hey were made by National Presto, but it gives no city or state. A Web search did not produce any hits.
Time for PhoneDisc PowerFinder. I have several other sets of phone numbers on CD-ROM, but I just got an updated PhoneDisc set, and it has always worked. I've changed machines since I used it last, but the installation is simple. It took only 30 seconds. Now to search, but where? PhoneDisc comes on six CDs. I started with the Northeast. Nothing. Next, I tried the business search button. That demanded that I tell it what kind of business. I hadn't the faintest notion, and there were a lot of categories, so I went back to names.
Change to the Atlantic States CD-ROM. I found that while PhoneDisc has a way to force a refresh when you change discs -- actually it's obvious, being a CD-ROM icon and first on the toolbar -- I did not see how to do it. I also found that if you act as if you haven't changed d
iscs and just proceed, you can lock up Windows 95 (Win 95) to hardware reset. Or at least I can, because I did it. What you must do when you change discs is hit the CD-ROM icon or else exit the program and restart it.
There was no National Presto in Atlantic States. Change to Midwest, click on the change disc icon, type in National Presto, and bingo. National Presto of Eau Claire, Wisconsin. It gives complete contact information. It also tells you the company is business category 363404, Electric Appliances, Small. I'd never have guessed that, because my pressure cookers aren't electric.
The important thing is that I found it, and that reminded me that somehow last month I forgot PhoneDisc PowerFinder in my User's Choice Awards. I shouldn't have because this is one of the most useful tools I have.
PhoneDisc gives you almost every listed phone number in the U.S., along with addresses, ZIP codes, fax numbers, and Web sites if known. I haven't used the Web-launcher feature yet, but it's a way t
o launch your browser and go to a Web site in one operation. The indexing is amazing, with thousands of business types. I don't see how anyone gets along without it, and PhoneDisc PowerFinder gets a belated User's Choice Award.
Once I had the fax number of National Presto,
I tried to use Symantec's WinFax Pro to send them a message. It didn't work: I kept getting the message that there was a printer error. I thought perhaps it was because I had upgraded Microsoft Word from 6.0c since I'd used WinFax Pro last , but that wasn't it. When I went to tell Win 95 that WinFax Pro is the default printer, I discovered no WinFax printer icon: the printer driver was gone. I've no idea how that happened, but I am always messing with this machine on the theory that if I have problems, I may save you some trouble.
Anyway, there's probably a way to install that printer driver without reinstallation of WinFax Pro, but I went back to square one. The result was awful.
Before I go through my ta
le of woe, a conclusion: once it's properly installed, WinFax Pro is still the best of the Windows fax programs. However, I truly believe the installation program was designed by fiends.
My troubles came when WinFax Pro offered to make use of Microsoft Access. The default is "don't do that." I don't use Microsoft Access or Microsoft Mail, but I thought it might do no harm to learn, so I foolishly checked the Yes box.
The rest of the installation seemed to go all right, except that when it came time to shut down the machine and restart, it wouldn't shut down properly. Microsoft Internet Explorer hung up, and I had to use a hardware reset.
It came back up all right. I opened the Printers folder and found the WinFax icon, set that to the default printer, and opened Word to send my fax to National Presto. Up came a box demanding that I tell it the path to the Microsoft Post Office. It also kindly informed me that if I didn't know that path, I should ask my mail administrator. I have neither Post
Office nor a mail administrator, so I tried to cancel it. Nothing happened. Tried to go back. Nothing. Closed Word in hopes that would close the whole mess. Word closed, but that box remained, covering 25 percent of my desktop. It wouldn't move, and it wouldn't close, and I couldn't start any other programs. Back to hardware reset again.
I tried once more, this time invoking WinFax Pro rather than Word and looking for a way to tell it I don't have a mailbox. Pretty soon I was right back there with that box open, and it was hardware reset time again.
At this point, I must have taken leave of my senses. When the program came back up, I told it to uninstall WinFax Pro. It did that, although it gave me some problems when trying to exit, and once again I found myself doing Ctrl-Alt-Del. Then I installed WinFax Pro again, this time paying attention to what was going on.
First, WinFax Pro's installation program plays "music" I don't want to hear. If I want music when I work -- I generally do as a
matter of fact -- I turn on KUSC (now that they've gone back to the classical format). I don't need an installation program trying to amuse me. When it got to the question about Microsoft, I carefully left it unchecked. The rest went well, or at least I thought it did, but when I invoked Word, I got a General Protection Fault. This is serious. I can live without WinFax Pro but not without Word.
This time I pressed the power switch, waited for a count of 30, and brought the system up again. Invoked Word. No problems. Went to the Printers folder and set WinFax Pro as the default printer, brought up my document, and sent my fax. It was then I realized that I had clobbered my phone book when I did the uninstallation. That fax phone book didn't have anything I don't have in another place, but it was convenient. I manually put in the number for National Presto, told it to add it to the phone book, and sent the fax.
Of course, it wouldn't send. If you retrieve a number from the phone book, WinFax Pro add
s the 1 to the dialing string if the area code is different from your area code. However, if you manually type a number in TO, it tries that exact number, and that failed, giving, interestingly enough, a line busy message. I tried again, this time bringing in the number from the phone book. It worked just fine, connecting at 14.4 Kbps. I really love that U.S. Robotics Courier V.Everything modem.
I'm running Norton System Doctor on this machine, and that has a protected recycle bin. Perhaps I could recover the phone book.
Not a chance. There's nothing that calls itself a phone book. I kept mucking around hoping to find the phone book, but it's simply not in any file I can identify.
Coincidentally, Roberta wanted to send 40 faxes about new developments in her reading program. She has WinFax Pro 7.0 on her Gateway 2000 P5-200XL downstairs. She'd forgotten that you have to set the default printer to WinFax Pro. Once that was done, we built up a list of numbers to send faxes to and let WinFax Pro
take over, which it did perfectly. Meanwhile, I've had no more problems at all. WinFax Pro is a very good program if you survive the installation.
For years I have avoided setting up a computer to receive faxes. That's part sloth and part paranoia. My security system is 100 percent certain: I've never allowed any computer on my network to answer a telephone, not even for voice mail or a fax. Our fax system was a simple box with its own phone number. It receives faxes, prints them on a whacking great roll of thermal paper, and cuts them more or less to size.
That worked for years, but lately I am getting far more faxes, enough that I have to change paper rolls nearly every day. Most of them are annoying messages about products I cannot possibly find interesting, and often are duller than that. There are announcements that someone I never heard of has been promoted to a post I care nothing about. There are also investment opportunities, press releases I actually find interesting, messages for Rober
ta about the Opera League, exceedingly long messages from people whose bread isn't fully baked, and much more. In a word, the situation has gotten out of hand, and it's time for a change.
To that end, I've put Win 95 on SuperCow, the Gateway 2000 486DX2 VL-Bus machine that for years served as my Windows 3.11 test-bed, and prepped it to take over as the fax server. I intend to read incoming faxes on-screen and print only those that need paper copies. Most faxes will be sent from within Word. From previous experience, my own and others I trust, I've decided on WinFax Pro as the software.
I have an elderly but serviceable Mannesmann Tally printer to attach to the system, so the only thing I need is a scanner. I have a couple of fax-scanning devices, including a Lumina unit that looks serviceable, so all that remains is to set it up. If it all works, I'll network it into the system.
When that's done, I intend to use the Network Systems Security Router as a firewall and sentinel to another phone
line, giving me access to my network when I'm on the road. I've wanted to do this off and on for years, but it has never been urgent because I've always carried laptops with enough disk capacity to hold nearly everything I need on the road.
Last month, though, I was the guest of honor at a small convention in Denver. Larry Niven was there, and I wanted him to see some work I'd done on
The Burning City
just before I left home. Only when I went to show it to him, I found I'd copied the wrong darned file. It sure would have been convenient if I could have dialed Chaos Manor and downloaded the file. That incident moved this project up a notch, and when I get the fax server installed, I'll work on remote access to my network. A full report when I get it done.
The
really
good news is that we have a new Compaq
Professional Workstation 5000, a dual-processor Pentium Pro/200 with 256 MB (really) of error-checked RAM and two 4.3-GB hard drives run by an on-board Ultra-Wide
SCSI controller. It comes standard with on-board 10-/100-Mb Ethernet, an eight-speed CD-ROM drive, and "business" (basically Sound Blaster 16) sound.
Ours came with twin very-high-end Elsa Gloria-L OpenGL-accelerated video boards, each board driving a different monitor. The result is awesome: David Em, our artist associate, astonished Yat Chan, the Compaq representative who came with the system (you probably won't get quite that level of support). I'll get back to that in a moment.
Compaq is known for their high-quality engineering. This box is built like a tank. It's a desktop configuration. It is easily "tower-able"; just flip it on its side. The CD-ROM drive even has "flippers" to hold the CD-ROM in place when you insert it vertically. The Professional Workstation 5000's card cage connects with a riser card, which plugs into the motherboard. You can pull the whole thing out and disassemble the entire machine in under 2 minutes with no tools. Given that each Elsa board costs more than many enti
re systems, the extra work room is worth having.
The cage design caused Alex a minor problem. He first set the system up at David's house. Unless you get the card cage well and truly seated, the machine won't boot up, and it didn't. When they brought it here to Chaos Manor, I solved the problem once and for all by using Stabilant 22, the miracle all-purpose contact enhancer. It not only makes for better electrical contacts -- a major use of Stabilant 22 is to get all the electrical noise out of hi-fi systems -- but also lubricates connector insertions. If you don't use Stabilant 22, I bet you wish you did.
Given that you seat the card cage properly, the Professional Workstation 5000 is as solid as a rock. You can change disk drives through the front bezel. I let the system stay on displaying really complex graphics and no screen saver while we went to dinner. I then had it do a lot of disk operations. Next, we opened it immediately for heat tests.
There wasn't any heat. Those huge Pentium Pr
o chips (no fans, just heat sinks) were warm, but I could put my hand on them, and they were the hottest spots in the box. It didn't overheat when we ran it with the cover off, and although it's not recommended, Compaq runs their lab rats with the tops off all the time. The bottom line is, this is one well-designed and well-made box. It also performs.
David works graphics systems hard. To challenge the Professional Workstation 5000's abilities, he brought over some huge graphics files on Iomega Zip cartridges. Once we had the dual screens working properly, we needed to get those files into the Compaq. I could have gone up to my monk's cell to get the parallel-port Zip drive, but given the size of the files, a SCSI connection was preferable. My SCSI Zip drive is attached to the Cyrix 6x86-P166's external SCSI-2 port with a Granite Digital SCSI-2-to-DB-25 cable. The Professional Workstation 5000 comes with Ultra-Wide SCSI built in, so the only problem was to find the right cable.
We needed an Ultra-
Wide-SCSI-to-DB-25 cable. A search through the cable room turned up plenty of Ultra-SCSI-to-SCSI-1 and SCSI-1-to-DB-25 cables, but no SCSI-1 sex changer. Then Alex realized that all SCSI-1 (DB-50) devices
are
SCSI-1 sex changers, so we brought out an old Maximum Storage Duette optical drive. The connection went Compaq to Duette, Duette to Zip drive. When we started up the Professional Workstation 5000, its on-board Ultra-Wide SCSI controller instantly recognized both devices. We hadn't installed any drivers for the Duette, but the Zip drive was immediately available.
David transferred some of his complex graphics files, and we began the experiments, using Adobe Photoshop, 3D Studio Max, and other graphics programs. I was fascinated: I've never seen anything like that. Neither had Yat Chan.
Bottom line: this system soars. I rather reluctantly let David take it home with him; after all, he's the one who can use all that capability. The good news is that I'll get my Doubleshot 133 back. The
bad news is I fear the only way I'll get that Professional Workstation 5000 back is to pry it out of David's cold, dead fingers. For now, all I have are his first observations.
We had some problems, none particularly serious. Under NT, with the right drivers, the screens are logically connected -- you can drag things from one screen to the other. The center of the viewing area is therefore divided between screens. Installation programs tend to center their presentations and dialog boxes, and most have no provision for moving that stuff around. The result is you can get walleyed looking at divided installation displays.
Some programs get confused as to where an image is, and when you drag from one screen to the other, there's some smearing, or artifacts are left behind. Yat Chan was sure no one at Compaq or Elsa had tried really high-end graphics software on a setup like this and is certain it will be corrected by the time you see this.
Meanwhile, we concluded that none of the problems matter
much compared to the benefits of having both screens. As David says, "Two heads are better than one." Here's his preliminary report:
"I've found at least three immediate improvements in productivity: I can shove all the palettes, tear-off control panels, and related hoo-ha onto the second monitor. I can see a full version of an image on one monitor and a zoomed version on the second one, letting me work on detail areas while not losing sight of the original composition. I realize now that the reason I've had trouble finishing some of the high-resolution pictures I've been working on is that
I couldn't see what I was doing
.
"With two full-screen applications open, I can make adjustments to an image in one program and update it almost immediately in the other, creating a very productive feedback loop. Right now, I am working on a children's book that's called
James the Dinosaur
. With Photoshop on one monitor and PageMaker on the other, I can import a picture into PageMaker, see ho
w it looks on the page, send it back to Photoshop, make adjustments, and reopen it in PageMaker, all without opening and closing windows or applications. Of course, this is RAM-intensive, but these days RAM is cheap.
"Also, this has given me a chance to use my Nanao Trinitron T2-20 and the ViewSonic P815 MegaMonitor next to each other in the current resolution of choice of 3072 by 1152 pixels, and while the Trinitron still is best for color fidelity, the P815
really
pays off in text clarity. When font sizes get this teeny, the Trinitron text gets unacceptably mushy."
Clearly, David is in love. This is all very high-end stuff. It's also astoundingly cheap for the capabilities; you couldn't have touched this much graphics power for less than six figures a few years ago. We'll have much more about the Compaq Professional Workstation 5000 and how it performs with different graphics packages in future columns.
Meanwhile, for yourself or for your company, think hard about real costs. Comp
uter equipment in this class costs money, but it's cheap if it increases your creative abilities. Years ago, I borrowed $12,000 to buy my first computer, Ezekial, which was a Z80. I made back every cent of it in six months by turning out a second book that year -- and that doesn't count the columns that resulted from having a computer to write with. It's the same with graphic artist talent: it doesn't take much of an increase in work to pay for something like this Compaq machine.
The Compaq Professional Workstation 5000 with Elsa Gloria-L boards can do both 2-D and 3-D, and the extra CPU power isn't just nice to have, there are tasks you simply cannot do without it.
Of course, you don't need this much equipment if you're not doing really high-end graphics. Multiscreen adapters from Colorgraphic Communications let you run multiple monitors off a single PC, and while the resolution/color won't be up there with the Compaq/Elsa systems under NT, they're good enough for stockbrokers or page-layout work
.
However, if you're looking for professional graphics capabilities, you won't go wrong with a dual-processor Compaq driving dual screens.
Finally, lest my Mac-using readers feel slighted, just at column deadline we got a high-end Power Mac 9500 with dual 180-MHz processors, 256 MB of RAM, and a 4-GB hard drive. Plugged it in. It had to have its permanent memory zapped before it could see our "generic" monitor, but then it ran with the ViewSonic without problems. We're now collecting hot video cards, software, and other goodies for it. It works. Details in months to come.
Several computer books this month, all on a theme:
Todd Stauffer's
Using HTML 3.2
(ISBN 0-7897-0985-6) in Que's
User Friendly
series is good for beginners and as an intermediate reference. Aaron Walsh's
Java for Dummies
(ISBN 1-56884-641-X) is a good introduction to that subject. IDG Books'
Dummies
series is uneven in quality, and I wonder if they haven't tried to publish
too many books for their editorial supervisory capabilities, but this one is quite useful. Finally, Arthur van Hoff and Sami Shaio's
Hooked on Java: Creating Hot Web Sites with Java Applets
(Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-201-48837-X) isn't an introductory work, but once you know a bit about Java, this book will take you quickly through intermediate to beginning advanced levels. If you're just getting into Web-page design, get all three books.
The
CD-ROM of the month
is Corbis's Leonardo da Vinci. Corbis is known as "Bill Gates's other company," and they consistently produce high-quality CD-ROMs on important subjects. Their first, A Passion For Art: Renoir, Cézanne, Matisse, and Dr. Barnes, was a milestone, offering the general public an unrestricted view of Dr. Albert C. Barnes's collection of modern art.
Gates clearly has directed Corbis to spare little expense in maintaining quality, and I suspect the company is as much a labor of love as a profit center for him. Some
time ago, he acquired Leonardo's
Codex Leicester
, his coded notes on science, architecture, and geometry. Gates calls himself the steward of this important piece of history. The CD-ROM is based on it and is as good a way for Gates to share it as any I can think of. If you have any interest at all in the history of science and art, you will find the Leonardo da Vinci CD-ROM utterly fascinating.
I still have a huge pile of stuff on my ready table, but I've already written more than can be printed. Be sure to visit BYTE's Web site for the Web Exclusive part of the column. Next month, we continue with the latest in arts and graphics programs and equipment. I also have some scriptwriting tools that need discussion.
Where to Find
Leonardo da Vinci..........................$49.95
Corbis Corp.
Bellevue, WA
Phone: 800-246-2065
Phone: 206-641-4505
Fax: 206-643-9740
Internet:
http://www.corbis.com
Circle 1014 on Inquiry Card.
Two Heads Are Better Than One
