The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Editorial Ash Nallawalla ash@melbpc.org.au

Thanks to another plug by Stan Johnstone last month, our online employment network at Listbot swelled in ranks (by two), but sadly Listbot will not be available after August. That is a blessing in disguise, as we have moved to another Microsoft-owned service known as MSN Communities. Please visit http://communities.msn.com/melbpcnet and sign up there.

You will need to have a free Hotmail or MSN e-mail address, or simply a Passport account, which means you can sign up using a pseudonym if you wish. Even I don't get to know who you are if you use an external address.

MSN Communities offers numerous little tools that you can use when building an online forum and you will like it, should you choose to go and build your own community. I have created links to interesting articles and employment agencies, for example, and a custom list of members and their areas of employment interest. Members can add links too. Several members have signed up at the MSN Communities Melbpcnet site and there are already some interesting discussions in progress.

Macromedia CoIdFusion 5 

This issue focuses on programming. I have not programmed "in anger" for over 10 years but much of my work with Web sites has involved a tiny amount of programming. I had the opportunity to attend the launch of Macromedia's ColdFusion Server 5. It is a Web application server whose applications are authored with ColdFusion Studio. If you are a budding Web developer, you will be faced with competing technologies such as ASP, PHP and JSP Programming in ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML) appears to be a lot more compact for a given task. Read more about it at http://www.macromedia.com.

Ad-Aware 5.5

I like to use Ad-Aware, a free program that checks your machine for nasties that keep tabs on your browsing habits. Several sites use cookies to find out how often you visited them and what pages you saw. When used responsibly, cookies help a user to see material that is of interest to them, based on previous visits. Some companies appear to share intelligence with other sites and they build a more complete picture of your travels. Others use "spyware", which you manage to download inadvertently or in the guise of "ad ware" - advertising banners on Web pages or occasionally in bought software.

Some ad ware is designed to spy on your surfing activities and to send reports to some central point, hence it is called spyware. Ad-Aware is one of many programs that finds and deletes spyware from your PC. You can also run it from the command line. The company has a new address: http://www.lavasoftusa.com and the program has been updated recently to version 5.5.

CD Writer Bulk Buy

Those of you who subscribe to the group's Internet service have your e-mail address in the membership database, so you already know about the offer you received in July. It was about an LG brand CD writer featuring a 32x CD-ROM reader with 8x writing speed and 4x rewriting speed using CDR-W media. While that offer lasted just one week and has closed.

Contacting xxx@melbpc.org.au

Members are still writing to wrong addresses, perhaps hoping that someone will do the right thing and forward to the right person. In a volunteer body such as ours, we do our best but you can never be sure, particularly when many people "reside" behind each address. It is easy to assume that someone else will take care of it. Most addresses are all on the directory pages.

• Anything to do with your membership or subscription to the Internet service, for example, a change of postal address should be addressed to office@melbpc.org.au.
• Anything to do with problems with your Internet connection should be addressed to ihelp@melbpc.org.au.
• Any comment about our own Web site content (not your connectivity problems) should be sent to webmaster@melbpc.org.au.
• Any submission or communication with anyone in the PC Update editorial team should be sent to pcupdate@melbpc.org.au.

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