DVD store
In December, I asked you about storage of data in largish quantities. One suggestion was: "If you can wait, DVD Rewriters and DVD-RAM drives should be affordable soon, storing 4.7GB per disc." Have I waited long enough? Janet Gyford
www.gyford.com/janet
Jack Schofield replies: Yes. The DVD writer market has been blighted by very high prices, and by different manufacturers adopting different, incompatible formats. Both problems are about to be solved by the arrival of multi-format (DVD+RW/+R and DVD-RW/-R) writers at relatively affordable prices.
Examples include the NEC MultiSpin ND-1100A and Sony's DRU500A internal drive. Both should be available before Christmas and are expected to cost £249. No doubt there will be others, but prices are unlikely to go much lower in the very near future. If you have a multi-format drive, you still have to choose which type of disc and system to use, but the low cost of DVD-R discs makes this a good bet for mass archival storage. PC Tech Guide has a good guide to the different formats and compatibility issues at www.pctechguide.com/10dvd.htm.
Dana Parker's Writable DVD: A Guide for the Perplexed is worth reading, though it was published in January 1999 (see www.emediapro.net/EM1999/parker1.html). One correction I would make is that DVD has a maximum capacity of 4.7 billion bytes, which is 4.37GB (gigabytes) not 4.7GB. If you try to copy a 4.6GB directory from a PC hard drive, it will not fit.
Bye, Bostik
I am fed up with cutting out the best bits of Ask Jack, sticking them on paper and putting them in a binder. How can I find old articles? Ian Glen
JS: Last week, Guardian Unlimited unveiled a new Online website, which includes the ability to limit searches to issues of Online, or specifically to Ask Jack. Early indications (fingers crossed) are that this does the job much more conveniently than searching the whole paper. It is also much less work than Bostik. Go to www.theguardian.com/online/askjack
Find me
I have set up a web page for Gloucester Chess Club and would like it to be found by search engines, especially Google. I registered the URL with Google weeks ago, and other search engines, but cannot find the address by searching for Gloucester Chess Club.
Pat Baker
JS: Most web pages are not indexed. This is not a problem unless they contain unique information that people could not find any other way. However, Google has a good page at www.google.com/webmasters to help people get their sites indexed. This points out that sites will be indexed if they are listed in the Open Directory or on Yahoo, which means a human will have looked at them and decided they have merit.
Also, bear in mind that Google's "spiders" find pages by following links, and the more links there are to your site, the more important Google thinks it is. Hence the use of "link farms" to try to fool Google's page ranking system (which decides which sites come out top). I would not recommend trying to subvert this system because it is what makes Google work so well. However, you could legitimately arrange "link swaps" with similar chess club sites, or join a Web Ring, thus increasing your chances of being crawled and indexed.
More Hotmail
Any suggestions on how to cut down the amount of junk mail I get in Hotmail? Jacqui Francis
JS: There has not been a good solution to the problem of Hotmail spam, but last Thursday, a beta test version 2.0.14 of Mailwasher was released. This now includes Hotmail support - as readers Peter Szewczuk and Ray Summer were first to tell me, in response to a published query from Anne Murray. Mailwasher can bounce spam from Hotmail and POP3 mailboxes without you having to log on manually or download it. You can download it, free, from www.mailwasher.net/download.php
Zone alarm
I have had a problem with my PC dialling my ISP when starting up. After formatting my hard drive and re- installing all my software I discovered the culprit. My free firewall, Zone Alarm, is dialling out to a Zone Labs webpage that offers a free 30-day trial of Zone Alarm Pro. How can I stop it dialling out? Howard M King
JS: Zonelabs says there is a bug - sorry, "an issue" - in Zone Alarm, whereby it performs a DNS lookup without waiting for you to open an internet connection. The support site says: "We will correct this in the next release of the products". If you have Windows XP, try disabling the Remote Access Auto Connection Manager. Or you could switch to Sygate Personal Firewall, free for personal use.
Backchat
· Last week, Eddie Smerdon complained he was receiving pop-up dialogue boxes from Windows Messenger advertising University Diplomas on his new PC running Windows XP. The solution seemed to be to disable Windows Messenger (not to be confused with Microsoft Messenger). However, it now seems more likely that the pop-ups are arriving via a more primitive route: a messaging service designed to allow network administrators to use a command line to send messages to users' PCs. Microsoft calls this a "Messenger Service of Windows": see Microsoft Knowledge Base article Q168893 for a description.
A $699.99 program called Direct Advertiser has been used to exploit this service to send spam, as desribed last week by Steven J Vaughan-Nichols at Practical Technology. It seems that firewalls normally block this traffic - which may explain why I have not seen any popups. See Asylum's new FAQ page at http://faq.ozoneasylum.com/853.
Finally, Coffee Cup Software has launched a $10 program, DirectAd Blocker, though you can stop the ads for nothing, eg by typing net stop messenger at a command line. Thanks to Gareth Jones, Emperor, Tom Royal and others for contributing information.
