deleting the shortcuts in this directory, the names of files in recent use will not come up under the start menu. Of course,
you have to keep on deleting on a regular basis. I tried making the folder read only to prevent new data from being
placed in it, but in spite of being marked 'read only' and 'hidden' in the properties, Windows still writes the shortcuts
to it.
After I discovered these two items the hard way, I looked in the Windows Help. The 'Send To' item is described there
(but not the Recycle Bin specifically); The 'Recent' folder topic is not covered at all as far as I can see.
I recently came across a program called Uninstaller from CyberMedia. I will write about its use in another NewsLetter.
Some of the mysteries of Windows are made a little clearer by it.
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.
We decide the meeting dates for the upcoming year at the last planning
meeting. The dates for these are listed below after confirmation of
the dates.
Future meeting dates:
January-25
February-22
March-22
April-26
May-17
June-28
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 currently
held at a members home and the address is announced at the meeting prior to the planning meeting. 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.
