beginning to move with the Safari. After NCR was dragged in, no journalist I know ever heard from either AT&T or NCR again. The Safari was never updated -- if there are new models, I never got the word. We can't review what we don't hear of.
It's up to marketing to make us aware of new products, or at least that there
are
new products, because I guarantee you there are plenty of outfits out there who
do
let columnists know. I confess I hadn't thought of AT&T for a year when I was reminded by a
Wall Street Journal
article of just what a fiasco the AT&T/NCR merger became.
The pity of it all is that if ever there was a company that ought to be booming in these days of Internet and Unix popularity, it surely ought to be AT&T. Who else would be better suited to sell you a Unix box that you can hook directly to the Internet? I used to have one here at Chaos Manor. Perhaps there's an updated system,
but if so, they sure haven't let me know about it. Alas.
Every now and then I get a panic E-mail message
about disk drives with lost chains, cross-referenced or nonmatching file allocation tables (FATs), and other disk woes. Alas, I don't have time to do more than send a generic answer. I usually advise them to try Norton Disk Doctor run from a floppy disk. I figure that if they had Norton Utilities (NDD comes with NU) already installed on the hard disk, they'd have tried NDD and said so. In any event, the one thing you don't want to do if you have a disk in trouble is install something new on it or write to it in any way.
NDD allows you to make an Undo disk that will put things back the way they were. You can put that on a floppy disk or on a network disk (
never
on the disk you're working on!). As long as you do that, you're reasonably safe, with one exception I'll get to in a second.
If NDD fails, your next step depends on how important the data is. If all you stan
d to lose is a few hours of installation time, you can try mucking about with NU yourself. For example, DOS keeps two copies of the FAT. They're supposed to match, but sometimes they don't. If you know which one is good, you can tell NU to use the good one and ignore the other. There are other such tricks. All are fairly dangerous in that you can lose your files forever, but that's the worst that can happen. If that won't be a complete disaster, you can use NU to try to recover from some stupid application that wrote garbage in the wrong places -- or more likely, something dumb you did.
You may even be able to recover compressed files. It doesn't say so on the box, but NU for Windows 95 works quite well in DOS (which is where you ought to be working if you're trying to recover files; using a disk editor in Windows or Windows 95 [W95] is just asking for trouble). It will work on Doublespace compressed drives.
Understand, I don't recommend file compression. Gigabyte disk drives sell for under $299 n
ow, and recently we got a 3-GB drive for about $700. With hardware that cheap, why take chances? Although file compression usually works fine, there's a small but real chance that you'll lose
everything
on one of those compressed logical drives. It's also inconvenient.
If you do use compression software, you
really
need to have NU installed in your system. It probably won't be good enough to recover you from your disaster, but it might be.
If all else fails, there are data-recovery experts. My son Alex is a partner at Workman & Associates in Pasadena, California. While they mostly do installation and maintenance consulting, they also do data recovery. You should be aware that this can get downright expensive. You're much better off buying the hardware and software it takes to do frequent backups. Most of the people who end up paying Alex to recover their data knew that, of course.
If your data is important enough to pay recovery experts to retrieve it,
don't
use NU
. And don't write to your hard disk if you can help it; because if your problem is a failing hard disk, recovery is going to be very difficult, and anything you write to that disk is likely to make things worse.
Clearly, your best bet is to make good backups before you have problems; and if your data files are important enough that you'd be willing to pay for their recovery, they're important enough for you to buy a tape drive. For that matter, they're probably important enough to protect with a RAID system or full mirroring.
I don't like Franklin Quest's Ascend 5.0.
I don't like the colors, and I particularly don't like the way it handles telephone calls. It uses the Microsoft Dialer, which means that if you hang up the phone after your call, your software doesn't know you've done that; and until you go back into the software and
tell
it that you've hung up, it keeps the phone tied up. It also keeps a log file open that is "timing" the call long after you hung up.
Th
e result was that I didn't use Ascend 5.0 to dial. I'd look up the numbers in a paper book; but since I wasn't using Ascend 5.0, I wasn't entering new numbers in it, so I got to losing phone numbers.
I'm not sure what I had against the rest of Ascend 5.0, but I went for almost two months without using it. The result was a mess. I wasn't able to keep track of appointments. I was losing phone messages. I didn't have any priority to my work. That clearly could not go on.
Therefore, I went back to Ascend 4.0. It has a few flaws that version 5.0 was supposed to fix, but I can live with them; and it's just easier for me to use. The colors are brighter. It has a phone dialer that knows when I have hung up the phone. It took me about 2 hours to go through the nine weeks in which I hadn't updated appointments, kept my journal, done my reports, and dealt with my priority task lists, but eventually I was done with all that.
The effect on my work was immediate. No more jotting down little notes on scrap
s of paper and losing them. Now I have a record, and even better, it's a record I can search. With luck, version 6.0 will be as good as version 4.0, but with the bugs fixed; until then, I can't live without Ascend, but I can sure live without version 5.0.
One good thing came of all this: I rediscovered the joys of paper logbooks. The problem with an electronic log is that you often don't have it with you, and often you want to make handwritten notes. Carrying a printed copy of the electronic log and using that to jot notes in doesn't work well because the resulting book is too thick to carry easily.
For years I carried Borum & Pease hardbound composition books. They're like the ones you see in the drugstore, but they come page-numbered. Since I have the habit of taping business cards, letters, and newspaper clippings into my logbook, I've found it makes sense to use nylon strapping tape to reinforce the binding. When I dropped Ascend, I started a new logbook. I'm going to continue to carry that. T
he result is I have a book that supplements my electronic Ascend records nicely.
One day I suppose I'll have a personal digital assistant (PDA) that I can carry about and jot notes into. My son uses a 286 DOS-only monochrome Gateway HandBook for that purpose and has mastered the art of typing fast with one hand while holding the system in the other. I still need a place to set the HandBook down, and thus it's as easy to keep the Gateway 2000 Liberty in my briefcase. The bottom line is that so far there is no PDA as convenient as a paper logbook, especially if you also use Ascend on your laptop and desktop.
Incidentally, I have friends who like Ascend 5.0 and can't figure out why I don't.
I love little computers, but every now and then I wonder.
I have two communications from the Gas Company. One threatens my life, or at least my credit, as well as warning that they're about to cut my gas service off for not paying my bill. The other letter tells me I have overpaid my bill, hav
e a credit balance, and should not send any money.
Something else from the same mail is prettier: two beautiful simulated handwritten notices from a charitable order I belong to exhorting me to pay my Pentecostal obligation. They are identical, and you have to look close to see they weren't handwritten.
Alex says these are reminders of how awful the world would be if it were written in COBOL.
I guarantee you a frustrating experience installing the CDSourceBook
of American History, especially if you're running W95; but eventually you'll get it up, and if you're at all interested in the fundamental documents of America, you'll be glad you persevered.
I had two distinct experiences with the installation from CD-ROM. The first time, the installation program ran; but at about 98 percent done, it said there was an error copying system files. If that happens to you, cheer, because you're nearly done; just ignore the error message. You'll still have to make your shortcut and put
it on the start-up toolbar, but that won't be a real problem.
Alas, I didn't do that after it happened on Pentafluge, the big Pentium that runs W95. I went over and tried the installation on SuperCow, the Gateway 2000 486DX2/66 that runs Windows for Workgroups 3.11. It didn't install easily there, either, requiring that I reset the machine at least once, but eventually it was finished with no harm done.
The CD-ROM is packed with information, from accounts of Columbus in Spain, through George Washington's early military career through the Revolution and right on up to World War I. All the major documents, such as Magna Charta, the Mayflower Compact, Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, and Constitution are there. So are the entire Federalist Papers. There are eyewitness accounts, literary works, Washington Irving, and so forth.
But there's more. You get Woodrow Wilson's six-volume work,
History of the United States
. There are all the inaugural addresses of the pre
sidents. There's James Madison's two-volume
Journal of the Constitutional Debates
. There is, in a word, nearly every original source and most secondary sources needed to teach American history, all indexed and searchable.
The viewing engine is Folio Views, about which more later. There's one quirk you need to know about. To make it easier to find and copy material from this wonderful collection, there is extensive paragraph identification, useful for scholarly quoting but annoying if you're just trying to read the documents. It's neither intuitive nor documented, but you can turn that off. Pull down the View menu, and click on the item Hidden; that will toggle the paragraph identifications.
Every schoolroom and home student in America ought to have this disc. It's that good. Highly recommended.
Attendees at Comdex and other computer shows know something
about Folio Views, because for the past few years, the convention directory has been given out on a floppy disk. BYT
E chooses the Best of Comdex show awards, and the Folio Views-based disk sure has made my life easier. I can search out new products by category, find booth and suite numbers, and suchlike. This year, I am going to take the neat little Citizen PN60 printer and use that to make out my show itinerary.
The Folio Views 3.1 Infobase Production Kit builds databases you can take with you. It comes in several levels, from a simple user database construction kit through a professional kit that includes licenses that let you distribute the run-time viewer with your product -- that's what comes with the American-history CD -- to a Software Developer Kit that lets you extend their tools and hook the whole thing in with other programs. It's all industrial-strength software and priced accordingly. It's also pretty solid.
ne. If you have any level of Folio Views, you can get a free tool called Folio Retriever that goes out on the Internet, grabs information, and puts it into a Folio Views-editable flat file complete with links and a table of contents. You compile that to make a Folio Views database you can use off-line. It's portable, and it can be copied. You can use this technique to grab a whole bunch of stuff from the World Wide Web and evaluate it at leisure. You can then use another tool to turn all that into Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) documents and put them on your own Web server.
The Folio Views 3.1 Infobase Production Kit comes with conversion filters for getting data out of most word processor document formats. The version I have doesn't seem to know about older database formats like Q&A, but I'm told the Software Developer Kit has the tools for constructing nearly any filter device you like; and Folio Views knows how to bring in data from any ASCII file-format system.
Like askSam, Folio Views isn't
the simplest thing to learn, but once you have it down, it's a lot more powerful. It can be used to build salable products from document collections or just to organize data for your own use. I can't claim great familiarity with Folio Views and Folio Retriever, but as Chaos Manor appears to be sinking beneath vast amounts of information retrieved from the Web, I think I'm about to be. I've seen many useful products built from Folio Views. If you're drowning in unorganized data or you have an idea for a product based on documentary information, this may be just what you need.
In
The Mote in God's Eye
(Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle,
Pocket Books), the characters all carry pocket computers that are tied into a central database, thus linking everyone to everyone else, as well as to all the knowledge of humankind. When we wrote that in 1970, we carefully did not describe how it all worked, but we did make it clear that you used a stylus rather than a keyboard.
We now have Zen
ith's CruisePad set up in Chaos Manor. CruisePad is a clipboard-size, stylus-controlled system that uses radio to link into a regular computer network. You can connect a keyboard to it if you want, but that gets clumsy, and if you're going to do a lot of typing, you'd probably be better off with a laptop or palmtop. Where CruisePad shines is with mouse-controlled operations. You can use it to make a big desktop do anything you could do with a mouse.
That includes accessing your Internet server or other databases. It also includes Internet access; and most Web browsing is done by mousing around. You can also "type" short replies with the stylus: you call up an image of a miniature keyboard and tap away at the keys. That's frustrating for touch-typists, but hunt-and-peck addicts get pretty fast with it.
The real merit of CruisePad is for structured actions. Years ago, I speculated that one day doctors making hospital rounds would have a clipboard computer that would give them the patient's chart, le
t them make entries, digest the information, and offer suggestions on diagnosis and treatment. That's no longer speculation. Teaching hospitals are testing such systems. You can even enter prescriptions with CruisePad. The result probably won't be reliably machine-readable, but the handwritten bit map can be attached to the patient's chart, a copy can go by fax to the pharmacy, and a clerk can complete the data entry from a central location.
I don't know if anyone is doing this now, but it wouldn't be difficult to construct a program that compares the recommended treatment with what is standard; does the same thing with dosages, taking into account the patient's body weight; looks in the record for contraindications; and flashes a warning if the physician has specified something outside the normal envelope. That would certainly eliminate careless errors.
To go from the sublime to something else, muffler and transmission shops are also using CruisePad. Tap the screen, and up comes a list of makes a
nd models. Use the stylus to let the computer know the model and year, and up comes a picture and a list of symptoms. Tap (as opposed to click) in the appropriate places, and out comes a repair recommendation and cost estimate.
The U.S. Navy is trying to replace paper with CD-ROMs. The problem with that was summarized by Gordon Eubanks, who was a submarine driver before becoming CEO of Symantec. If you're crawling around inside an engine trying to find out where to put a wrench, the last thing you need is to have to come out to look at a screen. With CruisePad, you can carry the screen with you, and as long as data access is mouse-controllable, it would be plenty good enough.
To utilize CruisePad, there are three ways to connect to your network: CruiseLAN/PCMCIA, for computers with a PC Card Type II slot; CruiseLAN/ISA, a card for AT-type bus desktop PCs and servers; or CruiseLAN/Access Point relay boxes, for extending coverage to up to 1000 feet in diameter in normal office environments. With a C
ruiseLAN/Access Point connected upstairs, I was able to control SuperCow from every downstairs room. A larger establishment like a hospital could put CruiseLAN relay boxes in several places; one would almost certainly be enough for a small clinic or mechanic's shop.
Setting up CruisePad isn't all that hard, but you do have to get the drivers loaded in just the right order and just the right way, and that can be tricky. Small companies without technically competent people may want some help, either from a franchising parent organization or outside consultants, to get it running.
Designing the custom database applications to make CruisePad useful is a much bigger deal. On the other hand, given tools like Visual Basic and Folio Views, even that's getting a lot easier, since mostly you're trying to anticipate what data will be entered. Body temperatures, after all, have a rather narrow range.
More on CruisePad after we get used to it. It's not the pocket computer from
Mote,
but it's sur
e a lot closer to it than I thought I'd have at Chaos Manor in 1995.
For years I've talked about Mrs. Pournelle's reading program,
which teaches systematic phonics. Now, the state of California has rediscovered phonics after over 30 years of denigrating phonics instruction, and everyone is interested. The older version required a tutor, but the fancy new Mac version teaches reading by using the Mac sound system to give the lessons. She's been trying it out in selected Los Angeles schools, and the documented results are pretty astonishing: up to five years' grade-level improvement in reading ability from a few months of lessons with her program.
Roberta got enough inquiries that she wanted to make a fancy new manual with a color cover. Unfortunately, the images she wanted to print were on the Mac version of the program. And the only color printer we have is the Fargo Electronics Primera, which works only with PCs. That meant we'd have to transfer the image from Mac to PC.
You c
an do that with CorelDraw 5. I have CorelDraw 6, and at some point I'll have to install it; I'm told there are a lot of new features. You may want to hang onto version 5 if you get version 6; readers are reporting a variety of odd bugs. In any event, CorelDraw 5 did the job. Reading an image in Mac format and then cropping and adjusting it to be saved in DOS format turns out to be tedious but not all that difficult.
The most intriguing thing I read this month wasn't a book but an article
in the October 1995
Atlantic Monthly
, in which Clifford Cobb, Ted Halstead, and Jonathan Rowe examine the concept of Gross Domestic Product. When I was in aerospace engineering, we were warned against what was called "the figure of merit fallacy": the notion that you could take a complex system and use some math to reduce its performance to a single number, which you could then optimize. GDP is a classic case of that. The theory is that the faster GDP grows, the better the economy. The problem is
that GDP includes everything, good and bad; under the GDP concept, the greatest economic hero would be a cancer patient getting a triple bypass while starting divorce proceedings. GDP, in a word, is all credits and no debits, and that's insane.
The authors propose a remedy that would be worse than the disease, but their diagnosis of the problem is good.
When I first began writing this column, I got a call from the then director of the office that prepares the Consumer Price Index. He wanted to know if there was some way the government could use small computers and modems to compile the CPI. At that time, they were getting data from cities all over the country, punching it onto IBM cards, and mailing the boxes of cards to a mainframe. The postage alone was running a couple of hundred thousand dollars a month.
The CPI is in the news this week: since Social Security and other entitlement increases are keyed to it, getting it right can be the difference between government solvency and bankruptc
y. Everyone is sure it's wrong. There's no agreement on new ways to compute it, but at least small computers make adjustments possible.
GDP is in many ways more important than CPI; and my guess is that small computers will make it possible to adjust it so it discriminates between production and crime. All we have to do is agree on how.
The
computer book of the month
is by Charles Kaufman,
Radia Perlman, and Mike Speciner,
Network Security: Private Communications in a Public World
(Prentice-Hall, 1995); it's both readable and complete, and if you have anything to do with network security, you need this book.
One last bit of advice: if you have W95 running stably, be very careful how you muck with it. More on that next month.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
Every schoolroom and home student in America ought to have
CDSourceBook of American History
($49.95). It's that good. Contact Compa
ct University, Provo, UT, (800) 677-3045 or (801) 375-2227; fax (801) 375-2228; sales@infobases.com. Circle 1087 on Inquiry Card.
To utilize
CruisePad
($1399), there are three ways to connect to your network:
CruiseLAN/PCMCIA
($695), for computers with a PC Card Type II slot;
CruiseLAN/ISA
($595), a card for AT-type bus desktop PCs and servers; or
CruiseLAN/Access Point
($1895) relay boxes, for extending coverage to up to 1000 feet in diameter in normal office environments. Contact Zenith Data Systems, Buffalo Grove, IL, (800) 533-0331 or (708) 808-5000; fax (708) 808-4434;
http://www.zds.com
. Circle 1088 on Inquiry Card.
Dead Chickens and Portable Data
