Williamsport Area Computer Club

Newsletter & Meeting Minutes

June 2000

NOTICE: There will be no business meeting in July. Members are invited to gather at Joey's Place, 505 Washington Boulevard, for food and drinks at 7 PM on the 11th.

Our next regular meeting will be held on Tuesday, August 8, at 7 PM, in the JVB Library Technology Branch, 123 East 4th Street, Williamsport. Topic to be announced.

Our last meeting was held on June 13, 2000. Treasurer John Yarosz was not present, but there were several new attendees.

Committee Actions:

Advertising / Awareness / Public Relations / Home Page:

• Kathy thinks it's time to try putting up posters at local retailers again. She and Jim will work on the design.
• It was also suggested that we try contacting local ISPs about banner ads again. However, the last time we tried this, very few were responsive to it.
• Jim asked Kathy about putting the latest minutes on the home page. She would rather not have everything available there in order to encourage people to come to our meetings to find out about our activities. Jim agreed, but suggested at least providing more recent archives.

Computer Recycling (finding charitable uses for old computers):

• Kathy suggested disposing of our old `286 systems since everyone seems to want modern software which will not run on them and they are taking up a lot of space. There were no objections to the plan.
• Geoff wondered whether we had enough hardware to build a Beowulf system. (This is a parallel-processing network. See www.beowulf.org for more information.) We probably do not, and nobody is sure what we'd do with one if we did.

Computer / Internet News:

• The JVB Community Net, www.lycoming.org, which meets the night after the computer club, has begun videotaping their web-design presentations for future use. They welcome the SPCA as their newest member at www.lycoming.org/spca.
• Earthlink has bought ISP conglomerate OneMain.
• Jim reports that OneMain has set up their own Usenet server.
• The Pennsylvania Association for Educational Communications and Technology has a very useful page full of computer-related links at http://www.paect.org/nc/linkpage.htm.
• Anyone who spends a lot of time on the net should visit http://grc.com and click on "Shields UP!" to test the security of their system. Some versions of Windows default to enabling more services than are generally necessary.
• The Williamsport Chamber of Commerce is planning activities for Technology Awareness Month later this year. Watch for details.
• Geoff is still having trouble believing the recent military security lapses...

Program:

After last month's newsletter went out, club member Robert Robbins decided to give a brief talk about his investigations into programming for the Palm Pilot. He reports that Java, C++, and a language very similar to Visual BASIC can be used. Generally, programs are written on a PC and run under a PalmOS emulator for testing purposes, then downloaded to the Palm Pilot. For Java programs, Sun has produced a Java virtual machine named KVM.