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The meeting will be held at 7:00 pm at the Maritime Museum of the
Atlantic, 1675 Lower Water Street, Halifax.
The main topic is web design and the
presentation will be by Liza Gagnon - Webpage designer and Mr.
Dana Morin....Former Executive Director of the Vancouver Film
School's Multimedia campus. Here is a url of some of his work
www.vfs.com.
Plus the opening introductory talks on the following:
Diane Smith - Tricks in WordPerfect
Rob MacCara - Over clocking a computer(speeding it up)?
Bill Marchant - more Windows 95 secrets
The HAPCC general meeting is on 4th Sunday of each month. The HAPCC has a meeting place at: Maritime Museum of the Atlantic 1675 Lower Water Street , Halifax, NS.
Meeting time 7:00 - 9:00 pm.
Parking available in the nearby Government
parking lot or in the Museum parking lot. Access to the building
is via the Night Entrance Doors, located just to the right of the
regular front doors. If door is locked, use the bell on upper
left side of the Night Entrance Doors.
The meeting room is on the second floor and
has a theatre type of layout. Washrooms are located close by.
Elevator service is available. Coffee served.
A Word of Thanks!
Our guest speaker at the March meeting was Mr.
David Baxter, Product Specialist at MT&T for the MpoweredPc
service. His multi-media presentation showed us how far the
service has come, and in which direction it is heading.
MpoweredPc is being officially launched on April 7, 1998 and it
promises to be serious contender in the high-speed
internet/software on demand arena. More info can be found here:
Mpowered Once again, thank you to MT&T and David Baxter.
Our guest speaker was Sgt. Bill
Cowper, Internet Communications Officer of the Halifax Regional
Municipality Police Department. He gave a history of how and when
the police department started using the Internet. They were the
first police department in Canada to be on the Internet. Sgt.
Cowper is continually receiving calls from all over the world
looking for assistance. The presentation showed how well the
department and the officers in the patrol cars are versed on
getting the criminals off the streets. If you would like to
check-out their web site the address is:
Halifax Regional Police Servicegives an idea
of what an "Internet Cybercop" is all about.
Fellow Members! We are planning on
purchasing a table at the Amateur Radio Flea Market to be held
May 30 at the Atlantic Winter Fair Grounds. There will be no cost
to members to bring articles for sale (if you have a very large
number of items, perhaps consider your own table). There is
something for everyone at the Flea Market, and if you've never
attended, why not this year!
The HAPCS has two kinds of meetings. Firstly the
regular Sunday night meeting which most members attend regularly,
secondly the monthly (approximately) planning meeting which
organizes the business of the Society, including what happens on
the Sundays. The planning meeting is held on Monday, a week after
the regular meeting in which all members of the Society are urged
to attend. At the planning meeting, we discuss feature speakers
for regular meetings, finances, membership, training, and other
computer related subjects.
....Bill Marchant
Articles can be submitted in almost any format, ASCII text, AMI Pro, MS Word, Windows Write, WordStar and of course WordPerfect.
Rob MacCara - SCSI vs. Parallel - Which is Best for you?
Bill Marchant - QuikView and .DLLs
General Information
Meeting schedule for the upcoming year
The different choices in add-on peripheral devices is overwhelming these days.
You can add hard drives, floppy drives, tape backup, scanners, CD-ROMS &
re-writers to mention a few. How you connect them is the topic of this article. As you will be able to see,
there are pros and cons to each method discussed here.
The first method to attach your new (or used) peripheral is by the parallel port on your PC or laptop.
Pros: Transportable from one computer to another. Easy to install
one device (+ printer). Less expensive to add parallel devices.
The easy accessibility and convenience
of the parallel port lends itself to easily attach devices and
move them from one machine to another. Generally, all that's
required is to load a device driver for the computer to recognize
the device. Some manufacturers have optimized their drivers for
Windows95 and for those devices a more elaborate (but still
painless) installation of software is required.
The actual installation of the parallel
peripheral is generally quote simple. Turn off the computer,
remove the existing parallel device's (normally a printer) cable
and plug in the supplied cable to the parallel port of the
computer. Plug your printer cable into the supplied pass-through
port plug and you're ready to go.
Because of the computer's built in
parallel port, the manufacturer is able to keep costs down on the
peripheral - and hopefully pass that on to the consumer! The
parallel devices are typically $20 to $50 cheaper than their
comparable SCSI cousin and this makes it attractive to the cost
conscious.
Cons. If one attempts to daisy chain multiple parallel devices, the likelihood of running into
problems is greatly increased. With just a printer and one other
parallel device you shouldn't run into problems - just don't try
anymore parallel devices in the chain!
The second major drawback of the
parallel port is the lack of speed through the bus. When compared
to SCSI, the parallel port positively crawls! If you are looking
for a speedy solution, look elsewhere.
SCSI Pros: Can handle multiple devices
easily System can multitask on SCSI bus Faster throughput than
parallel solutions.
The nature of the SCSI specification
suggests that it can handle multiple devices, and you'll not be
disappointed. A standard SCSI controller will allow you to daisy
chain up to 7 devices from the one controller, and you're not
limited to a single controller in the PC. Some controllers allow
up to 15 devices, so with two of them in your computer, you could
have thirty devices attached... As the SCSI controller is
"intelligent", once the CPU passes on the i/o
instructions to it, the CPU is freed up to go back to doing what
it does best - process. This leaves the SCSI controller to pass
data back and forth - at speeds that can range from 10Mb right up
to 80Mb - although typically you'll realize performance in the
10Mb range which is still considerably faster than the parallel
bus speed.
Cons: The largest detriment to SCSI is
to the pocketbook! The devices will generally cost more - a good
SCSI-2 hard drive can cost over $100 more than the IDE model -
and the higher end SCSI-3 (i.e. faster) versions of the SCSI
drives can cost double that of the "wide" SCSI-2
version. Although, to lessen the blow somewhat, as an example, a
SCSI scanner typically costs less than $50 more than the parallel
model.. The second cost is that of the controller card itself.
Often a peripheral includes in the package a SCSI host controller
card which is tailored for that particular device. In any case,
it normally is not of sufficient capability to act as a boot
device controller. The third con to the SCSI peripheral is the
setting up of the devices(s) installed. This is not a difficult
task, but it does require some attention to detail! This detail
could be a topic in itself - one that we'll save for a rainy day.
Money vs. Performance If money is no
object, then the SCSI solution is generally considered the best
way to go. If you enjoy tinkering with you PC, again, SCSI might
be right for you. If you just want to plug it in, turn it on and
start working/playing, perhaps parallel is your cup of tea!
One other alternative not mentioned
here is the new Universal Serial Bus (USB) which promises to make
adding devices a simple no-brainer type of operation. As yet
there are very few USB devices available, so it was not taken
into account for this topic. Perhaps next year...
These are two items which are mysteries to many Windows users.
INTRODUCTION
The April Meeting was for me an excellent example of the benefits to be gained from being a
member of this club. I have often stated that I have never taught
a lesson, or conducted a course or attended a computer meeting
without learning something. I learned that I already possessed a
copy of Quick View Plus which could do everything that I was
looking for and couldn't find in QuikView.
Last meeting I gave a presentation which involved the use of MicroSoft's QuikView. I used Rob
MacCara's laptop, and discovered that he was using Quick View
Plus from his WordPerfect Suite 8. It behaves in a somewhat
different fashion from the Microsoft version, being much more
capable. Needless to say, I have now installed WordPerfect's
version on my own computer. (I had it, I just didn't know I did).
In the following article, I will show how to look inside a DLL
file. When you are examining files which you do not wish to
alter, I recommend the use of MicroSoft's QuikView. The
WordPerfect version allows you to do editing, and in the case of
DLLs this would be dangerous. This is the essence of the
presentation I made at the meeting.
Quikview is probably a disappointment
to anyone who has tried to run it. If you double click on it in
the Explorer, or if you specify it in START|RUN, it does nothing.
It doesn't load and it doesn't explain. What good is it? It does
have a limited but useful function. I discovered it when I tried
to open a Word for Windows Ver 2 file using WordPerfect 8.
WordPerfect rejected it. Someone suggested that Microsoft had
viewers for many formats which are now not used extensively. I
used the START|FIND feature to find "VIEW", and came up
with QuikView.EXE in the Windows/System/Viewers folder.
After some experimenting, I discovered
that one way to get it to work was to set up a QuikView shortcut
icon and then Drag-and-Drop the file I was interested in onto it.
Quikview opened up and displayed the file contents. I keep a
folder on my desktop called EDITORS where I keep Notepad, Write
and Regedit. I added QuikView to it. You can also put it on the
menu which comes up when you right click on a file name as
follows: Open the Explorer at C:\Windows\System\Viewers. Notice
QuikView.exe on the right side box. Right-click on it and create
a shortcut. Then drag the shortcut to the C:\Windows\SendTo
folder. In that folder you can change the shortcut name to simply
"QuikView.EXE".
Quikview is capable, but its limitations are: no printing, no cut, no copy, no paste and no
editing. When we are dealing with files we don't want to alter,
even accidentally, these restrictions are important. The
"Open file for Editing" selection under the File menu
might seem to get around the no editing limitation, however, all
it does is open the "Open With" dialogue box and if you
do not have an application that will open the file, you are back
where you started from.
You do get a chance to select a more
readable font, or to change the size of the font. So I read my
Word 2 document, and copied by hand the data that I wanted to
keep. (Now with Quick View Plus, I would no longer have to do
that.) A short while ago, I discovered another use for Quikview.
It can look inside .EXE and .DLL files. Why would we want to do
that?
There are at least three good answers
to that question. First is idle curiosity. Lets look and see what
is there. After all Columbus discovered America on just such a
pretext. Second, it will give us some useful information when we
are trying to discover what DLLs can be removed safely from our
hard drives. And Third, (a reason which I should have discovered
a long time ago for myself) it has great use in programming. My
excuse for not knowing the programming angle before this is that
Delphi encapsulates much of the data of DLLs, and allows me to
use most of it without even knowing about the background. There
are hundreds, if not thousands of .DLLs on most Win 95 hard
drives. My computer contains 697 of them by actual count on 8
April 1998. They vary in size from over a megabyte to a few
kilobytes. As a pure computer user all one needs to know is that
if you accidentally delete a .DLL that is used by one of your
applications, that App. will no longer work.
When you remove an application, many
uninstall programs will delete the .DLL for you, but most of the
time, you have to tell the uninstall that it is OK. This is
because the same .DLL may be used by more than one App. Notice
the folder named "COMMON" somewhere under your Corel
WordPerfect Suite folder. I presume there is a similar folder for
other program suites. The result is that most folks decline to
delete any .DLLs, and they just accumulate on the disk until it
crashes, or until you erase the whole disk and sell or give the
old computer away. The most commonly used .DLL in Win 95 is
KERNEL32.DLL. It is 402 Kbytes on my computer and is found in
C:\Windows\System. The size probably varies depending on the
precise version of Win 95. My copy contains 780 functions of
various kinds that Windows and Windows applications use. To show
how this use is accomplished, let's do a demonstration.
DLL Demo Open C:\Windows\calc.exe.
Select (View|Scientific) Then minimize the window. The calculator
will come in useful later on. If you have not already put a
shortcut of Quikview.exe on your desktop, or added it to your
"SendTo" folder, do so now. Go to the
C:\Windows\Systems\Viewers\ folder and note the names of the .DLL
files there. VSWP5, VSWKS, VSWORD, VSRTF etc. Quikview uses these
for the various format transfers it has to perform. Note the
give-away names the .DLLs have. Drag Quikview itself to its own
shortcut or if you have added it to your "SendTo"
folder you can right click on it and send it to QuikView, and let
it examine itself.
Note the Import Table consisting of
functions from KERNEL32, USER32, SHELL32, ADVAPI32, and MSUCRT20.
Now you know why you cannot edit this stuff. If you accidentally
changed any of it the program would no longer work. Note that we
do not have references to any of the format .DLLs Quikview has a
flaw when looking at DLLs and EXEs, namely it does not always
list the other DLLs used. In the case of Quikview itself, the
only evidence we have that it uses the DLLs in the Viewer folder
is that they are in that folder. If you want to try an experiment
on your own, load an old Lotus 123 .WKS file into Quikview. Then
quit. Rename VKWKS.DLL to something else and try to load the
Lotus file again. My bet is that the second try will not work.
Lets examine two of these DLLs together.
Send VSWKS.DLL to Quikview. Then do the
same for VSWORK.DLL. Arrange these two windows so that you can
see them both side by side. Notice when you scroll them down that
the function names in the Export table is the same for both. The
details of the functions however are different. We know this
because the entry point column gives different addresses. (Since
these functions were originally written in C, and C programs are
entered from the bottom, a reasonable guess as to the file length
can be obtained from examining the entry points) You can use the
calculator to convert hexadecimal numbers to decimal numbers to
get a more familiar size comparison.
VSWKS.VWAllocProc is 1110 hex or 4368
bytes long while VSWORK.VWAllocProc is 1280 hex or 4736 bytes
long. Obviously, while they do the same thing in both cases, they
have to do it differently for different input formats. Note also
that each of these DLLs in turn use functions from the
KERNEL32.DLL. Notice the first couple of functions in these two
DLLs, which are imported from KERNEL32. They are GlobalAlloc and
GlobalFree. These functions allocate computer memory to a program
when it is required, and return it to the unused memory pool when
it is no longer required.
Let's check KERNEL32.DLL in Quikview
and have a look. GLOBALALLOC is function number 1b3 hex, or 435
decimal. GLOBALFREE is number 1ba hex or 442 decimal. In the old
days (only a few years ago), programmers had to write functions
of their own to do these things. Incidentally, that was one of
the reasons why there were so many bugs in early GUI programs.
Now programmers simply call common windows functions from within
their own programs, and windows does it for them.
A programming development system such a
Delphi permits the programmer to access these functions and
incorporate them into his or her own programs. This is what gives
windows its typical uniform appearance. When you open a file in
almost any editor, the "Open File Dialog box is the same.
Windows has supplied it to the programmer. The same goes for all
the major message and dialog boxes.
This document is mailed to all paid up
members and to anyone who has attended a meeting within the past
three months. Yearly membership dues are $15.00.
Society Mailing Address -
P.O. Box 29008, Halifax N.S., B3L 4T8.
Chairperson David Potter
Vice-Chair Bill Marchant
Treasurer Rob MacCara
Web Librarian Thayne MacLean
Newsletter Editor Diane Smith
Membership Promotion Pat Conen
and the following members who assist in planning our monthly
meetings: Norman DeForest, Henry Hill, Ken Gilmour,and Colin Stuart.
Newsletter Articles we are almost always in need
of good articles. If anyone has something that they feel would
make a good article, an interesting story to tell, or even a good
meeting topic, please don't hesitate to pass it on. Articles can
be submitted in almost any format, ASCII text, AMI Pro, MS Word,
Windows Write, WordStar and of course WordPerfect.
We decide the meeting dates for the upcoming
year at the last planning meeting. The dates for these are listed
below after confirmation of the dates.
As in previous years, the December meeting is moved to the early part of January due Christmas Eve being the fourth Sunday of the month.
May-17 June-28
The planning meetings are normally held on the second Monday (8 days) after the general
meeting. They are currently held at a members home and the
address is announced at the meeting prior to the planning
meeting. Anyone is welcome to assist in the planning of future
meetings or events.
Any changes to the scheduled dates will be announced where possible at the regular
monthly meetings and/or in this newsletter.
Forward to: June 1998 Newsletter
Back to: April 1998 Newsletter
Go to the: Newsletter Archive
