Number 211a - Year End 2000

Got to find it, Part-I
By Mark West, Tokyo PCUG
Several years ago, I was talking to a friend of mine about this new phenomenon, the Internet. To give you an idea of when this was, I accessed the Internet via a command line, used Elm as an e-mail program Lynx to navigate the web and FTP to download programs. I was trying to describe the size and amount of information that was out there. I told him, you can not imagine the size no matter how much you tried. You don't have any references to compare it too. About a year later, I received an e-mail message from him saying, "Wow! You were right. It is huge."     If the experts predicted the growth rate of the net properly, it should be approximately 27 times larger now. If finding something on the Internet is compared to the needle in a haystack adage, we would be looking for a needle in the United States. We Need Help!     A couple of months ago, we talked about some of the new search engines that are being developed for the web.     But what can we do, when we need the information yesterday. Thanks to our capitalist nature several companies have developed programs that expedite our search for information. These programs search the current search engines on the web and return their results for your further scrutiny. I scoured	some of my favorite web sites and took a look at several dozen of these programs. I downloaded several in a couple of categories and gave them a run through.     A couple of basic programs which I found were f.Search and Atomic. Atomic is a small program which floats around on your desk top. It allows you to type in whatever you want to search for and then click on the engine you want to use to search. It only searches one engine at a time but it does save time since you do not have to load that engines web page to begin your search. The results of your search are loaded into your browser. F.Search attaches itself to your browser and works in a similar fashion as Atomic. The advantage of f.Search is that it has predefined categories to assist you in narrowing your choice search engines.     I will continue my review of search programs next month. There is a lot of information I want to share but limited space. An update on my water cooling system for my CPU for those of you who are interested. I've gathered most of the parts and have begun modification of the heat sink. It is taking much longer than I anticipated since I do not have access to a machine shop. Even though aluminum is considered a soft metal, it is very hard to mold using a file and manual labor. I am documenting the process as I go and will give a demonstration when it is complete.     See you at the meeting, Mark
Number 211a - Year End 2000