Six of us met at RE/MAX this month. In contrast to the last time we tried this, we had no trouble at all hooking up to the network. That is not to say every thing on the net we were interested in exploring was quite so cooperative. A case in point was Gnutella. But first some background information.

A web based system for sharing MP3 files (compressed, CD quality audio) called Napster has created an uproar in the music world. Basically Napster allows individuals to easily find MP3 files that other individuals have and to share these files. These files are NOT on some central server somewhere. The particular file you find may be on some person's machine in their bedroom halfway around the world. And whatever MP3s you have made or collected can be shared with others the same way. As you can imagine, just about any recorded song by any artist is available somewhere. No wonder the music industry is concerned - they are completely cut out of the exchange. The catch with Napster is that it is for MP3s only and you don't really connect with the other computer directly - Napster acts as a kind of proxy for the exchange. The consequence of that is Napster is a target for legal action. (It is too impractical to go after the thousands of individuals who are actually sharing files.) Recently this has happened, most notably by the rock group Metallica, which successfully demanded that Napster kick some 300,000 plus users off the system for sharing Metallica's work.

As is typical of the Internet world, nothing stays static for long. The next logical step was to cut out the middleman (i.e., Napster) and allow searching for and sharing directly between the individual machines. And while at it, allow any file to be shared, not just MP3s. Thus was born Gnutella. This software for truly distributed sharing on the Internet was created as a "skunk works" project by some AOL programmers and squashed by AOL management in less than a day. But not before the genie was out of the bottle - more than 10,000 copies were downloaded in a few hours and the software has taken a life of it's own. In a recent National Public Radio broadcast, Marc Andreesen (creator of Netscape) has called this the next killer app on the web. So, with all this publicity, I downloaded the software and tried out with the group. Well, as a killer app, it definitely left something to be desired. First off, there was absolutely no help built into the program. Any information about how Gnutella worked was located on the web. The next stumbling block was finding some other computer out there available for connecting to. Even though there was a published list of IP addresses, nothing we tried worked. Oh well :-( There's a link to the main Gnutella web site below. If you get it to work, let us know the secret.

For some fun, we looked at a couple of screen savers and a joke program. One of the screen savers displayed really big, floating eyeballs, peering in all directions. The other was a cute advertisement for Folger's coffee - it displays a disheveled student who has been up to all hours studying for finals on a rainy morning and who, after a cup of java, magically transforms into a well groomed individual, ready to take on the world, which has now become a sunny day. As a bonus, there is also a simple game built into the saver. The joke program, catfood.exe, displayed a fortune cookie fortune while, to the tune of Harry Chapin's Cat's Cradle, a singer was crooning about how the meat in the dishes were something other than beef, pork or chicken.

Before proceeding further, since we were connected to the internet and there has been a lot of press about security, especially with DSL and cable modems, I installed Zone Alarm firewall software. We briefly discussed the purpose of the program, how it worked and some aspects of configuring it. We also checked out Steve Gibson's "Shields Up" site to test how well the firewall was working. Then we left it running in the background while we continued with the SIG.

We next looked at a couple of games. Alphatris is a tetris variant that has an educational bent. Instead of fitting various shapes together, the object was to drop letters in such a way as to spell words. An extensive library is supplied and you can add additional words. The program also features a variety of background music and customizable background graphics. As if that wasn't enough, the program can switch languages! Besides English, it has dictionaries for French, Italian and Spanish.

The other game was a 3D version of the classic pacman. The graphics look cool, but the program requires a really powerful CPU to run adequately. The club machine didn't have the horsepower to do it justice at all.

Our last bit of fun was a bit of utility as well - the editor pig-hEaDIT. This is a full 32-bit Notepad replacement editor with lots of useful features (large files, multiple file editing, etc.) and a unique twist. Press the "pig" button and, voilą, a new window pops up with your prose translated into pig latin! Away oolcay!

Our next stop was out on the Internet. And here we got our first example of Zone Alarm doing it's work as it popped up windows asking for our permission to allow various applications proceed to connect to the Internet. In this regard, we could tell Zone Alarm to always allow the program to connect (like we did for Internet Explorer), to only connect for this session or to prevent connection. In this way, one builds up a set of "rules" that defines the security environment for your specific machine. Anyway, where we headed was to a bunch of very nice aviation sites: the NASA Dryden Research Aircraft Gallery, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, the United States Air Force Museum (Wright Patterson AFB, Ohio) and Edwards Air Force Flight Test Center. If you are an aviation buff or just like nice airplane pictures, these are must-visit places.

Looking for an easy way to keep your computer's clock set? Our next utility, Atomtime is just the ticket. This simple to use utility connects over the Internet to the atomic clock in Boulder, CO and can check/set your system clock. The current version is shareware, but we demoed the older, freeware version, which, while it doesn't have all the bells and whistles of the current version, does the basics just fine. As an alternate, we also downloaded and looked at a favorite of Steve's, ClockAlign. It preforms similar functions from a sharp interface and additionally sits in the tray as a mini calendar.

Next up was a new web browser called Netcaptor. This browser is built on top of Internet Explorer (version 4 or higher) and features a unique, tabbed interface. Thus,ng new windows creates new "tabs" rather than separate windows. This makes it a snap to switch between different sites without the tedious back/forward arrows. Even better, a set of these tabbed windows can be saved as a "captor" group. Next time you are on the web, you can call up this group and automatically load all the sites. Pretty handy. Another web utility came along with this program with an unusual name, Flyswat. This little utility adds a special hyperlink to the web pages that, when clicked on, pop up a window with a set of special links. For example, an actor's name might produce a list of films, interviews, biographies, etc. If the highlighted item is also a normal web link, you can choose to look at the flyswat links or go to the original hyperlink. The utility also works with ordinary applications - for example, editing a document - hold the alt key down and click a word. Typically, the popup box will have links to a dictionary or encyclopedia. Interesting concept.

Since were dealing with Internet and had discussed security some, it seemed appropriate to look at some network utilities. One of these was NetInfo. This program is a full featured network analysis tool that can let you perform a variety of TCP/IP tests (e.g., finger, ping, trace route, Whois, ip and port scanning, DNS resolution) from a nice GUI. We even used it to get the identity of the mysterious FTP request reported and blocked by Zone Alarm during our session - yes these things DO happen! As it turned out, the perpetrator was MR Tech - the ClockAlign site. We decided that since we had just downloaded the program, he was interested in knowing if we were also making this available for further sharing by looking to see if we had a FTP server running.

We also looked at Net Sentinel, a simple utility to monitor who's connected to network shares on your computer. This would be handy in, for example, an office with a LAN where you share folders on your computer and you'd like to keep tabs on who's using them.

Our thanks, again, to Bernie Stephan and RE/MAX Marina in Petaluma for providing a meeting place with a connection to the Internet. Next month, I will not be able to do the SIG, but if I can find someone to step in for me, the meeting will shift back to the Bank of the West.

Here are Internet links to some of the programs we explored.