Williamsport Area Computer Club

Newsletter & Meeting Minutes

April 2000

Our next meeting will be held on Tuesday, May 9, 2000, at 7 PM, in the JVB Library Technology Branch, 123 East 4th Street, Williamsport.

Club member Geoffrey Knauth will speak about his work in porting large Unix database projects to Oracle under RedHat Linux 6.1 Enterprise Edition. (This program is rescheduled from last month.)

Our last meeting was called to order at 7:16 PM on April 11, 2000 by Vice-President Kathy Kolb. Attendance was extremely light once again.

The minutes of March's meeting were approved.

In John's absence, there was no treasurer's report.

Committee Reports:

Advertising / Awareness / Public Relations / Home Page:

Robbie reported that he fixed the Y2K problem in our homepage's comment form script.

Computer Recycling (finding charitable uses for old computers):

No action this month.

Computer Show:

• Kathy expressed concern that we won't have enough volunteers to run a computer show this year, in light of declining attendance at our regular meetings. Jim agreed, noting that last year's show was smaller than expected.
• Dan suggested that in lieu of our own show, we should volunteer to help with the Chamber of Commerce's technology show / job fair scheduled for October. However, they may not be soliciting volunteers.
• He also suggested setting up a table at the KISS-FM Yard Sale in order to spread the word about our club.

Computer Help:

• Jim read a letter from a disabled individual in Newberry who was looking for someone who could visit him at his home to help solve a printer/scanner problem. He is going to pass the message along to the wacc-chat list.
• Jim asked if anyone knew why the "never download" checkbox was disabled in MS Outlook Express's "download foreign character support" requester. Dan said that it only works if you download one of the packages first.

Local Computer and Internet News:

• Kathy is puzzled by the fact that people don't seem to be using the new Williamsport links page on www.lycoming.org.
• Kathy will be presenting a program on website design at the Community Net meeting.
• Robbie attended a local Microsoft "Big Day" forum and reported that there were lots of local vendors.
• Jim reported on receiving spam from a company called Brainbench who offer free online computer certification testing and claim that they are a recognized certifying body. Nobody else had heard of them.
• Everyong agreed that email spam was extremely bad in recent weeks, and Dan was even getting it on the library's private systems.
• Robbie bought Corel Office Suite for Linux for about $150 and likes it. He thinks it's about time that Linux got big-name applications.

Program:

Geoff had to postpone his Linux / Oracle demonstration due to his work schedule.