mplement it, I had several hours' assistance from our artist associate David Em.
We tried a large number of tools, including FrontPage 97 and PageMaker. In fact, the first page we put up was PageMaker output; but we found that for the rather simple stuff we were doing, Microsoft Word in Office 97 turns out to be the best tool for the job. Once David and I got Roberta's page up, I did mine after he left. It's not all that difficult once you know how.
Roberta has done most of her program building with a Mac, and most of the art that's associated with her reading program is in Mac format. When I was buildin
g our Web pages, one of my biggest problems was converting Mac image files to a format that Windows would understand. One can put this problem squarely on Microsoft's doorstep: a little bit more intelligence about file-format recognition could have been built into Windows, but it wasn't, and the result can be sheer hell for people who don't have a lot of experience with the problem.
If you save Mac files on a PC-DOS-formatted disk, a PC can see the files, but it won't necessarily recognize them as image files or be able to do anything with them. They need to be converted. If you intend to put up the images on a Web page, in practice you need one of three formats: GIF, JPG, or BMP. A number of programs will read one format and output one of those three.
Quarterdeck's HiJaak Pro, would seem to be ideal: it says it will read just about any image-file format and, once it has done that, export it in any other. The problem with HiJaak Pro is that you must know what image-file format you started with; wo
rse, so far as I can tell, that file has to have the proper file extension for that format. If you don't know what format the file is in or what extension normally goes with that format, you're just out of luck. At least, I was.
CorelDraw is a bit better at trying to read files in unknown formats. Adobe Photoshop is better still. When Equilibrium Technologies' DeBabelizer was exclusively a Mac program, it was famous for being able to find and convert image files; we'll be testing the Windows version's ability this month. We'll also have a hard look at all the alternatives.
So far, Photoshop has been the most useful program. With its Open As command, you can search through an entire directory of files to see if there are any in a specified format. If it finds one, it will open it without regard to the file extension. Once that's done, you can crop, edit, change file formats, and export it as anything you like.
Since Photoshop recognizes a large number of file formats, it may take you a while
to try them all; but the good news is that if what you're after is genuinely an image file, Photoshop will probably find a way to open it. David Em reports that it's tedious, but he's never yet failed to get Photoshop to bring in at least part of an image.
Since Photoshop is also the proper tool for 2-D graphics manipulation, this is another clear win for that program.
CorelDraw isn't quite so good at reading odd files, but once you have them in CorelDraw, manipulation is pretty straightforward. I've been using it in conjunction with my effort to convert Roberta's reading-instruction program from the Mac to Windows Visual Basic. I find that once you get over the initial learning hurdles, CorelDraw and Visual Basic do work well together.
One of CorelDraw's real strengths is an enormous collection of royalty-free images: clip art; photographs of people, places, and things; backgrounds; textures; theme art, both photographs and drawings. Just about any visual image you could want is in one or a
nother of the Corel art and photo collections, at least one of which has more than 20,000 images on 200 CD-ROMs.
Once again, there are some odd hurdles to learning how to find, export, edit, and convert the image you're looking for. Corel has been at this so long that not all the collections are in the same formats or can be read by the same image-browsing program. Persistence pays, however. For my purposes, CorelDraw augmented by some of the art collections is the single most useful graphics program I have.
Office 97 is huge, and some people have had problems with it,
but it was a lifesaver for building Web pages. Roberta had a graphics image in Mac format. Converting that took some time, and incorporating it into her page was simplified by using PageMaker. Even then, we ended up using Office 97 for the final product.
I started with a number of Word documents on various subjects to be turned into HTML. Several had footnotes. HTML does not support footnotes, so they had to be converted
to hyperlinks. Other documents needed some terms explained for a general audience. Again, this was a good use of hyperlinks, which are actually better than footnotes. I have several HTML books, but the thought of inserting all the little HTML symbols by hand was daunting.
I didn't have to do that. Word 97 understands Web pages very well. With Word 97, you open a new HTML document, insert a Word document file, and you're halfway there. The footnotes don't come through properly. They're in there, and Word 97 has a neat feature that shows the footnote when you put the cursor on the footnote number in the main text. However, the HTML document format won't let you View Footnotes, or wouldn't for me.
What I did was open the original copy as a Word document, copy the footnotes, and paste them into the HTML copy. Now give each footnote a bookmark (Insert Bookmark; easiest thing in the world) and hyperlink to the footnote. When you insert a hyperlink, Word 97 gives you the choice of linking to a bookmark,
a file, or a Web site. It's all quite intuitive. Then I went through the text, found the concepts and words that needed explanation, wrote definitions and such as needed, bookmarked them, and created more hyperlinks. In an hour, I had several of my articles and position papers on space policy up on the Web.
For the record, what I used is available to any EarthLink user: you get 2 MB of Web-page space as part of your basic subscription. To use it, download FTP or learn to use the one in your browser. I find that the FTP given away on EarthLink works well. Then name your home Web page INDEX.HTML; and use FTP to upload the index page and all subsidiary pages to your Web site. It takes about as long to describe it as to do it, once you have the pages in HTML and can read them properly off-line with your Web browser.
One caution: subsidiary files include not only any graphics files you've inserted, but graphics files Word calls on for bullets, lines, etc. When you use Word to make a fancy line or bulle
t, it's actually inserting a graphics file. Word then saves that graphics file (with the extension .gif) in the same directory that you save the HTML file in.
Second caution: many Web systems are very case-sensitive with filenames. If you insert the file jp.jpg into your HTML document when the file is really named JP.JPG or JP.jpg, your browser may well find it when viewing it off-line, and yet fail to do so when viewing it on the Web site.
The remedy is to rename the Web-site JPG file properly. Unfortunately, that can be exceedingly hard to do. Windows 95 (Win 95) is rather stupid about renaming filenames, and all my attempts to rename jp.jpg as JP.JPG completely failed; yet Word 97 inserted JP.JPG as the filename even though I did Browse and clicked on it. In desperation, I changed to HTML Source in Word 97, found the filename, and manually changed it to jp.jpg. That worked, but it's pretty stupid to have to do it that way. Incidentally, no book I have addresses this problem.
Office 97 is
big enough to deserve the name bloatware, and some readers have reported bugs. For instance, Word 97 does not seem to be able to convert long (greater than 1 MB) files from WordPerfect formats. I haven't explored the new features in the non-Word parts of Office 97. For that matter, I can't think of much that I want done that Word 97 does and that Word 7 in Office 95 doesn't do to ordinary documents; but when it comes to Web-page preparation, Word 97 is the bee's knees.
Actually, I'd intended to do more with Office 97 for this month's column.
I'm on the road -- literally, with Roberta driving while I type this. We've just come from a Computer Users in Education meeting in Sacramento, and the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) starts tomorrow and runs through my column deadline. Thus, I'm working with the Nimantics Orion 8X portable. I've plugged its power converter into one of those gadgets that delivers 110-V power from the car's cigarette lighter, and it's working splendidly. (For mo
re on the Nimantics Orion 8X, see my previous columns in BYTE and on the BYTE Web site.)
The Orion 8X has a 200-MHz Pentium processor, plenty fast enough to run Office 97, and it has an eight-speed CD-ROM drive. It didn't have Office 97. I was in a hurry to get out of the house and didn't see my regular Office 97 CD, so I grabbed a previously uninstalled Microsoft Office 97 Preview program. This says on the disc that it's licensed to one computer for a limited time only, after which you have to install the regular edition. Fine, thought I. It will be on only this one computer, and I need it for only a week.
Yesterday morning I installed it. The installation took half an hour; Office 97 is
big
. I very carefully told it
not
to disturb any previous programs -- such as Office 95 -- and to put itself into a separate directory. It told me I had to close the Office 95 toolbar, which I did, after which it trundled along and announced that installation was successful. Now I rebooted.
Fi
rst thing I saw was a message: "Your copy of Fast Find has expired." This was a bit frightening. Then I tried to open Word. "Your copy of Microsoft Word has expired." I tried to open Word 7. "Incompatible versions, please drop dead, OK?" (Well, it didn't quite say that, but that's what it meant.) At this point, I was in a near panic. I have a lot of work to do, and I can't work without a word processor. Worse, I had started this column and had maybe a thousand words done, and I'd hate to re-create all that in Q&A Write.
Office 97 was filling my laptop's hard drive to no purpose and seemed to be preventing access to Word 7. Time to uninstall. Control panel, Install/Remove Programs. I was pleased to see that Office 95 was still listed in the registry as Microsoft Office, and Office 97 had a separate listing. Uninstall Office 97.
Insert your installation CD.
After I stopped growling, I fished the useless thing out of the motel wastebasket. Fortunately, I hadn't broken it and danced on the b
its. Sure, the label warned that it would work for only a limited time, but that led me to believe it would work for only a week, or a month, not that it expired on a certain date. Why not print the expiration date on the label? Or at least have the installation program check the expiration date before wasting half an hour copying files.
The uninstallation was complicated, with confusing messages, and it wasn't complete. A remnant of the useless Fast Find was left in my Startup folder. Worse though, all traces of shortcuts to Office 95 were gone. There wasn't any way to start Word 7. I spelunked through the directories and eventually found the Office 95 toolbar. Double-clicking on it got me a way to start Word 7, and that's what I am using to write this, so it all ended well barring a near cardiac from fear and rage.
There are several morals to this story. The first, for me, was a resolution never again to install a Microsoft Preview program. Second, if you do install Office 97, in any version wha
tever,
keep the CD
, because you may never be able to remove it without that CD. Third, Microsoft has gotten so big that it can put out a Preview that will install itself without checking first to see if it has expired. The message here is that Microsoft's time is worth more than yours. As Roberta observes, no start-up company could get away with being that arrogant.
And having said all that, I must report that when I got to WinHEC and told that story, I didn't find a single Microsoft person who wasn't horrified at the problems I'd had. The manager of Microsoft installation programs turns out to be not only a nice chap but someone genuinely concerned about making things better -- he was hired precisely because he did not come from inside Microsoft. When he heard about this, he came to tell me he could very well understand that I was angry because it looked like the kind of thing any darn fool would check, but they hadn't. It will be fixed in the future. So I was promised, and in fact I believe it.
I'll get to the other "features" in Office 97 when I get home; this will be on the wire very quickly after I reach Chaos Manor.
The buzzphrase at WINHEC was "compelling rich interactive user experience,"
which is the new goal for hardware and software vendors alike. Sometimes that happens in real life, although it's not usual at Chaos Manor.
Pentafluge is one of the oldest 60-MHz Pentium-based systems. It was built by myself (a little) and Larry Aldridge of PC Power & Cooling (a lot) from a Micronics Computers M5Pi motherboard, a DPT SmartCache III controller, a Western Digital Caviar 4-GB hard drive, a Maxoptix T3-1300 optical drive, and a Plextor/Texel Double Speed Plus CD-ROM drive. The last three are SCSI-1 devices.
Pentafluge is old enough to have been one of the first Pentium test systems for early prebeta builds of Win 95, and a number of bugs were found and corrected running Windows tests with Pentafluge. Once Win 95 was stable, I used him as my main machine for both
writing and networking until last summer, when I phased in Cyrus, the Cyrix 6x86-P166. Since last November, Pentafluge has been Larry Niven's workstation when he works on our collaborative novels here. The system has also been used to test games.
Pentafluge was plenty fast enough as Larry's writing machine and as the host for the Maxoptix T3-1300 optical drive, which we use for ultrasafe backup storage, so there was no reason to speed him up other than that it looked like it would be easy to do. Alas, though, he wasn't fast enough for games. It seemed to take an eternity for MicroProse Software's Master of Orion II to update a turn or to shift scenes in Blizzard Entertainment's Diablo. Pentafluge's location makes that system ideal for testing games, because it's just far enough from my desk that someone can work there without distracting me. So when Intel offered me a test copy of the Pentium OverDrive processor, Pentafluge was the obvious choice.
Installing the OverDrive was incredibly easy. (You
can tell I've been at a Microsoft conference; they can't have those without saying incredible in every other sentence, and it's catching.) It literally took longer to disconnect the rat's nest of wiring and lift Pentafluge up on a worktable than it did to insert the OverDrive chip once I could get at the motherboard.
The Micronics board comes with a zero insertion force (ZIF) chip mount. The old Pentium 60 chip had an externally powered fan mounted on the chip. I disconnected that, opened the lever in the chip mount, removed the old chip, looked on the detailed diagram in the instructions to be sure I had the new chip oriented properly, and dropped it in. The OverDrive has a fan, but it's powered off the chip socket; no external power connection is required.
Close the chip-socket lever and turn on the machine. It worked fine.
The OverDrive comes with a disk. The software isn't needed for the system's operation; it's a set of tests and benchmarks. You're supposed to run it before you replace
your old chip, do the replacement, and run it again. I didn't do that, so I put the old chip back in, ran the diagnostics, and reinstalled the OverDrive. I did that only out of curiosity; none of the software is needed.
The result is that Pentafluge runs at least twice as fast as before, and for some operations, there seems to be even more improvement. I quickly ran all the diagnostic tests and then my standard software like Word. I tested the Ethernet connection to the other machines here and used the U.S. Robotics Courier V.Everything external modem to log on to EarthLink. No problems.
Pentafluge isn't quite as fast as a new 133-MHz Pentium-based system, but it's hard to tell the difference. I'll continue reliability tests, but I don't anticipate any problems. It may be cheaper to replace your motherboard and CPU than to use an OverDrive, and if you do, you'll probably have a faster machine overall; but that's a hassle, and you'll want to be sure your memory will work with the new motherboard.
If you're getting bored with your old Pentium 60 and want to upgrade without installation problems, the Intel Pentium OverDrive is what you need.
While I had Pentafluge open, I swapped out the CD-ROM drive. The original was a double-speed drive, which was state of the art when Pentafluge was built but is slow now. Moreover, sometime last year, the little spring that closes the drive door broke. A couple of weeks ago I was out at Fry's and saw a bargain on a Sony SCSI six-speed CD-ROM drive, so I bought it to install the next time I had Pentafluge open. Once I was sure that the new OverDrive chip worked, I put the Sony drive in. Then I tested it "breadboard fashion" before removing the old drive and installing the new one.
Pentafluge came up all right. The BIOS reported something was wrong, but I told it to go ahead and boot Win 95 anyway. Win 95 trundled awhile looking at drivers, and all was well. I shut down, took out the old drive, fought with the rails and mounting system for the new one, and
started up again.
"No boot device." After a moment of panic, I turned off the power, reversed the big SCSI-1 ribbon cable that I'd got on backward, and that took care of that. I now have a six-speed CD-ROM drive. Best of all, that was the last CD-ROM drive that needed those horrid carriers. I've always hated those carriers, and now I can get rid of them all.
If your CD-ROM drive is slow, or you're sick of the stupid carrier on your old drive, updating is pretty much foolproof, and there seem to be specials on good brand name drives every week.
Memphis is the code word for Microsoft's replacement for Win 95.
It's supposed to be very compatible with the upcoming NT 5.0, the major differences being security and networking. (I'm sure there are others as well.) There was a lot of talk about Memphis at WinHEC, and I've got a beta build of it I'll try out as soon as I file this column. It's said to be very stable and to fix a number of annoying bugs and bad features of Win 95.
It was fas
cinating to hear them talking about Memphis at WinHEC, because they never slipped up and called it anything else. The whole press corps was listening in case they dropped some hint of the final product name, but they didn't. Oh, well.
Meanwhile, wake up and smell the Java. In three days of WinHEC, there were about two mentions of Microsoft's ActiveX, while there was a great deal of talk about Java. I leave you to draw the obvious conclusion.
The CD-ROM of the month is a whole series of science and education discs
from DK Multimedia. They have Earth Quest, Dinosaur Hunter, general science, and discs on bugs and birds. All of them come with trial subscriptions to Science Online. DK is doing what I hoped the CD-ROM industry would do, producing well-organized original materials keyed to curious students from preteen to college age. Go to their Web site for a look. I bet you'll like what you see. This stuff is way cool.
The
book of the month
is Charles Harrington Elster's
There's a
Word for It!
(Scribner, ISBN 0-684-82455-8). There's no better book for a dringle, and yes, I learned that word from the book. To go with it, there's William F. Buckley Jr.'s
Buckley:
The Right Word
(Random House, ISBN 0-679-45214-1). They're both readable and must reads if you write much.
The
computer book of the month
is Que Books'
The Complete Idiot's Guide to Microsoft Word 97
(ISBN 0-7897-0953-8). Some of these
Idiot's Guide
s aren't much use or are too cute for words; but this one is well written and does what it's supposed to do. I learned a lot about Word in general and Word 97 in particular.
The
game of the month
is Wooden Ships and Iron Men from Avalon Hill; it has a couple of odd features that take getting used to, but it's a good simulation of naval warfare in Napoleonic times.
There were two big disappointments. BattleCruiser 3000 AD is a game I looked forward to for a long time. Alas, it turns out to be unplayable. Privateer 2: The
Darkening is all shoot-'em-up and nothing like the wonderful Privateer and its add-on Righteous Fire. Oh, well.
On a better note, I've been enjoying SSI's Steel Panthers II: Modern Battles, and as I promised in a previous column, I'm using it to design future battles. Finally, Master of Orion II is a great deal of fun.
I've done about 10,000 words this month. My long-suffering editor will put most of that on BYTE's Web site, including another graphics report from David Em, so be sure and look there. Meanwhile, for next month, I'm working on a Pentium II-based system, a 56-Kbps modem from U.S. Robotics that works for connecting to EarthLink, and there are piles of really interesting applications software I hope to get to. Stay tuned.
Product Information
CorelDraw 7.0..........................$489.00
Corel Corp.
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Phone: 800-772-6735
Phone: 613-728-3733
Fax: 613-761-9176
Internet:
http://www.corel.com
Enter 978 on Inquiry Card.
A Web Site for Chaos Manor
