President Milt Hull greeted the audience at the May General Meeting and apologized for the last minute hectic planning for the night's meeting. Meeting Coordinator Ken Hopkins had worked most of the day rounding up a second speaker for the meeting, introducing himself and the group to participants at the Government Technology Conference in town.
Ken Hopkins, also the group's Sacra Blue Layout Editor, reported that Tom Anderson, the Sacra Blue Content Editor, skipped town and was enjoying some days in Hawaii— not without first preparing May's issue for publication, however. Ken had not yet released the issue for distribution as yet, claiming "real life" got in the way. He did say this issue looked good and to expect it by the weekend.
Changes are imminent for the distribution of Sacra Blue and Webmaster Brian Smither explained how it will be done. The Steering Committee has finalized its decision to re-implement password access to the current and just prior issue of the Sacra Blue PDF document and eBlue pages. (The same password will work for everything.)
Our award-winning monthly news-magazine had password-protected access not too long ago. But due to changes in how members were notified of the upcoming General Meeting program, delivery of the password became problematic.
The SPCUG has entered most members' e-mail addresses in its database and has acquired the software to manage the password access system. Members (and certain other parties) are highly encouraged to make sure we have a current e-mail address. Passwords will be sent to the membership in the first part of June. Mechanisms exist to receive and automatically process password change requests, and to expire an individual's password to coincide with membership.
If anyone has questions, comments, or complaints about the re-implementation of password access, the e-mail address is president@sacpcug.org.
Milt Hull reminded the audience how appreciative he is of the great work that the various volunteers do for this organization, thanked those members who have been with us through these past few years, and thanked CalWeb, the local Internet service provider who has been hosting our site for a number of years, without ever requesting payment.
Milt and Ken reviewed the schedule of presenters for upcoming meetings. They mentioned that their efforts to attract Belkin, a distributor of quality networking devices, didn't garner any promises but will keep trying. At the GTC, Ken found Scansoft, who would happily show Dragon Naturally Speaking version 6. DNS6 is the latest version of this speech-to-text conversion application, incorporating the best of several technologies recently acquired.
The other speaker on tonight's schedule is Alpha Software's Alpha 5 database application. Alpha 5 is a fully relational, programmable database capable of satisfying the requirements of the small to medium-sized corporation.
For July, Microsoft will show a special presentation on digital imaging. Milt has seen a preview of this presentation and states it is quite a show, and not to be missed. Bring a friend.
Milt discussed his recent encounters with viruses. He specifically warned of a hoax advising people to delete a file called jdbgmgr.exe, which none of the anti-virus programs can detect, according to the latest hoax. The spurious messages also warn you to be sure delete it from the Recycle Bin as well. Its icon looks like a teddy bear. But the warning itself is a hoax. The file is actually part of Microsoft's implementation of Java services. Microsoft has this file available for separate download in case anyone falls for this hoax.
