It didn't matter how arcane the question; Johnny always had the answer.

Well, our February meeting felt a little like one of those episodes, with Ralph Reid and I sharing the part of Johnny, fielding questions from the Chapter members (I will say right now that I certainly didn't have as many answers as Johnny did in the TV series!) Here's how it went:

Det. Drebin: Where can I get a cheap upgrade to my operating system?

Johnny the Snitch: Go to Pricewatch and click on the "Operating Systems" link.

Drebin: The prices are too low to believe. Are these legit, or did they just happen to "fall off the back of a delivery truck?"

Johnny: It all depends on the vendors. Just watch out for the ones that say "NO CD MEDIA INCLUDED!"

Drebin: All right, next question -- If I upgrade my operating system, will it wipe out my installed programs and data files?

Johnny: Officially, No. But smart money says you should always back up your important data files, and have your original program CDs handy in case you need to reinstall your programs.

Drebin: Hmmm. What if I just need to check whether my operating system is working properly?

Johnny: Windows 95, 98, or ME?

Drebin: 98.

Johnny: Click the Start button, choose Run, and type in SFC to run the built-in System File Checker. See Windows Help for more help on what it does.

You could try MSINFO32 instead; it can tell you more than you want to know about the insides of your system, and it can run SFC, too. But be careful!

Drebin: Yeah?

Johnny: Yeah—some of the options let you modify your system, and that's pretty tricky business.

Drebin: Thanks, I'll keep that in mind. Now what if I've been getting warnings from my firewall that certain lowlifes have been trying to break into my PC. The firewall tells me a string of numbers, but it doesn't say what they mean.

Johnny: Numbers like 123.456.789.047?

Drebin: Yeah, that's right; something like that. What are all those numbers?

Johnny: Those are the raw Internet address of the scum that are trying to hack your PC. If you do a reverse DNS lookup on them, you might get some idea of who's trying to break into your PC.

Drebin: Great! How do I do the lookup?

Johnny: Go to GRC and download ID Serve from Steve Gibson, the guy who wrote SpinRite and a bunch of other useful PC utility programs.

Install ID Serve. The next time your firewall shows you a warning with those address numbers in them, fire up ID Serve and type the numbers into its Server Query form, then follow the instructions to have Gibson's Web site anonymously look up who's lurking behind the numbers. You probably won't learn who they really are, but you might get lucky. And it's free.

Drebin: Sounds like my kind of software. Anything else ID Serve can do for me?

Johnny: Yeah; if you type in a regular Web URL instead of all those numbers, then ID Serve can tell you about the cookies that the site tries to put on your PC.

Drebin: Cookies, huh? No donuts?

Johnny: No donuts.

Drebin: OK, what's the word on the latest Intel CPUs?

Johnny: The real dirt is that Intel has said that the transistors inside their McKinley CPU are so small that cosmic rays can flip bits at random inside the CPU while it's running a program, leading to occasional program errors that can't be predicted or prevented.

Drebin: Occasional? How occasional?

Johnny: Intel says that the average user will see less than one bit flip per thousand years. Some hardware experts, such as Jack Ganssle, writing in the February 2002 issue of Embedded Systems Programming magazine, worry that there may be so many PCs and other equipment using these CPUs that even such a long time between failures will still mean some failures will happen somewhere in the world every year—maybe in a piece of equipment performing some really important or dangerous job.

Drebin: Uh-huh. Any other news on new hardware?

Johnny: Well, the hotshot engineers down at EE Times, a rag for electrical engineers, did a manufacturing cost analysis of Microsoft's new "Xbox."

Drebin: Xbox? What's that?

Johnny: It's Microsoft's video game system, designed to compete with Nintendo's GameCube and Sony's PlayStation 2.

Drebin: Right. What about this cost analysis?

Johnny: Seems that the EE Times crew figured that it costs Microsoft about $323.00 to build an Xbox. Aand they're selling it for $299.00. It's a loss-leader; maybe they're selling them just to take business away from the competition, to muscle in on Nintendo's and Sony's turf.

Drebin: I see. Turf wars. Nasty business. Now, I took a bunch of pictures with a new digital camera. Undercover stuff; you know. The pictures looked pretty hot in the viewfinder, but when I downloaded them to my PC, they didn't look so good. I need to jazz them up somehow, but I haven't got the time to learn how to use Adobe PhotoShop or any of the other big image-handling programs.

Johnny: Go to MediaChance and download their freeware "DC Enhancer." Scan the downloaded file for viruses using an up-to-date virus scanner from a reputable company—not one of those free virus scanners from former Soviet-bloc countries. If the download is clean, install it. Run it. Use it to load the picture that you took. It will show you the original picture and some sliders and buttons to adjust the color, contrast, smoothness, and detail level. It will also show you the final picture, side-by-side with the original. Play with the sliders and controls until the final picture looks the way you want it to. Then press the Save button to save the final picture in any of the popular graphics formats.

Drebin: Sounds pretty easy; I like it. My friend has a stock-tracking program that shows charts that he wants to e-mail to his ... business associates. But the program won't save the charts in a file; he can only look at them on the screen. Any way that he can e-mail them?

Johnny: Sure. Run the stock-tracking program. Look at the pretty chart. Hold the Alt key, while pressing the PrtScr key. That will probably—not always—copy the chart into the Windows clipboard. Now start up the Windows Paint program: Press the Start Button, then choose Programs, Accessories, Paint. Choose Edit, Paste in the Paint program to paste the clipboard into a new picture. The picture will show the stock chart. Finally, choose File, Save As to save the picture as a graphics file. Now your friend can e-mail the graphics file to his associates, just like any other e-mail attachment.

Drebin: Good, he'll be happy to hear that. It's getting late, and I've got to go soon. But I have two more questions.

Johnny: OK.

Drebin: First, who's the odds-on favorite to win the door prize tonight? And second, when's the next Chapter meeting?

Johnny: [Looking around surreptitiously] The word has it that a new guy, name of Roger Cook, is going to be the lucky winner. As for the meeting, it will be held at the usual place and time: the Davis Public Library's big meeting room, at 7:00 p.m. on the fourth Wednesday of the month.

Drebin: Thanks, Johnny [passes him a big wad of cash].

Johnny: No problem. See you next time.

Drebin: See you next time, Johnny.

I spent much of the meeting demonstrating a Windows program that I've used for a long time: GoldWave, a really top-notch audio editing tool. It was created years ago by Chris Craig, a Canadian programmer. He's been improving it for all that time, making it more powerful, yet keeping it inexpensive and very easy to use.

GoldWave lets you edit sounds with your PC. But that's like saying that a pencil lets you make marks on paper. So let's try again: GoldWave lets you read a sound file, or record a sound file, or read the audio part of a movie file. Once read, it shows you the shape of the sound graphically, as if you were viewing it on an oscilloscope. Then you can do all the obvious things to the sound, such as snipping out parts of it ("I am [not] a crook!"), pasting in sounds from other sound files, reversing the sound (instant Norwegian!), and raising or lowering the volume. When you're done, you can save the sound back into a file, with a wide variety of formats.

But in addition to those simple operations, GoldWave gives you the tools to do more exotic operations on sounds. You can speed up or slow down the playback, while leaving the pitch of the voice the same (that could get you a job selling cars on the radio!); or you can go the other way, leaving the speed of a voice the same, but changing its pitch to anything from a menacing rumble to the frantic chatter of Alvin the chipmunk. You can make sounds echo, make people sound like robots, add sixties-style "flanging" sounds ("it's all so beautiful..."), expand a sound's loudness to make it more attention-getting, and do many, many other effects. Most of the effects are adjustable; the more complicated ones have convenient presets.

You can filter sounds, removing unwanted hums, pops, or scratches or boosting a weak bass line; you can mix two sound files together; you can analyze the frequencies present in a sound and display them while the sound plays; and you can even create mathematically-defined sounds using a built-in symbolic language. There are probably other functions built into the program; I'm sure that I have yet to explore all that it can do.

GoldWave is a marvelous tool. I've used it to clean up noisy sound tracks from videos shot live on location; to capture audio directly from a music CD (it does that better than any other program I've ever tried); to remove hiss and noise from old audio tapes captured using my sound card, converting them into sound files for an audio CD that I edited; to study "Shepard's Tones," an amusing sonic illusion (imagine the sound equivalent of a barber's pole: a sequence of tones that sounds as if it rising forever); and more.

The program has no major flaws, and very few deficiencies. Only three come to mind right now: it can't automatically add noise to a sound track (I needed to do that in a video that I was editing: some scenes had to be refilmed in a studio, so they weren't as noisy as the original live scenes that they had to match!); its display of an audio spectrum is dynamic and 2D (rather than an unchanging 3D "stacked" view showing the entire sound's spectrum over time), which makes it harder to analyze—and filter out—some unwanted noises; and, while it can yank the sound track out of a video file, it can't put an edited sound track back into a video file. Those would all be nice tools or conveniences, but they are not essential features.

GoldWave is shareware; you can download the fully functional program. A little while after you start using it, it starts nagging you (politely) to register it. The nagging messages don't stop it from working, and they go away if you exit and restart the program. If you register it (around $40.00 American), you receive a password that makes the program work without nagging. The password also works with any future versions that you download, so it is like getting unlimited upgrades for one low price; it's an excellent deal. I gladly registered my copy.

If you do any kind of sound editing, amateur or professional, GoldWave is a must-have tool; I recommend it highly.

We had fun playing with GoldWave during the meeting, and then Ralph Reid had fun because he won the door prize; congrats, Ralph! Perhaps next month you'll be the lucky winner—if you're a member of the chapter, that is! Regardless, everybody is welcome.