Fooling Around with the Web

Jerry finds some new tools to help him work on his Web site -- and finds time for a visit to SIGGRAPH.

Jerry Pournelle

I have just spent the weekend chairing a meeting of the Citizens Advisory Council on National Space Policy. Fifty rocket scientists and the administrator of NASA made for some intense discussions. I'm a bit exhausted, and I've got the meeting reports to write. With luck, you'll find some of the results on my Web site, and there will be a link to the council's Web site as soon as we get that set up.

I've been fooling around with the Web again. You can see my latest efforts at http://home.earthlink.net/~jerryp , not the easiest thing in the world to remember, but it works. I've been quite happy w ith Earthlink's services, and it's a lot easier than trying to maintain my own servers for a Web site. It's also a lot cheaper, since my page comes free with the Earthlink basic services.

It's not a fancy site. I've been offered help by some of the best people in this business -- for that matter, BYTE has some of them on its staff -- but the point of this exercise is to see what I can do more or less unaided. I did have David Em help me get started, but it's pretty much mine now. It will always be a text-oriented site -- I'm a wordsmith, not an artist -- but I'm learning about whizbangs, and over time I may drop a few in.

On that score, have a look at the home page at http://www.lynda.com . New Riders author Lynda Weinman has some good demonstrations. Her husband has an absolutely mad page called "Stink," with more demonstrations of what you can do. It also has links to what he calls a "hall of shame": bad Web sites, at least two of which managed to crash Netscape as I tried frantically to get away from them.

Another interesting place is http://www.webmonkey.com , which has tutorials. I have only recently realized, although I may have known it for a while, that with Netscape, you can "view" the original HTML source code of a site that does things you find interesting and capture it to a file to have exam ples to work with.

In my case, I have the wonderful Olympus D-300L digital camera, which makes it a snap to get digital pictures. It will even take pictures of text pages, diagrams, and, for that matter, other pictures. Olympus has steadily improved the software that comes with the camera. It's now easy enough to use that I can recommend it to nearly anyone able to use a computer, especially if they have a BYTE reader helping the first time they download pictures and play with them.

The D-300L comes with Adobe PhotoDeluxe, a sort of poor man's Photoshop. PhotoDeluxe is all right, but if you really want to touch up photographs -- both digital photos from a camera like the D-300L or scanned images of regular photos -- look at Kai's Photo Soap from MetaCreations. I find that Paint Shop Pro from Jasc is about the best all-purpose photo-tinker program I have. Photoshop is said to be better -- and perhaps it is -- but I find Paint Shop Pro a great deal easier to understand, and it's what I've been using for most Web photo work.

Photo Soap is amazing: it can do automatically what the other programs can accomplish only if you know what you're doing. If you have old photographs or you're a lousy photographer, try Photo Soap. Then when you get the picture the way you want it, use Paint Shop Pro to put it into JPEG format with the "progressive" option. That saves the picture in interlaced layers, so that when it is first downloaded, it appears as a blurry outline with progressively sharper detail.

PhotoDeluxe saves JPEG files in linear fashion: you see the top stripe of the picture and then the next, etc. It's possible that PhotoDeluxe will save in interlaced or progressive mode, and Photoshop will, but after 10 minutes of tinkering with manuals and help files, I wasn't able to make it work. With Paint Shop Pro I got it first try, so that's the one I'll be using.

Graphics files take a lot of disk space. It's also hard to know what's in a file. The other day, I used the D-300L to shoot a se ries of pictures of the tenth Sunday after Trinity service at St. Mary's. I downloaded them from the camera to the Fujitsu magneto-optical (MO) disc. The download software lets me give a root filename -- in this case, trini for Trinity -- and will then give each a unique name, so I ended up with trini0.jpg to trini26.jpg . Not all of them were taken at St. Mary's -- some were on the camera before I started -- and some were a great deal better than others for putting up on the Web site.

If you build your Web pages with Microsoft Office 97 Word, it will give you a preview of a picture you're about to insert, but that's still a painful way to select pictures. Much better is ThumbsPlus, a shareware program that makes thumbnail sketches of your graphics files. You can aim ThumbsPlus at an entire disc, and it will find every graphics file and make a thumbnail.

We had one problem with ThumbsPlus. Graphics files tend to be big, and with the D-300L, I can make a lot of them. In 10 24- by 768-pixel resolution, the D-300L holds 30 pictures; but in VGA (640 by 480 pixels), it will hold over a hundred, each one 50 KB and more in full-image JPEG (i.e., the images are compressed, but no detail is lost; as opposed to partial-quality JPEG, which blurs out some details as it compresses the file).

It seemed natural to combine the D-300L with the Olympus MO drive. The Olympus MO and Fujitsu MO drives use the same medium and format, so discs are interchangeable between them. MO discs hold 128 to 230 MB (there are larger ones, but I never find them at Fry's) and cost under $20; a lot of storage for the money. They're a natural accessory to a digital camera, so when I download my photographs from the D-300L, they go onto an MO disc.

Then I found that ThumbsPlus would look at the MO drive, pretend to make thumbnails -- and do nothing. This was frustrating, and the help file had nothing, so I called the programmer. "Do you have a volume label on the MO disc?" he asked. "We use that in maki ng the database."

A quick check showed I didn't, so I added one. After this, ThumbsPlus worked perfectly with the MO discs. This program has quickly become essential: if you do any graphics work, get ThumbsPlus and pay the registration fee. You'll be glad you did. Highly recommended.

Another utility worth having is Quick View Plus for Windows 95 (Win 95) and NT. This will plug into Norton Commander for Windows 95 and NT, and view nearly any file, including graphics files. It doesn't seem to view JPEG files saved by Paint Shop Pro in progressive format, although it has no problem with the same file saved linearly. Otherwise, I haven't found much that it won't show. Of course, Quick View Plus will work by itself or in conjunction with other file management software (including Explorer), but I particularly like it with Commander 95.

Commander has always been my favorite file manager, but the Windows version lacks the wonderful viewers that the last DOS versions had. With Quick View Plus, you ca n look at nearly anything, including individual components of ZIP files, DLLs, uuencoded files, and all kinds of stuff. I prefer to use it with Commander, because when I use Explorer and double-click on a file, I am never sure what will happen; with Commander, F3 brings in Quick View Plus and nothing else. Together, Commander and Quick View Plus are a killer combination. Recommended.

Finally, there's PhotoRecall from G&A Imaging. While this does limited special effects, mostly it's useful for organizing photographs into albums. It does that reasonably well, but it doesn't seem to have a batch capability. That is, to make a new album, I have to select and load pictures one at a time. Once that's done, it's easy to move them around in the album.

The presentation is quite good: a small, medium, or large picture in an album layout. Click on it to get the full-size picture. There's also a way to search the Web for pictures, although most pictures I have found on the Web are not ones I would want to download and keep. As a presentation system, PhotoRecall is neat, but as a management system for lots of photographs, I greatly prefer ThumbsPlus.

In the course of playing with the Web, we upgraded our software, and that generates this month's tales of hope, horror, and glory.

Begin with CyberMedia's Oil Change. If you regularly cruise the Internet, you need this program, which finds and downloads updates to your software. In our case, it found an update to Dial-Up network and one to Win 95 Winsock. We downloaded and installed them on Cyrus, the Cyrix P-166 that is my current main Win 95 machine. My real main machine is now Princess, a Compaq Professional Workstation 5000 running NT 4.0, but for the moment, I do a lot of work on Cyrus as well. Both updates installed painlessly, although there were a few oddities. For instance, I had to go find the passwords to my Dial-Up network accounts, because the update lost the ones I'd saved.

The result is a real improvement. Internet access is m uch faster, and multiple Internet operations really work. We were able to simultaneously do two downloads, answer mail, and go look at another Web site without any slowdowns. That's quite an improvement from a free download.

This worked so well that Alex thought he'd apply them to Pentafluge, the rather- dated Pentium 60 machine with an Intel Pentium OverDrive processor that Larry Niven uses when he works here. The result was a disaster: whatever effect these upgrades had on Internet browsing, the Dial-Up network update 1.2 (TweakDUN) collapsed the internal network. Pentafluge could no longer connect to any of our other machines.

Alex uninstalled the upgrades. After about an hour, he was able to get the network restored. It wasn't easy. Among other things, TweakDUN set the network properties so that NetBEUI was no longer the default protocol. There were other problems, but eventually we had Pentafluge back on the network.

We defragged the disk drives and did some more tweaking. Then we tried the upgrades again. Big mistake. Once again, Pentafluge vanished from the network; and this time, possibly because we tried to do some adjusting without uninstalling TweakDUN, things got progressively worse. By the time we did the uninstallation, it was too late. Bottom line: I worked a day trying to get Pentafluge back on the network, to no avail. It would not work.

I decided that drastic action was required: it was time to boot up in DOS, nuke the Windows directory, and reinstall Win 95 from scratch. We've used Pentafluge as a test machine for a year, and there were remnants of programs that couldn't be uninstalled. Tons of DLLs in the system directory. Garbage files everywhere. That sort of thing. Cleaning house was indicated anyway, and it also seemed to be the only way to restore the network. There was only one problem: in order to reinstall Win 95, I would need the CD-ROM drive, and that CD-ROM drive wasn't visible unless I was running Win 95.

That shouldn't have happened. In theory, I have a panic boot disk for every machine. A panic disk should contain the drivers for the CD-ROM drive, Zip drive, and other important accessories. Unfortunately, I had changed CD-ROM drives without updating the panic disk.

Two possible remedies: I could try to find the specific CD-ROM drivers for this version of the Distributed Processing Technology (DPT) SCSI controller Pentafluge uses -- it's an older SmartCache III -- surely I have those here somewhere. Or call DPT. Maybe they have something that would let me access the CD-ROM. I considered calling Sony -- it's a Sony CD-ROM drive.

But, in fact, as I was dithering, I found a copy of Sony.sys from DPT. It took about 10 minutes to fit up a CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT -- I'd completely forgotten how to do that -- but eventually I got it done. The real trick is in getting the command-line parameters for Microsoft CD Extension (MSCDEX). They're in most DOS books, but I don't have many left.

Once I was sure the CD-ROM drive worked in DOS, I saved the entire Windows directory onto the Maxoptix glass drive and then deleted it on Pentafluge. Boot up in DOS and run Golden Bow Systems' Vopt, still the best disk defrag program I know of. Reboot in DOS. Then I installed Win 95 from a CD-ROM. Since I had an upgrade Win 95, I had to find the setup disk for Windows 3.11 and put it in the floppy drive before Win 95 would install. After that, it all went swimmingly.

Moments later, I had the network restored. I had a pleasant surprise: Pentafluge runs about five times faster than before. Programs load faster, and the system doesn't thrash about as much. Everything is crisper. I didn't do any benchmarks, so I have no objective measures, but it's more than noticeably faster, so much so that I am thinking of doing the same thing to Cyrus.

The moral of this story is that if you change hardware, don't wait for a crisis to update your panic disk. A second moral is, clean your Windows once in a while. It sure can make a difference.

SIGGRAPH is in town. This is the Special Interest Group on Graphics of the Association for Computing Machinery. It has become ACM's largest show (and presumably also their largest fund-raiser). If you have any interest in graphics, it's more than worth going to. There are classes from raw beginner to very advanced techniques, chances to use a supercomputer for an hour or so, and technical exhibitions.

Alas, the floor show is becoming indistinguishable from the Electronic Entertainment Exposition: lots of hype, flashing lights, and a general heat-and-noise level sufficient to drive me out of the room, although not before I saw more than enough to boggle my mind.

Some major impressions. First, the price of admission to the world of high-end graphics is low and falling. Intergraph and Compaq both had new boxes with supercomputer capabilities at under $12,000, and I don't say that lightly. You could create all the objects in Jurassic Park on either of these machines, and you might even be able to animate them. Rendering the final prints to movie quality still takes days on much larger machines, but you could create a show, render in TV-video quality, and have it to present to financial people with equipment and software costing no more than $25,000. This is astonishing.

Hewlett-Packard and Digital Equipment, and even Dell and Gateway 2000, are also getting into the high-end graphics-machine game. I fully expect that my estimated $25,000 for a professional system will be cut in half in no more than a year. Ain't competition wonderful?

Second, it's no longer a Silicon Graphics/Unix world. At least half the professional-level displays we saw on the floor at SIGGRAPH were run on NT platforms. A few years ago, there were essentially none. As David Em, our graphics associate who attended the show with me, puts it, "The era of SIGGRAPH as the Silicon-Graphics-and-everything-that-goes-with-it show is over."

Third, while most of the very high-end professionals are still using Softimage -- a program develo ped for Silicon Graphics systems but now acquired by Microsoft and running on NT platforms -- 3D Studio Max, from Kinetix (a division of Autodesk), is catching up fast. Moreover, the current version of 3D Studio Max was designed to be an NT program and uses an interface that will already be familiar to AutoCAD users. This leads me to believe that design students are more likely to learn 3D Studio Max than Softimage.

Also, while the final cost of Softimage and 3D Studio Max with all the enhancements needed to bring it up to Softimage's power will be about the same, you can buy 3D Studio Max and enough plug-ins to get started for about half what you'll pay for Softimage. This is another big plus for students and beginners.

It's an exciting world out there.

As I said, David Em, who knows much more about graphics than I do, attended SIGGRAPH with me. Look for more of David's observations in the Web Exclusive part of the column on the BYTE Web site. Incidentally, if you are interested in computer -generated art, you can see some of David's work at http://businesstech.com/art/emgallery.html .

While we're on the subject of graphics, CAD, and Web sites, if you don't know about Visio, you ought to.

Visio is a stand-alone application for making technical drawings and other artwork. It has its own development environment or can extend Microsoft's Visual Basic for Applications environment. It also knows about Microsoft Office, and you can use it in conjunction with any of its components, including Word.

Mostly, Visio has a number of smart templates, and if the set you need didn't come with the package you bought, it's probably available. Templates include architect, chemical, electrical, electronic, process plants, pumps, pipes, heating and ventilation -- well, you get the idea. There are also abstract shapes suitable for making flowcharts and diagrams. If you work with computers and don't know about Visio, I bet you wish you did. Not only recommended, it's close to essential.

If you're looking for some unusal clip art on a Western theme, the classy RT Computer Graphics collections are now available on CD-ROM. Cowboys and Indians, traditional Navajo and other Santa Fe art, petroglyphs (genuine and humorous), plains Indian art, borders and images, it's all pretty neat. Look them up at http://www.rtcomputer.com . Next time I do a pass through my Web site, I'll probably include a few of these.

The old Game of the Month is the Deluxe Edition of Conquest of the New World, from Interplay. One tip: the Deluxe Edition has a feature known as the ancient temple of war. Find it and get control of it; it's worth almost any cost. Even if you can't control it, try to get the ownership in dispute, because it gives an enormous advantage to the side that possesses it.

The new game of the month is Imperialism, from Strategic Simulations. It's somewhat like Civilization II, but it takes place in the 1800s, which was the classic era of colonial imperialism, with great powers scrabbling for control of smaller countries. You do exploration and prospecting, and invest in both research and industry. It's not too bad as solitaire, but it's great as a multiple-player game: all the fun of Calhammer's Diplomacy, but with far more realistic economics and military actions. Make alliances and then stab your partner; but when you do, not only do the other human players take notice, but so do the nonplayer nations. Great fun.

The book of the month is my own, but you don't have to pay to read it. The Strategy of Technology was written in 1968 by Stefan T. Possony, Francis X. Kane, and Jerry Pournelle, and published by the University Press of Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was used as a textbook in all three service academies at one time or another and numerous times over the years in the Air War College at Maxwell AFB. It has been out of print for years, although photocopies circulated with my permission.

Recently, some young officers asked me to make it available. A professional Web designer, Arnold Bailey (abailey@bix.com), volunteered to turn it into good HTML, and so he did. You can find it, complete with partial revisions and notes, on my Web site at http://home.earthlink.net/~jerryp as well as a couple of other places. Fair warning, this is a cold war book, and while the principles haven't changed at all, nearly all the examples are from the Seventy Years War betw een the U.S.S.R. and Western civilization. It's an interesting example of how a book might be published on the Web; not fancy, but I think well done.

The computer book of the month is by Michael J. Hernandez, Database Design for Mere Mortals (Addison-Wesley Developer's Press, ISBN 0-201-69471-9). This is just what the title implies; if you keep lots of files and notes and wonder if there's a better way, you need a relational database, even if you don't know what one is. This book will help you understand the subject whether you work with Visual Basic, Access, FoxPro, Delphi, or whatever. It includes rules, views, and a good bibliography.

With luck, next month we'll have our new Pentium II system built. I've got all the parts, and we're getting a new ViewSonic monitor to go with it. Now to do my space council reports.

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Where to Find

Conquest of the New World, Deluxe Edition.........$29.95

Interplay Productions
Irv
ine, CA
Phone:    800-468-3775
Phone:    714-553-6655
Fax:      714-252-2820
Internet: 
http://www.interplay.com

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this product


D-300L...........................................$899.00

Olympus America, Inc.
Melville, NY
Phone:    800-347-4027
Phone:    516-844-5000
Fax:      516-844-5339
Internet: 
http://www.olympusamerica.com

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ation on 
this product


Imperialism.......................................$49.99

Strategic Simulations, Inc.
Sunnyvale, CA
Phone:    888-808-4311
Phone:    650-897-9900
Fax:      650-897-9956
Internet: 
http://www.ssionline.com

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this product


Kai's Photo Soap..................................$49.95

MetaCreations Corp.
Carpinteria, CA 
Phone:    800-472-9025

Phone:    805-566-6200
Fax:      805-566-6385
Internet: 
http://www.metacreations.com

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this product


Paint Shop Pro....................................$69.00

Jasc
Eden Prairie, MN
Phone:    800-622-2793
Phone:    612-930-9800
Fax:      612-930-9172
Internet: 
http://www.jasc.com/

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this product


PhotoRecall.......................................$49.95

G&A Imaging
Hull, Quebec, Canada
Phone:    819-772-7600
Fax:      819-772-7640 
Internet: 
http://www.ga-imaging.com/

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this product


Quick View Plus...................................$59.00

Inso 
Chicago, IL
Phone:    800-333-1395 
Phone:    312-329-0700
Fax:      312-670-0820 
Internet: 
http://www.inso.com

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Information on 
this product


3D Studio Max 2.0...............................$3495.00

Kinetix
San Francisco, CA
Phone:    800-879-4233
Phone:    415-547-2000
Fax:      415-547-2222
Internet: 
http://www.ktx.com

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ThumbsPlus 3.0g...................................$65.00

Cerious Software
Charlotte, NC
Phone:    704-529-0200
Fax:      704-529-0497
Internet: 
http://www.cerious.com/

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this product


Visio Standard 5.0........................about $149.00


Visio Professional or Technical...........about $349.00

Visio Corp.
Seattle, WA
Phone:    800-248-4746 
Phone:    206-521-4500
Fax:      206-521-4501
Internet: 
http://www.visio.com

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this product


The Wild West Collection.........................$79.95

RT Computer Graphics 
Rio Rancho, NM 
Phone:    800-891-1600
Phone:    505-891-1600
Fax:      505-891-1350
Internet: 
http://www.rtcomputer.com

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HotBYTEs
 - information on products covered or advertised in BYTE

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Jerry Pournelle is a science fiction writer and BYTE's senior contributing editor. You can write to Jerry c/o BYTE, 29 Hartwell Ave., Lexington, MA 02173. Please include a self-addressed, stamped envelope and 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 . Visit Chaos Manor at http://home.earthlink.net/~jerryp/ .