SCOUG-General Mailing List Archives

Date:	Sun, 16 Jul 2000 14:28:07 PDT
From:	dwatson@deltanet.com
Reply-To:	scoug-general@scoug.com
To:	scoug-general@scoug.com
Subject:	SCOUG-General: July GIG Notes

Content Type: text/plain

This is to provide some of the key points and URLs and such for
those who requested it, for those who were away from the General
Interest Group Meeting on July 15, 2000 for whatever reason, and
for the record.

We discussed two general topics, and two sub-topics within each.
I believe both topics deserve further attention by this group and I
hope some of you will find time and interest enough to pursue
some of these subjects, and will inform the GIG of your progress at
some future date.

Of the topic of fast graphics, of the DIVE interface and applications
that make moving pictures, we demo'd the installation and setup of
the WinTV GO card from Hauppage and the associated Warp
drivers from Abbotsbury Software, and the Flash plug-in for
Netscape from Innotek. We briefly introduced two software
alternatives for securing an always-on internet connection --
Internet Gate Proxy/firewall, and Injoy Firewall.

So what's the deal with graphics? Your monitor paints itself with
the data sent from the RAM in your graphics card. No magic.
Much like a television. The difference from television is that the
analog visual events we see on TV are converted to electrical
impulses and sent more or less directly to the CRT for display.
With computer graphics, we are encumbered by the need to
calculate the placement of each element of the picture. With a
static cluster of text like this mail, that's not too demanding. When
you add fine grained detail, like in a photograph, or add motion, like
in a movie, the calculations become more challenging. If you can't
do it fast enough, you either slow down the motion or take out
details, leaving you with the slow, simple images of the not so
distant past. The graphics acclerator in modern graphics cards
takes some of this processing load, and the increases in speeds of
CPUs, RAM and busses have led to rapid improvements. The
computer software defines how the picture is laid out, sends it to
the video memory on the motherboard, where it is transferred to the
graphics processor on your card, and then out to the monitor. This
requires efficiencies in many components -- the video RAM, the
graphics engine, the system bus, the memory bus, the CPU, and
of course the software. Windowing software systems put
enormous loads on the processing of graphics images. Thus,
many video games were written for DOS long after Windows and
Warp became popular, since DOS lets you write directly to
memory, and windowing systems intercede with their own buffers
and processing for the parts of the screen not supporting the game
or other app. Recent improvements have also included a
proliferation of protocols to expedite the data transfer to the card.
These involve sizzling amounts of co-processing on the graphics
card, and software routines (APIs) to relieve the application's
processing requirements. DIVE provides Warp with the API hooks
to support these graphics intensive programs.

More details on DIVE at
http://fff.fon.bg.ac.yu/os2/dev32/divestuff.zip
More details on graphics cards at
http://www.azillionmonkeys.com/qed/accelerator.html

So, let's put them to work. There are several drivers available on
the IBM device driver web site for TV cards I've never found in local
stores. A great article in the VOICE newsletter for July 2000
(http://www.os2voice.org/VNL/past_issues/VNL0700H/vnewsf4.htm)
and a sale at Fry's Electronics piqued my interest. The article by
Bill Esposito says it's easy to install and works well. I tried it and I
agree. Install the WinTV GO card from Hauppage, insert the
external cable between the sound output on the card to the line in
on your sound card, and start the computer. Get the free Warp
drivers from Abbotsbury Software Ltd at http://www.os2tv.com (the
wcast.zip file has the drivers and some utilities). Unzip to a
directory of your choice, then open an OS2 window and change to
that directory and run minstall. the multimedia installer runs and
asks you a couple of questions it should have figured out for iteself.
It installs the software and tests your system. Next you go to the
Multimedia Setup in your System Setup and use the WCAST tab
to configure your preferences. I used US region for the rabbit ears
demo, but use USCATV with cable at home. Everything else was
okay. Now, right click on the divetv icon and create a program
object on the desktop, with parameter of wcast 1 2 and you're
ready for your fave programs in a window on your desktop. It has
DIVE interface option which apparently requires setting up a
separate app (wtv.exe). It worked okay with the basic graphics and
I haven't tried the DIVE capability yet. If anyone does, I hope you'll
report to the list.

Next, I tried the latest beta Netscape plugin for Macromedia's
Flash. Flash is a low-bandwidth animation protocol to spruce up
web pages. The animations are developed by commercial apps
such as the Macromedia Director program which costs hundreds of
dollars, but the plugin is free for Windows and Mac. No such luck
for Warpheads until this new plugin from the wonderful folks at
Innotek. The "public beta 3" plugin is just out from Innotek at
http://www.innotek.de/flash. The information on the site was
helpful, and I also saw an article at
http://macarlo.com/flashos22103.htm, and you can find lots about
the Flash world at http://www.macromedia.com. The installer was
effortless. You restart Netscape and look at the About Plugins
page and there is a new listing with a button. Click this to get an
apparently unnecessary setup notebook. We also found a nifty
"easter egg" on the About page. Watch the credits scoll for a
minute, and at the end a red dot flashes up for a second. Click
that dot to get a Flash demo. I have read of general success in
using this plugin, and a few problems. The betas keep coming out,
so I expect they'll have it running smoothly about the time
Macromedia comes out with their next version. These betas have
an expiration intended to remind the user to upgrade. It claims to
remain functional after expiration, simply giving a single reminder
each time it is invoked. Now if we can just get a Warped developer
tool!

Finally, we briefly discussed two software firewalls available for
Warp to supplement the excellent Linksys Cable/DSL Router
(http://www.linksys.com) presentation that preceeded us. Also
see the recent VOICE article on using the Linksys device with
Warp at
http://www.os2voice.org/VNL/past_issues/VNL0400H/vnewsf2.htm
Internet Gate from Maccasoft (http://www.maccasoft.com) and
Injoy Firewall from F/X Communications (http://www.fx.dk/firewall)
are both available as shareware on Hobbes (search for firewall).
Internet Gate starts at $19.95 and InJoy Firewall at $30, with both
having higher prices for more features and more connections. The
gist of these discussions is that when you dial in to an ISP and get
a temoprary IP address, browse a while, and hang up you are a
"small target" and are unlikely to be hassled by the legions of
vandals and thieves that increasingly share the Internet with us.
When you get cable or DSL, you're always on and become more
likely to be scanned and get a followup visit from the bad guys.
You can find a lot of good info and a test for your system at
http://www.grc.com. All these products include a Network Address
Translation (NAT) capability to allow you to use a network of
systems simultaneously on a single internet connection as well as
the security features. The Internet Gate is a proxy tool which filters
various services like web and hail looking for misbehavior. The
Injoy and Linksys products use filters where you can close out
ports or addresses. There is no clear evidence that one is better
than the other, and certainly none are invulnerable. Maybe we can
get a hacker flyoff on these products down the road somewhere.
Try them out and see what you like. And let the group know what
you find. We were also advised that the new Warp TCPIP 4.1
includes a filtering capability built in which can give some security
features for free. We should look more closely at that in a future
GIG discussion.

Remember, we're all Generals at the General Interest Group.
Contact Supreme General Tony for future topics, or feedback on
these. Encourage your friends to join the GIG mail list, and let's
talk!

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