March 1999 Meeting Report
by Howard L. Bonar
Secretary, Alaska Computer Society

The March 1999 meeting of the Alaska Computer Society was held at its regular location at Providence Hospital starting at 7:00 pm. President Gene White introduced the board members, SIG (Special Interest Group) leaders, and volunteers present.

Questions and Answers

The meeting started off with the Question and Answer session. Bronwyn Hillman reported on her experience after a hard disk crash. When she installed the new drive, things weren't working out. She discovered that DOS was seeing two identical drives rather than one. The final solution was to use FDISK and delete one of the primary drive partitions.

The question was asked if anyone had signed up for one of the fast net services. One member reported that she now has an IDSL connection from Internet Alaska. They couldn't get it to work when first installed. After ATU corrected the routing assignment for her connection from router mode to the "node" mode, it worked really great. She now has continuous on-line service with very fast downloads at up to 128 kbs. For those whose business requires it, it solves a lot of connection problems.

Main Meeting

On behalf of the Alaska Computer Society, Gene White presented a certificate of appreciation to volunteer Al Sundquist for his dedication and hard work in taking care of the mailing of the ACS PC Newsletter. Dealing with the bulk mail system is a challenge and Al gets our well deserved thanks for doing a great job.

Ed Caldwell reported on the membership cards and the discounts being offered by some merchants. Howard Bonar reported on the software evaluation program. We now have several free demo disks available and try-before-you-buy offerings. See the software inventory elsewhere in this issue for what is available.

Gene White reported on the recruiting effort for volunteers to take over the functions of SIG, Publicity, and Volunteer Coordinators. Any one interested in one of these functions should contact him or any other board member.

Karen Ciocchi reported on the approaching AITP (Association of Information Technology Professionals) Infocom 99. It will be held on April 27,28, and 29th at the Egan Center in conjunction with the Armed Forces Communications Electronics Association Conference, and the State of Alaska Career Day. The National Security Agency will be represented to give information on their network security audit services which are available to interested firms.

There will be daily keynote sessions, a Job Fair, Career Day, a free general public program track, and three continuously running mini-shows. There will be a significant price break for early registration. For more information, check their web site at www.InfoCom99.com.

A gentleman from the audience reminded us of Colonel Norman Vaughn's current adventure which is a leisurely trip to Nome by dog sled. His route closely follows the original serum run trails. This is not a race, just a group of enthusiasts out for a good time. A daily report with pictures of the progress of the group can be found at www.wolfnet.alaska.edu/special.htm. If you are interested, sign on every day and follow their adventure.

A flyer was presented reporting on the new Master of Science degree in Computer Science now being offered through a cooperative program by UAA and UAF. The degree will be awarded by UAF but all courses may be taken on-site at UAA. Classes are available during evening hours to accommodate working professionals. There are two tracks to choose from: Software engineering which focuses on the management of software development and Technical, which emphasizes the actual programming. For more information, check their web site at saturn.math.uaa.alaska.edu/mathsci/cs/graduate-program.html.

Bronwyn Hillman reported on the Windows 95/98 SIG which meets the first Thursday of each month at the AARP Information Center in Northway Mall. Al Schuerger reported that the new users group SIG is on hold until there is more interest.

Winners of the Winshield and Folder Bolt software door prizes were Al Sundquist and Lloyd Korovec. A lucky third winner got away before I could get his name.

The Presentation

Mr. Mark Pearson of GeoNorth Inc. located at 3330 Arctic Blvd. in Anchorage gave us a live on-line demonstration of their GIS (Geographical Information Service) products and data bases available on-line. Their company operates from three locations located in Anchorage, Seattle, and Portland. For more information check their web site at www.GeoNorth.com.

MAP OPTIX

Map Guides which offer interactive mapping that easily publishes your GIS and database information. It uses a Java client to attain fast speeds and interaction between the mapping program and the data bases. They have an on-line demo using the latest version of the Anchorage data set.

ANCHORAGE DAILY NEWS ARCHIVES

Most interesting was a live demonstration of the Anchorage Daily News archives. This site was developed and maintained by GeoNorth. It contains every article published by ADN from 1985 to a couple days ago. There are presently over 205,000 articles available on line. There are no pictures, graphics, national stories, or ads. Articles are added within 72 hours of publication. Plans are underway to add the old Anchorage Daily Times articles in the near future. All articles are copyrighted.

The system offers free text searching providing an extremely fast retrieval of requested information. Searches can be made on a name, community or phrase. The search returns an abstract of the articles - usually the first 200+ words. You can check it out at www.ADNSearch.com.

If you want to download an entire article there is a fee. The price for the download is between $1.95 and $3.00 per article depending on the time of day and number of articles you are purchasing. Flat fee users can use credit cards or may arrange for prepaid service. A Contract can be made for multiple concurrent users.

Another option is to locate the articles you want using the free search engine then go to the Loussac library or UAA where you can down-load the articles at no charge to you. The libraries have signed up for the service and pay a flat monthly fee for unlimited downloads.

The program is written in "Cold Fusion". It provides the interface between the Internet and the data. The data base is residing on a 350 mhz dual pentium machine. It is on a Sybase adaptive server. Indexing is in a separate file which results in very fast searches.

INGENS

The Ingens system is a collection of over 100 million records in 20 data bases. It includes all kinds of licenses, court cases, PF applications, voter registration, and other public data. The service is by subscription and there is an initiation fee. They do check out new customers to be sure that they have legitimate and legal reasons for accessing the data. Most of it is available by going to the particular agency and requesting it. The Ingens service brings it all together and makes it much more convenient to access. Printed reports will look the same as the screen display. A 56k modem gives respectable performance for the connection.

MAP OPTICS 2.0

This program provides the ability to do a search for a location by the owner's name, address or zip code and see a map displaying the parcel. A great deal of data is referenced and can be displayed on the on-screen map. Included is an over-lay showing the earthquake danger for all areas of the city. The data display is in layers and several can be shown at the same time. The layers are presented as .gif files so load fairly quickly.

This is an expensive program and there are usage fees for each search. Considering the amount of information that it makes almost instantly available, the city, utility companies, and many consultants find it an invaluable tool.

MAP GUIDE

This is a Java applet viewer that can be downloaded for free and is not for sale. It is a finicky program and only works in certain versions of Netscape. Internet Explorer doesn't like it for some reason (probably the Java) and does unhappy things when you try to use it. If you are interested, it can be found at www.MapGuide.com.

The company will be hosting an AutoCAD 2000 introduction at the Sheraton hotel in the near future. For more information, check out their web site at www.GeoNorth.com.