The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group PC (President's Comments) George Skarbek gskarbek@melbpc.org.au |
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Internet Update
Internet bandwidth has been increased in order to provide a better service over the peak periods,
and we have ordered two new servers to replace the older computers that have run 24 hours/day for
several years.
Within a few months we will move most of the Internet equipment into a secure data centre. The group
will continue to manage and run its own Internet service and if you're interested in more details
about this move, you should read the Internet Newsletter
21.
PC Update Online
After more than a year of work, the PC Update Online project has reached practical completion. The
online files begin with the first edition, March 1984, and go right through to the August 2002 issue.
This comprises a total of 1607 Web pages plus 2217 attachment and image files totalling in excess
of 80 MB.
The Web work has been done by one man, Stan Johnstone our past President and current member
of the Internet team. Stan scanned, OCR'd and converted the older paper issues to obtain the online
material for most of the older issues and to do the more recent issues he used electronic source
material provided from the PC Update production files. PC Update Online is at
http://www.melbpc.org.au/pcupdate/. On behalf of
all members, many thanks Stan for your work in creating this vast resource.
Search Engine
Until now there has been a crude search script available, but soon that will be a thing of the past;
a new search facility is being provided.
Do you ever have to hunt through your old issues of PC Update to find a certain article? Now
the searching will be much easier.
Our current search facility is a small free program and not the most suitable tool available, so I
approached Odyssey Development Pty Ltd the publishers of ISYS, an excellent indexed search
engine. This product enables easy and rapid searching in over 125 data formats, including all Office
products, e-mail, PDF and HTML. I happen to own their desktop product and decided to enquire about
the price of their Web product. The full Web product costs $20,000 and when I told Odyssey why I was
asking, they offered to donate this to the group, because we are a non-profit organisation. And,
there is more! They will also provide free technical support which normally costs $3,500 PA, and,
they said to contact them when we are installing ISYS to ensure a good end-user setup. How's that!!
This product runs only on a Windows platform and currently all of our Internet computers run either
Solaris or FreeBSD. A new computer has been ordered; it will run Windows 2000 for both ISYS and the
iHelp database. ISYS will probably not be up and running by the time this is read but it
should be operational within a few weeks.
New Web Look
After several years of having the same look to our Internet pages, we have decided to alter the style
of the Web site.
Steven Goldate who runs our Web Page Design and other training courses started this process
by volunteering for the job. However, he found that working with a committee is a big job; everyone
has an opinion on what constitutes good design. Fortunately a decision has been reached and the process
of converting several thousand pages is well underway.
Although some of it can be automated, this still is a huge undertaking and
Stan Johnstone is putting many hours into the task. Concurrently, members of the iHelp team
are updating and adding to the FAQ and Help pages. By the time you read this, the new design should
be up. See
http://www.melbpc.org.au/.
Monthly Meeting Location
There has been no decision taken yet on where the meetings will be held next year; committee will
decide that before the end of the year. At the August meeting there were about 370 members present.
This is the best attendance at Parkville for some time but is still down on numbers reached during
the trial period at Clayton. The next monthly meeting will be at the Pharmacy College in Parkville
on Wednesday 4 September starting at 6.00 pm.
Reprinted from the September 2002 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
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