By William LaMartin, Editor, Tampa PC Users Group
lamartin@tampabay.rr.com

Digital Camera My Canon G1 digital camera is now three years old. It is hard to believe that it has been that long since I purchased it along with a 340 MB IBM Microdrive. The price of the camera was about $900, and the Microdrive was $302. See my original article in the newsletter about the camera at http://www.tpcug.org/newsletter/nl_2001/january2001/canong1.htm.

It has cost me about $400/year to own the camera so far. Oh, there was also the replacement battery at around $45. I have taken 4,867 photos with the camera and saved 3,463 of them. A quick calculation shows that it has cost $.36 for each saved photo (including the price of the new battery). It has cost $.25 for each photo taken. This is probably no cheaper than using a film camera, and at this point with the digital camera I only have a file--not a printed photo. But, oh, the convenience.

I get very good results scanning the negatives taken with my film camera into digital images on the computer, but this is nowhere as convenient as simply downloading photos from the digital camera into my computer. The film camera undoubtedly produces better images, but the G1 does a quite adequate job if you don't want to produce a print larger than 8 x 10 and you avoid harsh lighting conditions like very bright sunlight. The G1 actually does quite well in low light situations. To see some of my low light shots with the G1 go to http://web.tampabay.rr.com/lamartin/ and view the holiday light photos of my neighborhood. The photos range over the last three years.

Canon is now producing the G5, I think. Several of our members own G3s. These cameras cost more than your average digital camera, and, I suppose, they are aimed at the advanced amateur--and they produce excellent results. I recommend using the highest resolution and least amount of compression in taking the photos. That way you get the maximum amount of information. Hard drive space is cheap. Then you can put any photos you would like prints of on a CD and take it to your favorite one-hour photo place for printing.

Remote Desktop My son visited us for the holidays and every day spent some time accessing his computer in New York City via the Remote Desktop feature of his NYC computer running Windows 2000 Server and my daughter's computer running Windows XP Pro. When he left Manhattan, he left his computer running and connected to the Internet through a DSL connection. He noted his IP address on the Internet and hoped that the connection did not go down and come back with a different IP address.

Once in Tampa, he went to my daughter's laptop and started the Remote Desktop Application (Start | All Programs | Accessories | Communication | Remote Desktop) . He entered the NYC computer's IP address, and since the computer in Manhattan had been configured to accept Remote Desktop logins, he was asked for a username and password. After logging on, he was working on his home computer. He could start programs on it, work with any files, and run Outlook to send and receive email from his computer--not the one in Tampa. Of course fast broadband connections are vital for this kind of work.

When we traveled to my hometown to visit my mother and sister, he wanted to access his NYC computer from there. My sister has a broadband connection on a computer running Windows 98. That was fine. All that was needed was to go to Microsoft and get the requisite software to allow her computer to be a client computer for a Remote Desktop setup.

Note that any computer running Windows 98 or higher can function as a client for a Remote Desktop Connection. However, the computer that you want to access remotely (the server in the setup terminology) must be running either Windows 2000 Server or Windows XP Pro--that is XP Pro, not Home). That was one reason that I wanted my daughter's new laptop for college to have XP Pro as the operating system. I had hopes of being able to access her computer at her request to help with any problems she may be having with it. Unfortunately when I tried to access it via a Remote Desktop Connection at her school, I found out that the school wouldn't allow that.

Web Logs That's web logs--not WebBlogs, which seem to be all the rage. A web log is a text file that logs all of the visits to a web site. It is something that the server software does. A web log lets you know what is really happening at your site--what are the most visited pages, what time of the day is most active, how many visits on a particular day, the IP address of the visitor, and what pages get none or few visits. For the TPCUG.ORG site and my personal lamartin.com site, the web logs run close to 10 MB each for a month's data. For a commercial site, it could be more than that for one day's activity.

To make any sense of all this data you need log analyzing software. At one time I bought some such from Web Trends, I think. It was their scaled down version, and it made nice graphs, but it did not allow you to see past the first 10 pages in any category--the most visited 10 pages but not the 11th or 12th. So I created my own log analyzer in Microsoft Access.

Using my log analyzer, I have that for the month of December, 2003, the TPCUG site had an average of 155 unique visitor sessions each day and the lamartin.com site had an average of 234. The TPCUG site used only a total bandwidth of .25 GB, and lamartin.com used 1.4 GB (many more images downloaded). At the TPCUG site, Internet Explorer made up 58% of the page views, Netscape Navigator made up 1%, and other browsers and web crawlers made up the remaining 41%. At lamartin.com, Internet Explorer registered 75%, Netscape Navigator 1%, and other browsers and web crawlers 24%. So, at least at these two sites, Netscape Navigator is basically a nonentity. What I mean by a web crawler is something like the Google Bot which visited 761 different pages at the TPCUG site in December. That is how Google knows what is at the TPCUG site. And that brings the following to mind.

ASP.Net and Google As noted above, Google periodically visits web sites like our TPCUG site and indexes many of the pages there. It can do this because it can follow the links that are given in the underlying HTML on any page where it lands. On web pages created by ASP.Net, you may or may not have such links in the underlying HTML. It just depends on how you allow the user to browse to other pages. If you use regular hyperlinks, then everything is fine for Google. It sees them in the underlying HTML. But what about those buttons I use to access other pages at the .Net Test at TPCUG? Go to the main .Net test page at http://www.tpcug.org/Main.aspx and do a “View Source” in your browser. You will not be able to find a single link to another page at the site, I believe. So what are Google and all the other web crawlers going to do? I don’t know.

.Net Speaking of the .Net version of the site, for which I placed a link on our home page, I want to thank those who tested it to see how well it displayed in browsers other than Microsoft Internet Explorer. They pointed out several problems in displaying the page properly, and I was able to trace the problems to errors in my code that, when corrected, made the pages display correctly in all browsers tested except Netscape Navigator 4.7.

Santa If you are observant you can tell that I am stretching this article out to fill the newsletter. If I had gotten that third article I asked for, I wouldn’t have needed to be so long winded. Now that Santa has come and gone perhaps some of you will have some articles for me on what he brought you for Christmas. As for myself, this is probably the first time in a long time that Santa brought me no computer-type present. I was hoping for a new laptop since my current one is five years old, but I received none. Santa undoubtedly knows best--probably has inside information on drastic price reductions in the near future on such items. Indeed, I have noted some real good prices on laptops with the specifications I want in the CompUSA ads. They were from Compaq and Toshiba, I think. So far, it appears that Gateway has not lowered their prices on the 450 series much if any since we bought one from them for my daughter in August. u