Well, I was just sitting here late in the afternoon the day before the newsletter needed to be printed looking at around two and a half blank pages. What to do? I just did it. I reformatted all the articles from 10 point type to 12 point type. That added a little over a page—and made it easier for you to read. Now I will attempt to fill that remaining empty space with something of interest.

I have no new software or hardware to write about this month. Neither do I have any terrible computer problems to relate. But I have done a few things worth noting.

First let me say that Windows Millennium for which I did a clean installation on my Compaq 333 with 128 MB of Ram and a 20 GB hard drive is running well with no problems. I have found no problems with it. I also purchased the upgrade from Windows 98 version to install on my Gateway 600, but I have held off on that since I think I need to uninstall GoBack on that computer before installing Windows Millennium, and I haven’t had the inclination to do it. I read somewhere older versions of GoBack were not compatible with this new version of Windows.

As mentioned in the minutes of our last meeting, as a brief fill-in, I demonstrated the WebCam I have been working on. I have one of these small Intel video cameras that connects to the computer via a USB connection. I wrote some Delphi software (with a lot of help from examples in the Delphi online help) that captures a picture of my pet cockatiel at fixed intervals. It then changes the captured BMP file into a JPG file, which it then saves to the computer’s hard drive. Another Delphi program I wrote (again with considerable help from Delphi examples) takes this file at fixed intervals and sends it via an FTP connection to one of the web sites I have. On that site is a page which displays the picture. This page automatically updates itself every three minutes. As with a lot of the things I do, this was more of an exercise in programming than a desire to have my bird on the Internet. I think there is still a little problem with the FTP software, but when I get it totally debugged, I will be happy to share it with anyone who might be interested.

AOL Mail Contacts Online This past month I have had several people tell me that after sending an email to someone who was on AOL, the AOL person would then reply to them, saying something like "I see that you are still online, so I will reply to you." They mentioned it to me, and I said that I didn’t see how anyone could know whether you were online or not unless you had signed up with one of those instant messaging services—which these people hadn’t. Then I had the same experience, and that led to the following investigation.

Knowing that I hadn’t signed up for any instant messaging, I came to the conclusion that the email messages I send apparently transmit more than just my email address, since no one could tell whether I was connected to the Internet using just that. I then sent myself a message from my RoadRunner account to my NetCom account, opened up the message after receiving it, and looked at the "message source". To my surprise, right there in the message source was the line: "Received: from rome (242848hfc60.tampabay.rr.com [24.28.48.60] )". Well, "rome" is the network name of my computer and "24.28.48.60" was the current IP address of my RoadRunner connection. So a lot more than my email address was being sent with the message.

Now, how could I use this information to see if "rome" at 24.28.48.60 was still online. Well, there is a program called Ping. All computers running Win 95 and above have it. You can run it from the Start | Run text box, but it is better to drop to the DOS prompt to run it, since then the Window will not disappear when it is finished, and you can then read the results. I ran "Ping 24.28.48.60" from the DOS prompt on the computer connected to NetCom and it indicated that it had indeed sent and received responses from 24.28.48.60. That told me that there was a computer at the address 24.28.48.60.

But how do I know that the person who sent me the email from a computer at IP 24.28.48.60 is still the same person using that IP address? I don’t. It is possible that he sent the message then disconnected and RoadRunner then assigned someone else to that IP address. But if, when I pinged the address 24.28.48.60, I could also ascertain that the computer name was still "rome", then I would be pretty sure that I had the same person.

I have not had time yet to figure if and how this last item can be done, but I believe that it can—unless the person is using a firewall.

Anyway, I have basically figured out how AOL knows whether the person who sent you an email is still online or not. And I have learned that when you send an email, much more identifying information than just your email address goes along with it.

I have also been doing a bit of Visual Basic programming involving Microsoft Access databases, and I find that I have almost as much of a problem getting the database to behave correctly—which really should be the easy part of the effort— as I do writing the VB code. And it turns out that these database problems are the same ones I have run into in our Microsoft Access SIG. So come out to the SIG and help me solve them. u