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The Australian Financial Review
By Jason Romney
As I write this first Road Warrior column, I'm about to fly over to LA, New York, Utah and Washington for a lightning two week trip, once more exposing myself to the often fragile and eminently capricious world of mobile business computing.
The sumptuous features of my trusty new Toshiba T4900CT notebook (16MB of RAM, active matrix color screen, 810MB hard disk and Pentium 75Mhz chip) work well to keep fellow warriors drooling in flight lounges but make me a plum target for New York muggers. So one of my first priorities is to back up all my data before departure. (If it came to a choice between handing over my unbacked up hard disk and a 5th Avenue knifing, the latter would almost be more painless...)
Given that my 810MB hard disk was almost full on day two after purchase (gasp) a backup is no mean feat. I haven't yet been able to get my Trantor MiniSCSI Plus cable to let my notebook's LPT1 port talk to my external SCSI Archive Viper 525MB tape backup unit (even with an emergency courier delivering the new Adaptec drivers). Normally this might mean thinking about a stack of floppy disks taller than me...
But mercifully a chance encounter with Mr David Geller of Travelling Software in the States (using Vocaltec's remarkable $US49 Internet Phone program) recently led to a review copy of Laplink for Windows turning up. This elegant program is essential to all Road Warriors - it lets you do fast, simple drag and drop backups through a com or printer port (and a whole lot more, of which, more in later weeks).
So I watch happily as my precious data gushes across to squeeze into a spare 780MB plot in one of my home desktop PCs. (Of course, it would have been preferable to do it on my law firm's hefty Novell server, but breaching network security with an influx of foreign data, however virus free it may be, is a distinctly career limiting move).
But we are still in the Windows environment (deliciously enhanced with the PC Tools for Windows 2.0 desktop shell) and Laplink reports some files are in use by the system and can't be transferred. I'm also mindful of hidden files. By this time I've got the MiniSCSI plus cable talking to my external SCSI hard disks so first I get Xtree Gold to find all my hidden files and then copy them across. (Of course, I only remembered later that I could have just used the trusty DOS command xcopy c: f:/s/e which would have dumped everything across without Laplink).
There's only time for a quick sigh of relief before packing the magic bag of tricks that will be the focus of untold anxiety throughout the trip. First there is the snaking tangle of cables that will keep my trusty Netcomm SmartModem M11F and notebook powered and on-line (and provide endless fascination for airport security). A telephone cord extension cable is essential and a phone-line splitter makes life much easier. Then there's a torch (hotel phone plugs are inevitably in the darkest, most inaccessible nook of any room) and Swiss Army knife (you never know when the hotel phone will be screwed, or nailed, in its socket).
I wanly prepare to farewell my Ericsson GH337 phone and Link Adviser pager and don't even THINK of packing a swank Motorola Personal Messenger 100D wireless PCMCIA modem card (the American ARDIS system isn't compatible with ours). But then comes something you mightn't expect: ANOTHER computer. Yes, the predecessor of my T4900CT was a T3300SL. When the T4900CT battery runs out somewhere over the Atlantic, the (far more modestly featured) T3300SL will take over. It gets about 3 hours battery life instead of 1.5 - and I have an (expensive) spare battery for it. (But will I have a shoulder left by trip's end?)
Finally, there's a high-tech shopping list (to be carefully hidden, of course, from my Luddite partner's contemptuous eye). If one of those dastardly new digital PBX systems blows up my analog modem I'll be delighted to have a good excuse to finally purchase a PCMCIA modem such as a Hayes Optima V.34 and fax modem. My heart was recently won by the prospect of a CardCam-VideoIN PCMCIA card which captures video to a notebook in 24 bit color.
And having been around for a while now, I've always had a soft spot for an acoustic coupler. Something like the Konexx Model 204 may seem atavistic, but, fitting over any telephone handset, it can be a crucial tool of crisis management if the Swiss Army knife fails to gouge out the hotel phone plug. Of course, the Swiss Army knife also comes in handy for the muggers...
* Jason Romney is a solicitor and information systems consultant at Price Brent's Information Media and Communication Group. E-mail: jromney@werple.mira.net.au
ENDS
By Jason Romney
The news said it was the coldest Melbourne day in almost a century but two road warriors stood shivering on the nature strip outside my house, a notebook computer clutched tightly in their blueish fingers where, truly, a hot thermos should have been.
Yes, your intrepid correspondent has the one (?) house in this suburb which stubbornly refuses to entertain mobile wireless communication. The man from Motorola was certain that former resident and builder of the house, Governor Hotham, must have put a hex on it as we trooped from one room to another seeking a connection with the svelte Personal Messenger 100D wireless PCMCIA modem card.
Finally we did get it going - the tiny antenna had worked itself loose from its socket. One flat battery and an ``illegal function call'' message later we were on air and indeed, your correspondent was deep bit by the wireless bug.
While the business world clambers onto the Internet through traditional ``wireline'' links, I suspect wireless digital communications (give or take the odd glitch) is a second revolution waiting closely in the wings. Road warriors long liberated by mobile phones and notebooks can now take a jubilant extra step, integrating their personal digital assistant (PDA) with the Internet or a central office database through wireless packet links which do away with the legendary search for a phone outlet or battles with PABX switchboards.
The release of Motorola's Personal Messenger last November was a world-first and breathed new life into PDAs such as Apple's Newton or Hewlett Packard's LX200. In the Windows world, Australian Internet gateway provider, OzEmail (tel: 1 800 805 874), was also quick to create a special suite of Internet accessing applications for the Personal Messenger, a type II PCMCIA card with a matchbox sized battery compartment and foldaway aerial attached at one end. (The PM100D weighs 155 grams, operates for up to 40 hours on a 9-volt alkaline battery or 8 hours with a NiCad rechargeable and is able to store either 64KB or 8KB depending on the model you choose.)
OzEmail's program let you send and receive e-mail (including attachments), send faxes, interrogate news group and Web browse with software that emulates the function of most of your existing Internet winsock applications. The PM100D uses Motorola's error-correcting DataTAC system (which interfaces with Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Thailand and Canada - but NOT the USA) to send information generated or requested by the OzEmail software at rates of up to 19.2kbps (effectively, however, 14.4kbps or less).
It is difficult to gauge the ultimate appeal of this system now. An expected six month trial offer in which an OzEmail account and software cost $50 per month (after purchase of the PM100D for between $1250 and $1450) should win plenty of hearts. After that, and particularly for large data transfers, the GSM network with a digital phone is likely to pose strong competition.
But in the meantime, even the most jaded road warrior will get a tremendous kick out of OzEmail's system. Your incoming e-mail is initially listed with the sender's name, the subject, the mail's size and date, and whether it has been read. You choose the messages to download in full, leaving long ones for wireline retrieval.
Deletions and transfers to and from the mail server are drag and drop operations and messages can be saved as an independent text file. If you are careful about the way you configure your Telnet session, all the standard Internet Unix applications are available such as Lynx for Web browsing.
In the future, the so-called ``vertical'' wireless applications (for service technicians who need technical documentation or warranty information at customer sites or salespeople needing delivery and inventory data) will be a great money spinner for the Australian software industry. Simpler programs such as Scribblemail for the Newton (from BHA, tel: 07 258 4444) and the WinMessage paging software from A2B Telecommunications (tel: 03 670 6099) show the way now.
This transition to vertical applications will take time, however, with one American study estimating that at least 25 percent of cellular data users will still be using wireless connectivity only for functions such as e-mail and faxing by the year 2000. But at least by then people will probably remember to bring a thermos...
* Jason Romney is a solicitor and information systems consultant at Price Brent's Information Media and Communication Group. E-mail: jromney@werple.mira.net.au
By Jason Romney
Road warriors deprived of access to their electronic mail will be familiar with the onset of e-mail withdrawal syndrome. It begins with longing looks towards telephone outlet sockets or swerves of the entire body (with embarrassing alacrity) to any computer that looks like it might be connected to the Internet.
It hit hard many years ago now on my first computerised trip to America. I hadn't realised that my Netcomm modem (unlike my Toshiba notebook with its pleasingly slender but `universal' power supply) only APPEARED to work with American 110V power supply outlets.
Front panel modem lights may twinkle happily but the veteran warrior is alerted to a problem at the outset by the absence of the reassuring double bip sounds which signal the modem is properly initialised for communications. Sometimes an `ATX1' initialisation command - which forces the modem to dial irrespective of other circumstances - solves such problems, but such was not the case that time.
The solution is to pick up a $US50-80 transformer - but it is worthwhile investing in a more functional unit. My own transformer is a brutish black cube about the size of a small lunchbox which I purchased from the 42nd Street Photo Shop in New York City for $US160. It has two power outs designed for American plugs so I always travel with some $10 US to Australian converter plugs.
Importantly, there's a switch on the back of the transformer to set the incoming voltage between either 110V or 240V so that when you return to Australia you can plug in any electrical products purchased in America that expect 110V instead of 240V - this makes it a much more useful investment than the unswitchable $80 models.
Nowadays, however, the quest to collect my e-mail is usually thwarted by more exotic problems. On an American trip last week, the new digital phone exchange of my LA hotel utterly refused to cooperate.
No problem, I thought. I'd just use the blisteringly fast T1 connection of an Australian friend's swank offices (down the corridor from movie producer Ivan Reitman) on the Universal Studios Lot after my meeting there. But even a T1 goes down, and needless to say, it was out to lunch like everyone else in LA, when I really needed it.
Surely salvation was at hand when I popped my credit card in the onboard domestic Delta airlines GTE Airphone en route to New York City. I was delighted to find a data port was provided - but within seconds a flight attendant had politely insisted I read the airline magazine which strictly forbids in its small print any computer peripheral device to be connected to the inflight phones by cable.
Flight attendants, who have even on occasion insisted I remove my recharging notebook from toilet cubicles (something about it being a fire hazard), are notoriously unsympathetic to e-mail withdrawal syndrome...
Of course I'd taken every other necessary step for the trip such as making sure I had a valid CompuServe account for local dialup access in US cities. It is very helpful to remember to get the dial-up numbers before you leave, however, and creating a .forward file at your Unix Internet gateway provider is essential.
This contains a list of addresses to which you want your incoming e-mail to be redirected. It can be created on your PC using any text editor and then uploaded to your Unix account via FTP (File Transfer Protocol) or else created during a Telnet session with a Unix text editor such as VI. (If this sounds frightening, just call your Internet gateway provider help desk and ask them to create the file for you.)
But what if your notebook is stolen or damaged or you are staying with friends who look on your computer and craving for their phone line with suspicion and distress? This last eventuality - being a social rather than technological problem - can defy even the best prepared road warrior and happened to me in New York.
At this point you might think the great New York City Library could help, but experience has shown it has only two Net-connected computers and even these offer only Netscape without any other client programs. In fact, the final resort is just to fall on the mercy of a specialist mobile computing shop such as New York's DataVision Superstore at 445 Fifth Avenue.
The only problem is that while you are `testing' a modem, they tend to stack up a mountain of tempting products beside you which no real road warrior can walk away from with impunity - of which, more next week.
* Jason Romney is a solicitor and information systems consultant at Price Brent's Information Media and Communication Group. E-mail: jromney@werple.mira.net.au
ENDS
By Jason Romney
The road warrior must often fill the role of crisis manager, called on to perform amazingly difficult feats with little notice and less preparation. The warrior's mettle is best shown on that chilly 6am flight when a colleague billed as 10am keynote speaker at a distant conference has fallen sick or a key overseas negotiator for the warrior's side has been snowed in at some remote airport.
The bottom line is that a lot of information must be examined, sorted and put into useful form (complete with trump cards and appropriate jokes) by the end of the flight. You foolishly agreed to accept the brief - and now you are staring at your computer screen, wedged between your nose and the (much reclined) airline seat in front.
No matter how awful the jet lag (or hangover), a road warrior can have an enviable secret weapon at this moment of truth. It's called InfoSelect and costs just $199 (tel: 03 9427 0168).
This free-form text retrieval program allows anyone with a notebook computer to recall instantly, with a few deft keystrokes, any scrap of information which crossed your path previously, irrespective of its obscurity or vintage.
There's no need to wrestle with data fields. The warrior simply bashes out notes about phone calls, letters, thoughts, ideas, dates, addresses, phone numbers, passwords (or whatever) into `windows' which automatically expand up to 30,000 characters to accommodate the size of the note. (If you MUST have a consistent data input format, an InfoSelect window can be organised into a `form' which structures the information like a traditional database.)
A window can be automatically time and date stamped, contain text of various colors or absorb an independent ASCII file. The most important feature is that once data is entered, your `stack' of windows can be interrogated with a range of powerful search strategies.
An exact search on a particular text string is the same as when you look for a word or phrase within a file with your word processor. You might want any window from your stack of jokes which mentions lawyers. There's nothing particularly special about that - and indeed, you can perform all the usual `and'/`or' searches.
The real power of InfoSelect first peeks out with a `return' search - eg if I kept a list of all the most profitable Disney movie deals, I might want to return to the general stack any notes of deals I know Disney chief Michael Eisner played a big part in when I'm chatting with the Eisner estranged former Disney magnate (now at Dreamworks/SKG), Michael Katzenberg.
An even more powerful strategy is the `neural' search in which a warrior enters a list of various words and InfoSelect returns the windows that contain as many of the words as possible, irrespective of where the words may appear in the text in a given window. A multimedia developer might search a stack for any jottings which contained as many as possible of the words: `CD-ROM', `contract' and `developer'.
InfoSelect is a wonderfully useful program for a road warrior with numerous other powerful features such as an ability to create `overviews' of information contained in a certain paragraph of multiple windows. It has mailmerge and its date `ticklers' make it a reasonably effective appointment diary as well.
But no matter how well InfoSelect will manipulate information AFTER you actually get it in your computer, there will often be times when the warrior's brief reconnaissance stopover is made in suboptimal circumstances. A lawyer involved in less than friendly litigation might visit an opponent's office and be told certain documents can be inspected only in a room without a copier. A journalist might have a brief opportunity to check some magazine references in a library before an interview, only to find all the copiers are out of order.
At this point you need a Primax Datapen (call 0011 1 212 689 7171). This remarkable $US300, 75 gram `pen' will plug into your notebook's (shared) printer port, take its power from the keyboard port and `read' any text you run it over with real time optical character recognition spurting text straight into an InfoSelect window (or any word processor).
It reads a line at a time of any magazine, newspaper or other document, guided by your hand at up to 5.8cm (100 characters) per second - and, crucially, worked perfectly for me straight out of the box. It will even recognise the text of 11 major languages and set user-configurable recognitions to convert, say, any dollar sign into $USD.
The only question is whether you'll get any work done after everyone crams around to get a look...
* Jason Romney is a solicitor and information systems consultant at Price Brent's Information Media and Communication Group. E-mail: jromney@werple.mira.net.au
By Jason Romney
The hand huggingly curvaceous desktop mouse is the dimmest of fond memories for the road warrior emerging from a long work session on an international flight. On how many trips in the early '90s did my cramped mouse paw come to resemble Nosferatu's twitching claw groping from its coffin? And how often did I shoot envious glances at the elegant trackpad of Apple Powerbook users?
Flight attendants may like to remove your book when you fall asleep but they HATE tripping over a dangling mouse cord (it is also a painful experience for the drowsy warrior to watch his beloved notebook suddenly wrench off his fold down tray and crack into the aisle following a spirited trip...)
For this reason, with my first couple of Toshiba notebooks I used to unplug my com port-connected Microsoft Mouse or Appoint mouse pen when travelling and used a shareware utility from CompuServe called NoMouse. This program could be toggled on and off and let the keyboard cursor keys become mouse navigators, the ins and del keys serving as the left and right mouse buttons.
Back in those days a warrior had to go through the arduous (and battery draining) process of completely powering down and rebooting the notebook to change pointing device - it was woe betide any wannabe warrior who disconnected his mouse during a work session (the whole mouse connection could occasionally `blowup' in such circumstances, needing to be replaced).
Nowadays many notebooks come with integrated pointing devices such as the Toshiba AccuPoint, a small pivoting nipple between the g and h keys. IBM Thinkpads use a similar but differently named device. The mouse buttons are either in front of the keyboard or mounted on the front vertical face of the notebook.
I much prefer the AccuPoint (also known as a TrackPoint) over the trackball mounted next to the screen on the right of the Compaq LTE Elite I'm currently testing with Windows 95. For one thing, the trackball's positioning, with mousekeys behind the screen, can cause the air traveller's hand to brush perilously against his in-flight drink (kept in the unmovable right hand indentation of the seat in front's fold down tray). The trackball also tends to `slip' sometimes, failing to move the pointer until greater pressure is applied.
One of the major advances in notebook technology is the way the presence of an external pointing device (or keyboard for that matter) is `intelligently' sensed. When connected, an external pointing device takes over from the in-built pointer device or works in tandem with it, even without rebooting. With an AccuPoint-like device installed, you may never need to resort to this capability, however, some new pointing devices are so good that it is actually worth abandoning even the best in-built pointers.
One such external mouse substitute is the Alps Glidepoint (tel: 03 9427 7564) which finally makes available to PC users the Trackpad-like ease-of-use Powerbook people take for granted. The pointer is moved simply by glancing your finger across the Glidepoint's smooth upper surface. Normal buttons at the bottom, or better, a simple tap of your finger on the Glidepoint's surface, give a mouseclick.
While the Glidepoint, which comes in both a PS/2 and serial version, still requires a cable (a short version and an extension are supplied) to vex your flight attendant, it is more kind to hand muscles than any pointing device I've used. Even after hours of intensive pointing, the warrior's hand feels relaxed and is RSI-associated pain free.
The special supplied driver, accessed through the Windows control panel, offers extensive programmable functions such as the handy `autojump' facility which places the pointer on the default button of most dialogue boxes. A third button on the Glidepoint at the top of its surface area can also be configured to perform useful functions such as calling up the Task Manager, escaping a dialogue box or double clicking the primary mouse button with one press.
The only criticism I can level at this device (or its driver) is that in some circumstances it can very occasionally cause the pointer to jitter slightly or, more infrequently, go completely berserk. Re-entering Windows fixes the problem. This is due to some anomaly in the software configuration of my notebook which I've not yet been able to isolate - it does not occur on my desktop machine.
Of course, those wishing to retain the driver of their native notebook pointing device (or the excellent IntelliPoint 1.0 or 32-bit version 1.1 driver of the most recent Microsoft Mouse) may need to maintain multiple win.ini and system.ini files, copying the appropriate version for use when desired. This can be automated through a simple script in the autoexec.bat but becomes a complicated matter when new software is installed which makes changes to the present versions of those files which need to be manually transferred to the unique versions for each pointer device.
All this might be a slightly complicated way to keep the vampire's claw at bay - but its much more effective than draping garlic gloves around business class...
* Jason Romney is a solicitor and information systems consultant at Price Brent's Information Media and Communication Group. E-mail: jromney@werple.mira.net.au
ENDS
By Jason Romney
Most Road Warriors are hard pressed to receive the merest jot of sympathy for a life-style generally perceived to be insufferably glamorous. Still, flitting from one distant appointment to the next can be lonely as well as grueling which may account for the appeal of a quaint Microsoft Home program called Scenes.
It's a simple screen saver which lets you set your favorite picture as a constant Windows background image or a series of images can be made into a slide show. This requires your images to be digitised.
One quick and easy way to do this, if you have a CD-ROM drive capable of reading Kodak Photo CD-ROMs, is to get your photos returned in this format from the developer.
Two other ways are more sophisticated, useful, and, for extensive jobs, cost-effective. With an image grabber or video capture device, the road warrior can not only be reminded of home but also collect visuals for incorporation into a spreadsheet or database presentation, for on sending via e-mail or just to show friends and colleagues upon return from a trip.
A real estate agent might want to use a portable device such as the Apple Quicktake 150 camera (tel: 02 452 8000), Kodak Digital 40 camera (tel: 03 9727 3518) or even a video camera, to record images of properties. An architect might need images of a building or a lawyer need pictures of exhibits in a case.
One way to acquire these is with a $695.60 video digitiser available from Lakovision called ComputerEyes (tel: 03 9525 3899). This good looking, black, cigarette packet-sized box plugs into your digital camera or video device with one cable and into the LPT1 printer port of your notebook computer with another cable. The connection is with a pass-through connector so the port can be shared with a printer.
ComputerEyes captures images in up to 24-bit color from a black and white preview window displaying 10-12 frames per second video for framing and focusing. Images can be saved in a range of formats such as TIFF and JPEG (and including .bmp files for direct use in the Scenes program).
It is powered either by 3 AAA batteries or (in some cases) directly from the parallel port itself and accepts either composite video or S-Video. The image quality is acceptable and images can be enhanced with a rudimentary set of editing functions.
The only problem with this device, which mercifully requires no fiddling with your configuration files for a successful installation, is that you may find it difficult to plug the supplied cable into your notebook whilst retaining easy access to nearby ports (it didn't plug into my desktop's LPT1 port at all) due to the shape of the plug. On a Toshiba, this means foregoing the use of an external keyboard for the duration of your image capture session.
A more ambitious alternative is the $US329 Cardcam Video-In PCMCIA card from Quadrant International (tel: 610 964 7600) which lets you capture not only still images but also color motion video at up to 15 frames per second and 320 X 240 pixel resolution. Its software also offers more powerful special effect features.
It is a good idea to ask the excellent Quadrant technical support team led by Mike Rivers (at qi-tech@quadrant.com) for the latest software - the new Beta version, for example, eliminates the need to run a special DOS enabler program and finesse memory exclusion statements before running the Windows video capture program. (The new Beta can also be downloaded direct from a BBS at 610 964 8150).
The only potentially complex installation issue, apart from a possible hardware interrupt conflict, is that you need DOS enabling software, such as Phoenix card services, to be executed before a computer will recognise a PCMCIA card. It may also be necessary, if a color signal proves elusive, to obtain a special cable from Quadrant.
Once these issues have been mastered, however, the Cardcam is an effective way of dramatically improving your Powerpoint presentation or really impressing the people you correspond with through e-mail. The video you capture can be incorporated into a Novell Envoy document, for example, and simply played back on the recipient's computer - even if they lack of the necessary playback software.
And with an audio-video of your family on your notebook, the warrior's hotel room seems a lot less lonely...
* Jason Romney is a solicitor and information systems consultant at Price Brent's Information Media and Communication Group. E-mail: jromney@werple.mira.net.au
By Jason Romney
Tomorrow your correspondent jets to Paris for the International Bar Association's 12th Biennial Business Law Congress, a talkfest which brings together hundreds of lawyers from across the world. This year's hot topic is the law of the Internet - a fast growing area for lawyers interested in multimedia and on-line services.
The idea of so many lawyers in one place probably reminds you of acerbic jokes involving the bottom of the ocean and sundry other ways of dealing with the legal profession. The low esteem with which the public regards attorneys may account in part for how hard lawyers strive to endear themselves to people - even to the extent of handing out dozens of business cards to their own kind at conferences.
At the last IBA congress I came away with no less than 50 business cards which is more than I usually acquire even at computer conventions.
Now, all Road Warriors know the value of contact information - but also how hard it is to keep track of business cards. You (or your personal assistant) might keyboard the information into a good contact management database such as Tracker, but this often only occurs when you return from a trip because there is never enough time to enter the information into your computer while on the road.
For this year's IBA I'll be packing one of the most elegant and powerful solutions to this, and many other Road Warrior challenges: a PaperPort. This 2.5 pound wonder, available for Windows or the Macintosh, plugs into the com port of your notebook and scans paper - from a business card to an A4 page - straight onto a virtual desktop on your computer screen.
At 6 seconds per business card, you can scan in 50 cards in five minutes. There is no on/off switch - the PaperPort is `paper driven', activating automatically when it detects paper at its mouth.
The PaperPort software is automatically fired up after a scan and lets you view the scanned paper either as a thumbnail (in `Desktop View') or as a single page (in `Page View'). You can also import .bmp and .tif files to the desktop (or export your scans, also in a range of formats). You can even choose the PaperPort Desktop as your Windows printer driver and print directly onto the Desktop from any Windows application.
At the bottom of the PaperPort screen you'll find a series of icons (exactly which ones depends on which software is already installed on your computer). By dragging a thumbnail of any scanned object to the appropriate icon, you can instantly fax, e-mail or print it.
The built-in Calera optical character recognition means you can drag an A4 page to the icon of your word processor and have the page converted into editable text in say, Microsoft Word, within seconds. Scanned paper can be arranged into stacks of up to 2500 documents and an entire stack faxed, e-mailed or OCRd automatically.
I bought PaperPort in America for $US359.00 (00 11 1 880 289 7939) plus $US61 delivery and some duty at this end. It's a not inconsiderable investment but eminently worthwhile. Scans can be made at up to 400dpi and, although color is not available, even the faintest business card will come up readably with a little magnification. It also works extremely well for newspaper articles.
Scans can be given names of up to 30 characters and arranged into folders with similarly long filenames. Scan names (which you do need to keyboard) can be retrieved with a powerful built-in search engine which will locate information such as the item name, keywords and specific words or phrases in annotations.
The PaperPort software lets you annotate documents with notes, highlight text or draw lines, arrows and circles around the page.
Of course, while the PaperPort software can accommodate up to 100 folders (each one of which can contain up to 100 scanned items), this requires a reasonable amount of hard disk space. An average A4 letter takes 30.8K at 200dpi and 62K at 400 dpi. That means that as you get addicted to PaperPort you'll probably need considerable hard disk space...
Warriors wanting to go on-line simultaneously will also need to invest in a PCMCIA card modem because most notebooks only have one com port.
Happily I can say that PaperPort seems to work fine with both Windows 3.1 AND Windows 95 - although in rare instances, it may conflict with certain drivers already present on your system which will need to be disabled.
If there's one thing lawyers (and tax agents) love, its a good paper trail. With PaperPort you can turn a trail into an eight lane superhighway...
* Jason Romney is a solicitor and information systems consultant at Price Brent's Information Media and Communication Group. E-mail: jromney@werple.mira.net.au
By Jason Romney
Road warriors feel a particular pang of terror when their computer jack knifes off a car bonnet, gets pincered by a closing lift door or throws up a scrambled FAT warning message during boot up. They know every shred of information necessary for their life to continue smoothly is in that fragile box - crush, submerge or jolt it and the owner can be technologically lobotomised.
But the warrior's perilous treks via planes, trains and splashy hydrofoils are far from the only jeopardy. Your correspondent recently accepted a client's floppy disk containing text files for inclusion on a Web site. The Junkie virus leapt hungrily from the floppy to your correspondent's Toshiba notebook hard disk with malevolent ease after an uncharacteristically irresponsible failure to prescan the floppy with the Mcafee anti-virus program.
In this rare instance your correspondent was at home and able to turn to his desktop computer with the excellent new Norton AntiVirus for Windows 95 to clean the offending floppy. Had he been on the road, without a nearby desktop, there would have been a sharp intake of breath and resort to the deep bag of tricks all road warriors sling from their (aching) shoulders.
Lodged in a compartment of every computer bag should be a bootable, virus-free floppy to ensure that a boot up can occur without a virus in your notebook's memory. Then, a simple DOS anti-virus program such as Mcafee scan (downloadable for evaluation from http://www.mcafee.com) can quickly search out and destroy the virus on the notebook's hard disk. The floppy can then be inoculated as well.
Of course, viral and other attacks on your notebook are less stressful if you have a full backup. Today's notebooks can contain a hard disk with storage of more than a gigabyte (more than 800 floppy disks) so backing up properly is an ongoing challenge.
One of the most extraordinary backup tools on the market is the Datasonix Pereos (tel: 9600 1418 or 0414 665 204). This is a $1400, 10 ounce tape backup unit, capable of storing up to 1.2 gigabytes on a tape the size of a postage stamp (22 X 30 X 5 millimetres).
The trustily chugging 525MB Archive Viper SCSI tape backup unit on this warrior's desktop has ground loudly through hundreds of backups - I was expecting at least a drone from the Pereos. In fact it emits no more than the faintest whisper as it whips data onto a 24.8 metre-long tape so thin it needs 16 layers to build up to the same thickness as a human hair.
This sounds rather fragile, I know, but the Pereos uses a special system which verifies data by checking its integrity on the fly after each write. It's true that a little maintenance (a cleaning cartridge after every 12 hours use) is required. However, stick to the regimen and the statistics are impressive: approximately one faulty bit in 120,000 full cassette recordings and a specified mean time between failures of 100,000 hours.
Indeed, while this tiny device wouldn't look out of place in a doll's house, it provides safe backup at about 10MB per minute (with compression) through a notebook's printer port and works 4-6 hours with two AA batteries. A `vampire' cable is included which draws the necessary power from the notebook's rear keyboard or mouse ports.
Apart from these impressive hardware features, Datasonix have written easy to use but extremely powerful software which makes the Pereos a realistic option to export data to clear hard disk space, not just back data up. This means that if you have, for example, a gigantic .avi multimedia file captured from your video camera with say, the Cardcam Video-in PCMCIA card reviewed here recently, you can offload it to the Pereos during a trip and only reload it if and when required (perhaps to your desktop computer upon return from the trip).
A lot of thought has gone into detail with the Pereos. If you forget your password, the software offers a hint. If you forget the name of a file, the software offers a fuzzy search capability.
Even if you are about to hara kiri after a catastrophic data loss and find you have lost or damaged one of the $45 Pereos backup tapes as well, the software will interrogate its database record of the versions of files on all your other tapes and automatically assemble a close substitute of the file set from multiple tape copies.
It may be too extravagant to claim that Pereos substitutes for an Internet connection. However, it is certainly a viable substitute for a remote modem connection to your office file server. And as a passport to peace of mind, Pereos is priceless.
* Jason Romney is a solicitor and information systems consultant at Price Brent's Information Media and Communication Group. E-mail: jromney@werple.mira.net.au
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By Jason Romney
This Warrior has never felt the adrenalin of being a war correspondent but he has brushed closely with death in the line of duty. Back in the '80s, for example, his police roundsman desk was strafed by the Russell Street police station bombing, his chair blown back from the window impregnated with a spray of four inch-long glass shards. Fortunately, your correspondent was out to lunch.
In those days, journalists at The Age were issued a fearsomely large object for remote assignments called an acoustic coupler. This 300 baud modem fitted over the handset of even the most primitive telephone system and reliably transmitted data. While it would sometimes run out of battery punch on deadline, it was often a God send for far flung jobs ranging from mining disasters in country towns through to the Arts Festival in Adelaide.
This morning your correspondent bashes out this article in the charming little Paris hotel, Regent's Garden, fresh croissants and coffee by his side. Having made several subway trips to the huge Apple Computer Paris Expo, he still seems to be in a potential bomb zone, but at least his TeleFast acoustic coupler from TeleAdapt (02 966 1744), cuts a much smarter profile nowadays.
It's just as well. The hotel room telephone, a `Luciole ABF Controle', stubbornly refuses to hear his modem's dialer. With the small, light TeleFast Coupler, the number can be dialled from the telephone's own keypad and then the coupler clamped onto the handset.
On pay phones the TeleFast can manage only 2400 baud but for electronic telephones the TeleFast can operate at speeds of up to 24Kbps. From my hotel, it comfortably manages the local 14,400bps Paris CompuServe connection.
Of course, the red-glowing dialer buttons are on the underside of the handset which means the Warrior must be rather agile and coordinated to dial the number on the handset and then quickly clamp the flexible rubber suckers of the TeleFast onto the handset in time for the modem to handshake properly.
A black velcro strap secures the TeleFast in position on the handset. Provided that the crucial X1 command is added to the modem initialisation string of the WinCim `session settings' menu to prevent the modem from demanding a dial tone, a connection follows shortly.
Once the procedure is mastered, this $345.50 coupler lets your correspondent's reliable Netcomm PCMCIA V34 modem make a consistently good connection for e-mail and faxes. That's very important, but not the only data transfer required when a Warrior rather timidly brings his Toshiba T4900CT notebook to a mega event like the Apple Expo.
The Expo is a 25,000 square metre Apple orgy, the usual 100,000 or so visitors (who consume 15 metric tons of apples) mostly paying 80 French Francs to see demonstrations of things such as the Copland operating system, Quicktime VR and, of course, Apple's splendid new range of PowerPC 603e notebooks (available in Australia in October), the PowerBook 5000 and 2000 series.
The Windows PC notebook toting warrior inevitably incurs the contempt (or pity) of this formidable Apple community, but he can at least obtain documents and graphics from Apple formatted floppy disks if he has the nifty $249.00 Conversions Plus (version 3) program from DataViz.
This Mac disk mounting utility lets DOS/Windows users view and format Macintosh disks from its own window, the File Manager, DOS or any PC program - but also offers a large file translation library.
Version 3 has translators for programs such as Quattro Pro 5 and 6, Lotus 1-2-3 versions 4 and 5, WordPerfect 6.1, Microsoft Works for Mac 4.0, ClarisWorks and WordPerfect Works. It can also translate TIFF, GIF, JPEG, BMP, PCX and EPS graphics files.
One of its many elegant powers is an ability to convert only a portion of a graphic image, using a new file preview feature. It can handle embedded graphics so that a graphic within a WordPerfect document, for example, will be converted to an embedded graphic within a Word for Windows document. Alternatively, you can simply convert a graphic cut out of any program by copying the graphic to the Windows clipboard and converting it to the desired format.
This means the Warrior will almost never need to despair when confronted with a conference room full of Macintosh users wanting (disdainfully, no doubt) to share data with ``that poor Windows guy from Australia''.
Now, if we could only get the European Community and UN to work as smoothly...
* Jason Romney is a solicitor and information systems consultant at Price Brent's Information Media and Communication Group. E-mail: jromney@werple.mira.net.au
By Jason Romney
The Road Warrior's notebook can be more valuable than a fistful of credit cards for a sophisticated thief who knows the worth of a login and password. Many notebooks now have power up and other password protection to prevent the information in databases or automated company server login procedures falling into enemy hands.
But how many impatient warriors opt for convenience over security and simply disable these protections?
There are probably not that many warriors who would still send their credit card details across the Internet while teleshopping on a lonely night in a hotel room. However, it is sometimes hard to resist the temptation to telnet back to a home town Internet gateway for mail, news groups and browsing.
This procedure is supposed to be almost as risky as sending a credit card number because the Warrior may have his or her login and password soaked up by `sniffer' programs designed to detect and retrieve such information for hackers.
The prospect of a well-sniffed hacker getting access to your account to read your mail, delete files or send undesirable messages under your name, is at least embarrassing. It could even be disastrous.
Probably the most serious risk of all, though, is that a warrior's crucial business (and romance) related faxes and e-mail will be intercepted and read by the unscrupulous. One solution is to output faxes as a file on the hard disk of your notebook using a scanner (such as PaperPort) or a fax program (such as Winfax Pro). This output can be encrypted and sent to a receiver who has similar encryption software.
This procedure is cumbersome but highly effective where security is paramount. The best such program is Philip Zimmermann's PGP, which stands for Pretty Good Privacy. It is widely available from FTP sites throughout the Internet - although its use is banned in some countries such as France.
This `public key' encryption package uses special digital `keys' to protect messages from unauthorised reading and also digitally sign messages so that people receiving them from a travelling warrior can be sure they are authentic.
The PGP program is available for most common computer platforms such as Unix, Amiga-DOS, MS-DOS and the Macintosh. All versions work the same. You, the data sender, have a `public' key provided by the data receiver. This public key can be freely distributed by a data receiver to enable people to encrypt messages intended to be sent to that receiver.
To read messages encrypted with a public key, the receiver must use his or her private key. So it is important to keep your private key secret because anyone with your private key can decode messages sent which have been encoded using your public key.
A PGP key is a series of alphanumeric characters up to 128 bytes long, created for you by the PGP program. To create a private key, you would type: `pgp -kg'. To decode an encrypted message (which will have an `.asc' suffix) you would type `pgp encryptedfilename' then enter your secret key. To encode a straight ASCII file, you would type: `pgp-e unencodedasciifilename nameofdestinationemail'. The result will be a new, encoded file with the .asc suffix, ready to be e-mailed.
A much easier to use encryption is a recently released, $US98 program called PrivaSoft from the Israeli company, Aliroo (aliroo@netvision.net.il). With this system, a document can be scrambled with just four mouse clicks from any Windows application. The program mimics a Windows printer driver to let the Warrior create a scrambling key before sending a fax or e-mail. Only someone who knows that key can descramble and read the document.
This system's advantages are that it is relatively inexpensive, easy to use, fits on a single floppy and offers continuous protection from the writer's fingers to the reader's eyes. Any type of contents, in any language, can be scrambled and each scrambled page has a built-in `key clue' to help you work out the password. The system also works particularly well for e-mail messages in Eudora.
Aliroo encourages warriors to send this program to anyone they will need to send a secure fax or e-mail to. The fax receiver is allowed to use it for descrambling free of charge. The fax sender can send 8 faxes as an evaluation before the program must be registered to keep functioning. A Windows 95 version is expected to become available shortly.
By using these techniques, good security can be ensured with minimal inconvenience. Just be sure to remember all those passwords!
* Jason Romney is a solicitor and information systems consultant at Price Brent's Information Media and Communication Group. E-mail: jromney@werple.mira.net.au
By Jason Romney
I could see it in the embarrassed eyes of the British Airways flight desk operator as she looked up from her computer. `Prepare for the worst, and then some', they said.
The Friday night flight back to Melbourne from Heathrow Airport, London, was canceled. This exhausted warrior, desperate to get back in time to write a conference paper to be delivered Wednesday morning, was faced with a compensation choice of either 250 pounds cash or 400 pounds towards his next BA flight. That wasn't too bad, as misfortunes go.
But then comes the punchline: a forced night at the Heathrow Hilton, thrown in before a Saturday departure.
Would I get away with it? I had most of the raw materials I'd need to get started on the `Business on the Internet' keynote paper already digitised in my notebook thanks to my PaperPort (reviewed here last month). I'd also downloaded to a local CompuServe line in London and Cambridge, numerous e-mails with relevant information throughout the previous two weeks European travel.
All I really had to do was draft an emergency outline and send it off to the conference paper publisher via e-mail by, say, 7am London time to meet the deadline. OK, another crisis managed. Almost.
Having grappled at length with the telephone of my French hotel (see this column last month), the battery of my trusty TeleAdapt acoustic coupler had passed away and I really needed to plug my Netcomm PCMCIA modem directly into the phone outlet. In such circumstances, the sight of a British Telecom proprietary plug has a uniquely depressing effect on any Warrior trying to remain optimistic in a crisis.
My Netcomm V34 PCMCIA modem was also starting to show strain. After long periods of operation it was becoming almost too hot to touch and dropping its line - which Netcomm has since told me is a problem they are investigating when it is used with certain models of notebook computer. Models such as my Toshiba T4900CT...
Down at the Hilton reception, the concierge looked sheepish. Yes sir, of course we can help you with a British Telecom plug adaptor box - indeed, they're very popular items. Erm, so popular, in fact, that all our adaptor boxes are currently in use and we don't expect to get any back until mid morning tomorrow...
The crucial adaptor did indeed arrive mid-morning - with a charming typed letter about how, should the warrior wish to avail himself of the (5 pound?) adaptor permanently, 40 pounds would be debited to his hotel bill.
As it happens, your economy travelling correspondent had already found a workaround by talking his way into the opulent First Class British Airways Flight Lounge which provided a complimentary modem line. True, it also sported a hideous BT format plug.
But the true warrior never gives up. So moved by my despair was the on-duty customer comfort officer that she again overlooked my miserable economy ticket and fished from the bottom of a brown paper bag behind the inquiries desk one of the cherished BT to RJ11 adaptor plugs.
Heathrow Hilton: It was too little, too late. British Airways: May you always rule the air!
Mind you, I was already starting to feel jet lagged and hadn't even left London. In the remaining hours before the flight I tinkered with an intriguing little 55 pound device I picked up at the vast British consumer electronics show, Live '95.
The Reveal Voice Mail for PC from Electronic Frontier (e-mail: nick@elecfron.com) can turn your notebook, if it has a supported sound card, into an extraordinarily sophisticated voice mail system and speakerphone.
A small plug in your com port connects to your sound card and phone line. You can then place and answer full-duplex telephone calls from your PC hands-free - even initiating your own selection of `music on hold' to take another call if your telephone supports Telecom's Easy Call features.
The device will also act as an answering machine in your hotel room while you're away, recording messages to your hard disk after delivering a message you leave, different for any one of up to nine pass-word protected voice/fax mailboxes. The software naturally includes an automatic dialer with phonebook record.
Installation was easy and the unit works surprisingly smoothly. I've already set it up so that if it's the Heathrow Hilton calling, I'm out.
* Jason Romney is a solicitor and information systems consultant at Price Brent's Information Media and Communication Group. E-mail: jromney@werple.mira.net.au
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