A New Mutation

As usual, Windows 95 is the focus of attention at Chaos Manor. But first, a new virus.

Jerry Pournelle

By now, you've probably heard about the first truly multiplatform, multi-OS virus. It can strike if you download an infected Microsoft Word document that has Word BASIC macros. It's called WinWord.Concept. As I write this, the only version known outside the lab has the annoying but not fatal effect of transforming your Word documents into templates, making it impossible to edit them without changing them back; but it's clear that a similar virus could have a nastier payload that deletes or corrupts files.

I learned about this virus in a fax alert. S&S International sends out virus alerts to subscribers to Dr. Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit. The alert included instructions for downloading a remedy. This was several days before the news exploded on the Internet and over a week before Microsoft announced a remedy.

The virus is unusual in that it operates from inside Word, meaning that it is dangerous for Mac and Windows users. Worse, you can be infected even though all you've done is download and open a Word document; it will then spread to any other documents you have that use that document's template. Worst of all, it points the way to other ways of transmitting a virus through downloading embedded objects.

The situation is now under control, but everyone is nervous. My conclusion is that it's time to subscribe to a good antivirus service that does alerts. I recommend Dr. Solomon's. They have a good track record of early detection and disarming of new virus threats, and I like their approach. I know Dr. Solomon, and I'm confident that he'll continue to invest in virus analysis, detectors, and remedies.

I'm still using Windows 95. Until this morning -- it's 4:00 a.m. -- I've been mildly unhappy. The problem was that no matter what I did, I would get hesitations in my Q&A Write DOS character-based text editor. I'd also get them in Word for Windows and Procomm Plus 2 under DOS. It wasn't a terrible situation, but every few minutes, I would type two or three letters, and they wouldn't appear on-screen for about half a second. That glitch broke my flow.

I tried disabling every multitasking program, including Norton Utilities, and closing every window but the one I was working in, but it did no good. Finally, I decided there was nothing for it: I probably had some old Win 95 beta code that was never properly removed, and the only way to get rid of it was to scrub the Windows Directory entirely and install from scratch.

This would let me install my shrink-wrapped shipping copy of Win 95. It's supposed to be identical to the gold beta version I have installed, but this way I can be sure I'm running what you have. So here I go.

Four hours later, and I'm done. Some of my adventures are instructive.

My first move was to make a DOS 6.2 boot floppy disk complete with the DPT and Corel SCSI drivers so the system could find the optical and CD-ROM drives. Then I booted in DOS, copied the parts of the Windows subdirectories I thought I'd need, gulped hard, and deleted the Windows Directory and all its subdirectories.

Next I had to install Windows for Workgroups 3.11, because I have only an upgrade version of Win 95. The installation didn't take long, but when I went to set up the screen, I found that I had somehow managed to delete the drivers for ATI Technologies' Graphics Pro Turbo Mach 64 card. Downloading a new set from ATI's BBS took about an hour. Incidentally, we're extremely happy with that card in Windows 3.x, 95, and NT.

Windows worked, but for reasons I do not understand, W4WG 3.11 refused to access my optical drive. It believed there was a removable-medium drive there, but it refused to believe there was a disk in it. I could access i t from DOS just fine. On the other hand, the network worked splendidly, and I was able to access my other machines.

Installing Win 95 was a bit of a bear; I'm glad I had it on a CD-ROM. First, I tried running it from DOS. The Setup program launches a Scandisk program, and that promptly found a bunch of programs with long filenames. It tried to fix those but gave up after a while. It also insisted on scanning my E drive, which is the optical drive. It never found any problems but wouldn't continue unless I let it do its thing on all the hard drives, including that one.

Next, it wanted me to exit Setup and run it from within Windows. I tried that; and Setup said it was doing a routine check of my hardware. Half an hour later, I was locked up to hardware reset. This wasn't encouraging, so I launched Setup from DOS again. Once again it complained I ought to run it from Windows, but I told it to go ahead from DOS, after which things went pretty fast.

However, when Win 95 started up, it complained that my Intel EtherExpress card wasn't working properly. Since that card had just been working in W4WG, this didn't seem likely; but Win 95 couldn't find my network. It seemed pretty clear that Win 95 had the wrong settings for the EtherExpress card, but the Win 95 Network icon in Control Panel didn't offer any way to change settings.

I fooled around with help for a while and eventually learned about the Device Manager. Once I got to that, I was able to see what was wrong: Win 95 was assuming that my EtherExpress card was set for interrupt request (IRQ) 5, when it was set at IRQ 10. Once I told it to look for IRQ 10, the network came up fine.

There was one other glitch. Although the Device Manager saw Valiant, the ValuePoint machine, and saw that Valiant had a printer named HPLASERJ, it didn't see Valiant in its printer's browser list. When I manually typed in \\valiant\hplaserj for the printer name, it found it just fine. So it goes.

My hesitation glitch is gone, and so is the Q &A paste error I told you about in October. Win 95 is working very well indeed, so my problem must have been some leftover beta code. I advise all former Win 95 beta testers to terminate the old code with extreme prejudice.

Now to reinstall Norton Utilities for Windows 95 and hope that it doesn't bring my glitch back.

I consider NU an indispensable accessory to Win 95. I have always trusted Norton Disk Doctor more than the DOS CHKDSK or Scandisk utilities, and while I haven't often needed UNDELETE, the few times I did, I needed it a lot.

NU for Win 95 has a bunch of other features, including a neat display of CPU resource usage that helps tune up programs. Q&A Write, if allowed to run in the background, will eat up 100 percent of your CPU resources even though it has been made into an inactive icon on the toolbar. The remedy is to go into the program's properties and check the "always suspend" button to tell Win 95 not to run Q&A in the background. This does no harm -- after a ll, a word processor doesn't do anything in the background.

NU for Win 95 also showed me that WinWord was eating 100 percent of my resources. I never did learn why; the problem fixed itself when I shut down and rebooted. Earlier, I couldn't find WinWord at all. That is, I could see the WinWord icon on the toolbar and could click on it, but nothing would happen. If I right-clicked, I could maximize it and all would be well, but if I then tried to reduce it to an icon, it would vanish.

This happened while I was on the phone to the chief technician at Symantec, and we puzzled over it for half an hour. I tried things like cascading windows. Nothing. Finally, in desperation, I did a right-click on the toolbar and chose minimize all windows. Then I did it again, choosing to undo the minimizations. Voilà! There was WinWord in a window where it belonged.

If you run Win 95, you really need Norton Utilities. It will help you tune up and avoid disasters.

My conclusions remain abou t the same. Of the new OSes, OS/2 Warp Connect is technically superior, but Win 95 is good enough, now that I don't have half-second glitches in my DOS editor. Of course, I never did have them on the OS/2 machine.

I like OS/2 Warp Connect. Unfortunately, it is published by a firm with less-than-optimum marketing capabilities. IBM promotes OS/2 Warp Connect for corporate customers and gives game compatibility a low priority, while Microsoft has a gaming fanatic as part of the Win 95 design team.

While some Win 95 installations are difficult, most are smooth because of Microsoft's attention to legacy hardware. I don't understand why Win 95 didn't automatically find my EtherExpress card's IRQ setting, but the error wasn't fatal -- and I had no trouble with the CD-ROM drive and the optical drive. Some OS/2 installations go easily; but far too many are a nightmare for unsophisticated users.

No one, even IBM, is working very hard to develop software for OS/2, while most major comp anies are working full speed on stuff for Win 95. On the other hand, as yet there aren't any Win 95 applications you can't live without.

This suggests a possible strategy. OS/2 Warp Connect isn't expensive. It runs DOS and most Windows applications just fine, and it networks easily to W4WG as well as other OS/2 Warp Connect machines. Assuming you don't have major installation problems, OS/2 could be a pretty good place to wait while the Win 95 dust settles, Microsoft gets out the inevitable maintenance release, and we see what IBM will do about Win 95 compatibility.

Having said all that, I continue to use Win 95, but I still print and do communications with an OS/2 system.

I'm giving up on the eraser-head mouse substitutes. I gave the Lexmark Classic Touch with Integrated Pointing Stick keyboard a good try -- long enough that the rubber cap on the pointing device has worn through -- and I'm going back to a mouse and my good old Northgate OmniKey Plus keyboard.

We also gave extensive trials to Cirque's GlidePoint fingerpad or mushpad, which we liked better than the eraser head. It works, and if you like it, you may like it a lot. It takes up less room than a mouse. Next I'll be trying several flavors of Logitech trackballs.

I'm trying to be fair. Certainly trackballs, fingerpads, and eraser heads work, and one or another may be preferable for certain applications. The eraser head on my Gateway 2000 Liberty portable saves space and is certainly good enough for the road. Alex likes both the eraser head and the fingerpad, and he uses both more than I do. But the fact remains that for overall mousing, I haven't found anything I like better than the Microsoft "Big Teardrop" Mouse 2.0, with the older Microsoft "Dove soap bar" Home Mouse a close second. Your mileage may vary, since it's all very personal.

If you have Win 95 and you like playing with your system, Martin Matthews' Windows 95 Power Tools (Random House, 1995) may be useful. It tel ls you where to find tools for editing the Win 95 registry. Alas, it's very skimpy on how the registry works or what you can do with it, which is a lot. At the Microsoft Win 95 dog and pony show, they were using the registry to do some amazing things.

The book has a better explanation of the System Policy Editor and what you can do with that, and a good section on networking. There's also a CD-ROM of shareware. Some of it is extremely useful.

Windows 95 Power Tools is about the best book of its kind I have seen so far. I expect better ones in the future.

Tapedisk is an idea whose time came a while ago. Now that gigabyte hard drives cost only a few hundred dollars and multigigabyte drives cost well under a thousand, there aren't many who will need this.

Tapedisk will convert just about any SCSI tape drive into what looks to your system like a big hard drive. It does this in the only way possible, by caching the file allocation table (FAT) and directory informat ion in memory. Thus, when you are done writing to your Tapedisk, you must close things properly before you shut down; otherwise, you are in for some grief. You can recover from a shutdown without proper closing, but you won't like doing it. You don't want to use this without an uninterruptible power supply (UPS).

Tapedisk will work across a network: if you can see drives on the remote machine, one of those drives can be a tape. This works with W4WG networks.

Tapedisk is surprisingly fast and, once properly installed, easy to use. You can write to a tape drive from inside a DOS or Windows application, as, for instance, "Save As" in Word, even over a network (provided you've mapped the remote tape to a drive letter on your local machine). It's cheap storage, and with a digital audiotape (DAT), you can archive a large amount of stuff. You could have a whole library of tapes, each one looking like a big hard drive.

Accessing the information is easy. You can use XTree, Norton Commander, or almost anything else to find, access, and copy files from tape to disk. This is a lot faster than going through an archiving system like Palindrome's Network Archivist. You can, for instance, create special directories to store older copies of files that will change and get at them quickly. You can also store your whole disk image and get it back by booting with a floppy disk.

Having said that, I will still use Network Archivist on my DAT drive. Network Archivist protects me from stupid blunders, and there are times I need that protection. I am rather angry at its handling of drive volume labels, but I suppose I'll get over it. The solution is to write down the exact volume label of your hard drive before you need to restore to it.

The bottom line for me is that it's easier to add a new gigabyte hard drive to the system if I want a place to keep temporary files I have to get at quickly and use my DAT drive for true backup and archiving. If you have a SCSI tape drive you're not getting much use from, Tapedisk may be the way to go.

The English historian Thomas Babington Macaulay introduced competitive examinations for civil-service positions to the Western world, modeling them on Chinese Mandarin examinations. The notion caught on, and competitive exams can make a real difference in people's lives.

Although the SAT is not quite as important in American life as its equivalent in Japan, your SAT score has a lot of impact on what university you can attend and what kind of scholarship you can get, and that can make a real difference in later life. They've recently changed the SAT tests. Many experts say the changes make it easier to study for the SAT.

There has always been a practice effect in taking exams; it's easy to show there are test-taking skills that can be learned independent of the specific test. There's also strategy. Should you guess, and if so, under what circumstances?

Princeton Review Management has a program called Inside the SAT. The company is not associated with Princeton University, but they have a lot of experience with SAT courses; and they've put much of that knowledge into this program. They also include a book on college admission and how you can better your chances of getting in. How useful it is will depend on how sophisticated you already are, but it won't hurt anyone to read it.

No computer program or crash course can substitute for sound preparation and good study habits; but this package can take a lot of the initial shock out of the SAT. I've had some experience with both tests and test preparation, and I believe that while this program won't perform magic, it can help you in two ways. First, it provides practice in test taking, and that's always important. Second, the vocabulary and math coaching sections can help fill in any gaps in specific knowledge and capabilities.

In these competitive times, even a small edge can be important. I think Inside the SAT will provide at least that.

If you re ad general business magazines like Business Week , you've seen a lot about Oracle. You probably know that Oracle is a DBMS capable of building and maintaining enormous relational databases on client/server systems. You may or may not know that the company has expanded into publishing tools that can be built into business management systems and applications.

If you don't know what a relational database is, or you do but know little about Oracle, you need Oracle: A Beginner's Guide

If there's another book like this, I don't know of it. Oracle: A Beginner's Guide is on my refere nce shelf. Recommended.

You may recall I was recently the keynote speaker at a Canadian convention on technology in education. One of the awards given there was to SIR (for Simulations and Interactive Resources), a DOS VGA demonstration program that does chemistry experiments developed by Professor John Martin at the University of Alberta (John.Martin@ualberta.ca). The intended use is with a projector, so the program can function as a kind of animated blackboard. You can show Torricelli's mercury barometer, illustrate ideal gas laws, heat mercury without having the health physics people rush in to clean up your classroom, and show chemical reactions, including titrations. There's a neat periodic table from which you can extract information on demand. All told, it's like having an assistant drawing frantically with colored chalk as you lecture, and it's more legible.

Although it's meant for class use, SIR could be used as a lab supplement. I'd think every high school honors and col lege freshman chemistry teacher could make good use of this. SIR isn't fancy, but it will make a good teacher more effective, which is what electronic teaching aids are usually best at.

There's a new-and-improved version of Accent, the word processor that works in many languages. Accent Professional comes with a thesaurus in 11 languages, the ability to do bidirectional Arabic and Hebrew, 150 fonts, beaucoup keyboard layouts, spelling checkers in 16 languages, and the ability to import and export into popular word processing programs. The interface is good. There's really nothing like Accent Professional; if you need it, you need it bad.

The UPS business is extremely competitive. It's also very hard to "review" a UPS without serious test equipment. For most of us, a UPS either works or it doesn't, and most of them do.

American Power Conversion has nifty software that monitors the status of your UPS and power line. This can be handy if you're in a location wi th bad power and you need to prove it to the local power company -- or for that matter, to justify more UPS equipment to your bosses.

PowerChute Plus software works with Windows, NetWare, UnixWare, SCO Unix, and IBM LAN. It shows UPS status (including battery charge), gives remote control of distant-site servers, and can make a full power-quality log.

The first book of the month is by Robert L. Forward, Indistinguishable from Magic (Baen Books, 1995). The title comes from Arthur Clarke's phrase, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Dr. Forward is a former senior scientist at Hughes, an authority on gravitation, and one heck of an imaginative writer.

The second book of the month is by Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime (Random House, 1995). It's part of his history of the Seventy Years War (formerly called the cold war) and tells a grim tale of what happens when idealists and cynics fight over power.

The CD-ROM of the month is Microsoft's Composer Collection, three CDs on Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert. I've written about these musical biographies before. They're a great and painless way to learn about composers, their times, and major works.

The game of the month is Interplay's Dungeon Master II: The Legend of Skullkeep. It's not as good a game as the original Dungeon Master, and the early parts get close to boring. However, it's different enough to be interesting if you like creature-bashing games and don't have the reflexes for the straight arcade variety.

We've received a new firewall box from Network Systems. It's called The Security Router. It's a lot more security than we'll ever need, but it will let us set up our own Internet interface with some confidence. A lot more another time, but if you need secure ways to the Internet, talk to Network Systems. They literally wrote the book on the subject.

We also just got the Zenith CruiseP ad, a portable pen-based radio-link interface to my network. It's not the pocket computer I invented for The Mote in God's Eye , but it's getting there.

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PRODUCT INFORMATION

There's really nothing like Accent Professional 2.0 ($399); if you need it, you need it bad. Contact Accent Software International, Inc., Exton, PA, (800) 800-5256; fax (800) 535-5257.

Microsoft's Composer Collection ($54.95) is a great and painless way to learn about composers, their times, and major works. Contact Microsoft Corp., Redmond, WA, (800) 429-9400 or (206) 882-8080; fax (206) 883-8101; http://www.microsoft.com .

I recommend Dr. Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit 7.5x (single-user version for most OSes, $125). They have a good track record of early detection and disarming of new virus threats, and I like thei r approach. Contact S&S International, Inc., Burlington, MA, (800) 701-9648 or (617) 273-7400; fax (617) 273-7474; http://www.us.drsolomon.com .

Dungeon Master II: The Legend of Skullkeep (about $40) is different enough to be interesting if you like creature-bashing games and don't have the reflexes for the straight arcade variety. Contact Interplay Productions, Inc., Irvine, CA, (800) 468-7752 or (714) 553-6655; fax (714) 252-2820; http://www.interplay.com .

Inside the SAT (for Mac and Windows, $29.95; on CD-ROM, $54.95) provides practice in test taking, and the vocabulary and math coaching sections can help fill in gaps in specific knowledge and capabilities. Contact Princeton Review Management Corp., New York, NY, (800) 955-3700 or (212) 874-8282; fax (212) 874-0775; chris.tprg@review.com.

The Norton Utilities for Windows 95 ($119) will help you tune up your system and avoid disasters. Contact Symantec Corp., Cupertino, CA, (800) 441-7234 or (503) 334-6054; fax (503) 334-7474; http://www.symantec.com .

PowerChute Plus 4.2 (Windows, $69; OS/2, Windows NT, and NetWare, $99; Unix, from $149) software monitors the status of your UPS and power line. Contact American Power Conversion Corp., West Kingston, RI, (800) 800-4272 or (401) 789-5735; fax (401) 789-3710; http://www.apcc.com .

I'd think every high school honors and college freshman chemistry teacher could make good use of SIR ($50). Contact The Journal of Chemical Education: Software, Madison, WI, (800) 991-5534 or (608) 262-5153; fax (608) 262-0381; http://www.jchemed.chem.wisc.edu .

Tapedisk 6.4.0 ($249.95) is surprisingly fast and, once properly installed, easy to use. Contact Tapedisk Corp., Oshkosh, WI, (800) 827-3372 or (715) 235-3388; fax (715) 235-3818; http://www.tesser.com/tapedisk/ .

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Jerry Pournelle holds a doctorate in psychology and is a science fiction writer who also earns a comfortable living writing about computers present and future. Jerry welcomes readers' comments and opinions. Send a self-addressed, stamped envelope to Jerry Pournelle, c/o BYTE, One Phoenix Mill Lane, Peterborough, NH 03458. Please put your address on the letter as well as on the envelope. Due to the high volume of letters, Jerry cannot guarantee a personal reply. You can also contact him on the Internet or BIX at jerryp@bix.com .