CompuNotes
Notes from The Cutting Edge of Personal Computing
October 19, 1997
Issue 104

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CONTENTS
My Notes:
1=> Kid's Sites on the Web, mailto:pgrote@i1.net
2=> This Issue's Winner!

News:
3-> News of the Week, mailto:pgrote@i1.net

Columns:
4=> Linux and Tcl/Tk by Harry Baecker, mailto:hbaecker@island.net

Reviews:
5=> Product: Redneck Rampage by Interplay - games/action
Reviewed By: Michael Gallo, mailto:gallomike@aol.com
6=> Product: Listings Deluxe by Pro CD - business/reference
Reviewed By: Robin Nobles, mailto:smslady@netdoor.com
7=> Product: Front Page Sports: Golf with Coeur d'Alene - game/sports
Reviewed By: Doug Reed, mailto:dr2web@sprynet.com
8=> Product:  <Coloring Web Graphics> by Linda Weinman & Bruce Heavin - book/webmastering
Reviewed By Doug Reed, mailto:dr2web@sprynet.com

--- BEGIN ISSUE

1=> Kid's Sites on the Web!, mailto:pgrote@i1.net

Well, after 6 long months of development I have finally finished the booklet KID'S SITES ON THE WEB! Just in time for a stocking stuffer for your kids or students, this booklet contains over 500 websites categorized by grade levels! Each grade level is categorized by topics such as FUN or REFERENCE. 

This unique booklet comes with an accompanying floppy disk with bookmarks that you can load into Netscape or Explorer! You can instantly visit the sites that interest you! All links are guaranteed 100% functional and you can update your links at any time with a quick visit to our website! Every month we'll post a new bookmark file with new and updates links!

KID'S SITES ON THE WEB makes a perfect Christmas gift! KID'S SITES ON THE WEB makes a great reward for students who perform well! KID'S SITES ON THE WEB is the perfect way to spend time with your child!

To order KID'S SITES ON THE WEB, send a check/money order for $7.50 to:

B440
1315 Woodgate Dr. 
St. Louis, MO 63122

We'll send your copies of KID'S SITES ON THE WEB immediatley!

2=> Winner!
This week's winner: steve@adserve.com.

3=> News and Game Bits, mailto:pgrote@i1.net or mailto:dr2web@sprynet.com

PG: John Ashcroft Speaks on the Government and Technology
<http://www.compunotes.com/columns/ash.html>

PG: Spam King off the Net
<http://www.wired.com/news/news/business/story/7789.html>

PG: . . . and Netcom admits it scanned mail
<http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,15382,00.html>

PG: Gee, Apple's S&P Rating Lowered . . .
<http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,15373,00.html>

PG: Wow, a beta product that freezes? NT 5.0 . . .
<http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/content/pcwo/1017/161949.html>

PG: Do you want to be paid to play?
<http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/burst21.html>

DR: Finally, a challenger to Windows?
http://www.be.com/aboutbe/pressreleases/97-08-04_intel.h


4=> Linux and Tcl/Tk by Harry Baecker, mailto:hbaecker@island.net
                               
It's been a while. To get the drift of these columns you could do worse than look at the first two at <http://www.compunotes.com/columns.htm>. In short, they are about Linux, a free variant of the Unix OS, and Tcl/Tk, a free scripting language from Sun Microsystems, which has interpreters available that run under any Unix flavor, MS-Windows (3.x, 95 and NT) and the MacOS.

Anyone visiting the above website and reading the 2nd of my columns posted there, originally published in CompuNotes #49a a year ago, will find some of the text differs in representation from the original. It is, in part, gibberish and gabblehonk, when viewed in a HTML browser. We used to be concerned whether our telecommunications facilities were "8-bit clean", that is whether they could transmit full 8-bit bytes without garbling the transmission. Now our lives are complicated by the special meaning of certain ASCII characters in HTML. If you set about composing an HTML document, a webpage, for instance, to start with the HTML to type is obvious, but what representation do you use for a document that will first go out as ASCII text, by email or ftp textfiles, and then later will be put up on a website, without that incurring editorial labor (so that both documents when viewed give identical information)? Anyone who has an answer please let me know.

There have been significant changes to both Linux, and to Tcl/Tk interpreters during the past year. In the case of commercial software these would have been touted as "revolutionary progress", "feature-rich enhancements", and so on, and you would have been importuned over the net to buy, buy, and buy! As it is the use of Linux on heavy-duty workstations has spread, so far this year, according to marketing analysis consultants, 20% of new and replacement workstations bought commercially have been preloaded with Linux, the rest split evenly between proprietary Unix versions and Windows NT.

The most significant change has been the general acceptance of the ELF format for binaries in place of the older and more restricted "a.out" format, all binary distributions are now in ELF, but can also load older binaries, provided you have not thrown away your older shared libraries. The notion of shared dynamic link libraries is intrinsic to Unix, DLLs were not invented by Microsoft! The advantage of Unix-style shared libraries is that the library procedures are loaded individually, only those needed by a particular program are loaded, not the whole library as for a DLL. The advantage of the ELF format is that it makes the use of shared libraries more efficient.

A note about kernel and distribution numbering in Linux. Currently the latest stable version of the linux kernel is 2.0.30. What does this mean? Think of a kernel ID as x.y.z. The first, x, digit denotes progress, major enhancements. The major development from x=1 to x=2 is the ability to load/unload drivers for I/O gear, including the net, automatically and dynamically as needed. Of course you must have the needed driver modules available on your system! The second, y, digit, if even denotes a stable kernel, if odd a kernel under development, to be used at your peril if you are not a kernel hacker. The third, z, digit just denotes a development sequence or bug fixes.

On top of the above are the various distributions of Linux. The most popular, with their current version numbers, are Red Hat 4.2, Slackware 3.3, and Debeian 1.3. Regard the version numbers as merely convenient ID, not of any other great significance. Other popular distributions are Caldera Open Linux, WGS Linux Pro (both based on Red Hat), and Linux-FT. There are many more (do I detect a nice bandwagon to climb onto?) Anyone eager to pursue the merits of rival distributions is advised to follow the advocacy and debates in comp.os.linux newsgroups, .advocacy .misc and .setup. Every distribution come with both precompiled kernels and kernel source code, in C, a compiler for C, C++, and Objective-C, static and dynamic link libraries, editors, spellchecker, a GUI (XWindows), many interpreters, Tcl/Tk, Perl, Python, and their enhancements, filemanagers, etc., etc., and multiples of documentation, which most people ignore, asking questions instead in newsgroups.

ftp.cdrom.com hosts copies of the three major distributions for those who have free Internet access and a good connection and very much patience. Otherwise, you can buy CDs for less than $2 plus mailing. Most major bookstores, campus bookstores, etc. stock textbooks on Linux that include one or other distribution on CD.

How do these distributions differ? Mostly by way of installation and configuration and maintenance tools, and/or the inclusion of shareware versions of proprietary software. For instance, Red Hats own CDs come with Applixware 4.2, an office suite many acclaim as better than MS-Office 97, Caldera packages Corel Office). Then there is Xess, a spreadsheet to take realtime data off the net and recalculate values accordingly. Red Hat and its derivatives employ a packaging system called .rpm using the Red Hat Package Manager, rpm. The value of this is that it records details of your installed packages, allowing for uninstall or seamless updates, with automatic dependency checking (that is, if a new version of twittle requires the twattle library then rpm will not install twittle until it can also find the necessary library). There is now a Perl script that will snoop ftp sites of your choice to find updates for your installed packages. Debeian has a similar system, their packages are .deb files. You can use rpm to convert, say, the contents of a .zip archive to .rpm form, but you have to invent the SPEC file to add into it to define dependencies. Altogether a tedious and error prone procedure.

Unless and until everybody uses a standard form of package management the user is probably better off installing .zip, .tar, or .tgz archives off the net. The reason for this opinion is that many of todays applications use interpreted scripting languages as cross-platform implementation tools. There are Tcl/Tk, Perl, Java, Forth, and, not least, Visual Basic. During the last month or so VBVM, the Visual Basic 5 Virtual Machine, a VB interpreter for many platforms, including a version for Linux has been released. I cannot see all the varied application programmers who originate cross-platform scripts packaging them then for platform-specific use. This could well leave the user with an unmanageable stew of packages installed if s/he places any reliance on anything but meticulous record-keeping by themselves.

The "great event" for Tcl/Tk has been the release of version 8.0 of both interpreters, well, what actually happens now is that when a script is loaded it is processed by a bytecode compiler, just like Java, and then the interpreter feasts on the bytecode. Also, there are now facilities for handling binary file I/O, and for internal binary string manipulation. Numeric results are now stored in binary until explicitly made visible to human eyes, or explicitly converted. There is also finer tuning of the GUI available to the programmer (scripter?) and a namespace mechanism for more easily handling procedure packages (libraries). Very few backward incompatibilities exist, all that I have found concern the previously somewhat ambiguous rules for string comparison in conditional statements. You cannot, yet, store bytecode to file.

In concert with the new developments Sun Microsystems formed a new division, Sunscript, to encourage the use of Tcl/Tk in commercial applications.  That does not seem to be moving that fast, though you will find that most Linux distributions have user-editable taskbars, control-panels, configuration utilities implemented in Tcl/Tk and the extensions, TclX, Tix, Expect, Blt. The problem that arises is that people like Red Hat use a different directory/file structure for Tcl/Tk from that assumed as default by the development group at Sun. If you recompile because you wish to upgrade your script interpreters it is likely that your GUI configuration bars, etc. die, because the motivating scripts can no longer find the necessary procedures.

Pity. And there's no warning in the distribution.

The future contents of this column, depends on feedback from you the readers. My email address is at the beginning too.

Keep well.

5=> Product: Redneck Rampage by Interplay - games/action
Reviewed By: Michael Gallo, mailto:gallomike@aol.com
Reviewed On: Pentium 100, 16MB RAM, S3 SVGA, 4X CD-ROM
System Requirements:  Pentium 90, 16MB, DOS, 150MB HD, SVGA, CD-ROM
Recommended System: Same except Pentium 166 with 32 MB RAM
MSRP: $59.95

Yes, yet another 3D first person shooter has entered the gaming market.  This one is called Redneck Rampage and was developed by Xatrix entertainment.  The three phrases on the jacket of the CD sums up nicely what you can expect out of this game-"All Killin, Twice the Humor, Half the Intelligence."  Relying on the "Build" graphics engine that powered the hit Duke Nukem 3D, Redneck Rampage boldly goes into the back woods of humor, to bring you mojo mayhem at its best.  It's what you would expect when you cross Deliverance with Doom!

The game takes place in a fictional country setting called Hickston.  All of the stereotypes about rednecks can be found here including the bad boss sheriff, space aliens, whiskey, moonshine, and plenty of chickens, pigs, and cows.

Whats the plot?  A bunch of aliens kidnapped your pig and cloned a local named Billy Ray Jeeter.  Since Billy Ray was too dumb, the aliens dumped all the clones back on Earth to wreak havoc on Hickston.  Along with Billy Ray and the Sherrif, theres a crazy old coot with a .45 constantly shouting for you to get off his land.  And what redneck stereotype would be complete without gin-u-wine aliens from outer space including bodacious alien vixens with rapid fire ta-tas.  Your objective: Kill everything.

This game completely adopts redneck theme.  A players health can be restored by eating moonpies.  Another way to gain health is by drinking some whiskey. This also improves a players shooting skill and will allow a player to take more hits before dying.  You have to be careful to monitor your sobriety meter though.  If you drink too much whiskey, your character becomes drunk as a skunk.  Just like in real life, walking becomes very difficult, you may push the key to go forward and end up moving sideways.  It's also possible to screw up your vision.  If this happens, the computer kicks you into a lower graphics resolution, that makes it harder to see things.  Hilarious.  

On the audio side, the game  has various sprinklings of redneck provocations including "Ahll barbacue your ass in mowlassiss" or "Ahmm gonna hafto open up ah can of woopass on you."  The CD also comes with a beef jerkin, ass kickin, moonshine blinding soundtrack.  Songs include "Baby's Liquored Up" by the beat farmers, "Nurture my Pig" by The Reverend Horton Heat, and other tracks from artists like Mojo Nixon, and Cement Pond.

I'd say what really made the game fun was playing it against a real person. Like I said before, the game if full of little bits of sophomoric humor. Drinking six packs of beer is another way of gaining health. However, this causes your character to begin to fart.  Now that's  funny when you're trying to sneak up on your opponent, because he can hear your farts too!  What can I say, I'm easily humored.

No 3D shooter is complete without a good arsenal of weapons.  Your redneck weapons selections start with the straight aiming .45 Magnum.  Next up is the double barreled shotgun.  From that, move on to the AK-47 automatic machine gun. No hick arsenal would be complete without good ol fashioned dynamite. They come in two varieties, single stick and dynamite mounted on a crossbow arrow. To do some serious damage, you'll need some of the more exotic weapons including a ripsaw gun that shoots circular saw blades(be careful to look out for ricochets!) and alien weapons including a rapid fire brassiere machine gun (yes a bra) and an alien ray gun complete with alien arm still attached.

The graphics in the game are great to look at,  but there is a price to pay for good looks.  On my Pentium 100, the game plays sluggishly.  The game's graphics engine can display up to 1600 by 1200 pixels, but I was having a hard time keeping up a decent frame rate at 640 x 480 pixels.  On my new notebook computer (a Gateway SOLO 2200) it ran wonderfully.  That computer however has a Pentium MMX 166 with 80 MB of RAM (It should run good).  So faster computers will definitely equate to more fun.

The one huge drawback of this game is its hard disk requirement.  Redneck fully installs onto the hard drive and requires a whopping 150 MB of disk space!  You do not however, have to keep the CD-ROM in the drive to play the game, unless you want to hear the soundtrack.

I took a trip to Interplay's Web site (www.interplay.com).  As of 20 September, there are no patches for Redneck.  The game ran fine on my computer and looks to me to be sufficiently bug free.  If you're in the mood to be thoroughly offended and appreciate generous amounts of the F- word along with liberal uses of the Lord's name in vain, then the Redneck Cuss Pack is available for you to download.

The Cuss Pack can be downloaded from Interplay's web site.  In order to discourage any minors from coming into contact with such foul language (why would they even have the game to begin with?) a credit card number must be given and one dollar will be charged to your account.

The web site can (as long as you are running a newer web browser) put the browser into "secure" mode so that your credit card number is encrypted while it travels over the Internet.  I know that might scare some people. However, as long as you know the web site is reputable, then odds are you're safer giving your credit card # to a web site using a secure browser than if you go to the restaurant and give it to the waiter.

Anyways, the file is about five megabytes in length.  Simply download it and unzip it into your redneck directory.  After that the Redneck's foul language will spew out enough epithets to make a sailor blush.  Given how I've felt about the rest of the game, I think you can guess much better it is with really foul language. 

I liked playing this game.  To me, the fun value is related more to concentrating on "theme" than technical specifications.  Redneck Rampage does not attain new highs in technical achievement, but they do implement current technology most satisfactorily.  However, they have fully immersed the game in the theme- HICK HUMOR.  Yes the game can get a bit tiresome. Some of the levels are too hard.  I don't want to search through the whole levels like a habitrail mouse  just to get to the next level.  However,  I had real fun cutting my brother-in-law down with the Alien arm gun.  Dont worry though, he got me back enough times by hiding in a shower in the trailer park.  I always kept going back there to get the brassiere gun.

If you're looking for sophisticated puzzle solving, mind challenging type of game, look elsewhere.  If you want a game where you don't have to think too much to play and you appreciate 7th grade humor, then Redneck Rampage is for you.

For playability, I give Redneck a gold rating.  Installation and ease of use are also a gold, but I cannot give Redneck an overall rating of gold because of the hard disk requirements.  Sorry guys,  you should give the user the option of only partially installing the game to the hard disk.  That's what CD-ROMs are for.  As an added bonus, the CD-ROM also contains the Redneck theme for your Windows desktop.  It comes with bitmaps, sounds, and mouse pointers.  After loading one of the themes, my computer began to fart when I made an error.

One final note:  The game has a rating of "M" probably because of the violence.  I would rate basic game itself at a PG-13 from the humor viewpoint.  However, if you do download the Cuss Pack, a rating of R or X would be more appropriate.

Interplay Productions
<http://www.interplay.com>

6=> Product: Listings Deluxe by Pro CD - business/reference
Reviewed By: Robin Nobles, mailto:smslady@netdoor.com
Reviewed on: Pentium 200, 64 MB RAM, Windows 95
Requires: 386SX/25, 8 MB RAM, 32 MB Available Hard Disk Space, Win 3.1 or 95, CD-ROM
MSRP: $41.95 

The concept behind Listings Deluxe is awesome. The eleven CD-ROM set contains 250 million listings! It includes complete U.S., Canadian, and toll-free phonebooks, as well as a street atlas, Internet directory, demographic browser, and a ZIP finder, all at a great price. What more could you want? 

Installation is a breeze, with one small exception: you have to install the different programs separately, but that's not really a problem. 

Let's begin by looking at the Select Business & Residential Listings on seven CD-ROMs, which includes the United States and Canada and contains over 100 million listings. These CD's contain every published business and residential phonebook listing! The program is simple to use. You choose the CD for the area you want to search: South, Pacific, Central, Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, Great Lakes, or Canada. After choosing the area, a box comes up where you indicate name, address, city, state, zip, etc. 

The beauty of the program is that you can do a wide search by only listing one item, such as a last name. Or, you can narrow the search down considerably by including any of the other data, such as city and/or state or even the address. A useful feature is ListMagic, which lets you search in just residential or just business listings, or lets you select only ZIP+4 listings, only new listings, etc. Again, this is a way of narrowing down your search. SmartFind is quite helpful as well, since it turns up other ways your listing might be published. You can also click on the Name field to display a list of alternate names and spellings. For example, if the last name were Smith, Name would tell you to try Smyth or Smythe as possibilities (as if Smith wouldn't give you enough listings on its own). 

After you find a listing that you want to keep, double click on it to store it in the Tag Manager. Then later, you can print labels or a sheet with just those listings. This feature is extremely helpful if you're searching through a whole list of people. You can also export your listings for use in other applications. 

The GeoTarget feature lets you find all listings within a specified radius (in miles) around a listing. For example, you can find all the grocery stores within a 10-mile radius around your home. 

Aside from the many features available in this program, I ran into a few problems. Whenever I tried to switch CD's to search a different area, my whole system would freeze, and I would end up losing all of the listings I'd saved in Tag Manager. After several emails back and forth to their Technical Support people, I was told to check under Preferences to make sure only the CD-ROM letter was highlighted, and that solved the problem.

Now, let's move on to the Select Street Atlas. You select the Navigate button and move to the area on the map that you want to see, then single click. The map zooms in one level, and you can continue clicking to zoom in more. Or, cut to the chase by selecting Find, then searching for a place by state, city, county, ZIP code, address, or even area code. The maps are in color and are wonderfully full of details such as county borders, forests and parks, populated areas, primary and secondary roads, and water. Symbols are included for you to drag and drop into your map to highlight areas of your choice. You can even print out a map and zero in on the exact area. 

Another wonderful feature is that you can begin with the Select Business & Residential disks, tag certain listings and save them, then import them into the Atlas where they're plotted on the maps. 

One CD contains free phone number listings, an Internet directory, and a demographic browser. The Internet directory gives you instant access to 200,000 registered Internet domain names and addresses as well as company names, addresses, etc. It's a marvelous tool for finding WWW or FTP addresses for companies as well as mailing addresses. 

The free phone listing can be accessed and used in the same way as the other phone listings and is an excellent addition to the overall program. How many times in the past would you have loved to have had the toll free number for some company? 

One absolutely fantastic feature is the demographic browser. You simply jot in a ZIP code, and the browser spits out pertinent information about that area based on 1990 U.S. Census Data. You can find out the total population of an area, the median age (even broken down by males and females), the total number of families, the average household size (2.64 for my area--interesting), the average household income, and much much more. It even tells you the percentage of the population that's white, black, Asian, American Indian, and other. The information is fascinating, not to mention downright educational. 

The last CD is the ZIP Finder, which is pretty neat. You can type in an address and find out the ZIP code, or you can type in an address and ZIP code and find out the ZIP+4 code. The program will also correct addresses with misspelled street or city names or incorrect ZIP codes. And, it will also prepare an address list for use in the Atlas. 

The program itself is loaded with potential. But why would you want to purchase it when you can go to the Web and retrieve much of the same information? Because if you're searching through a whole list of people, you can do it much faster on this program versus on the Web. Also, you can tag individual entries and only print or save the ones you want, which you can't do over the Net. Not only that, but you'd end up searching all over the Web for the information that's provided within this one small packet of CD's. The program allows you to make mailing labels too. So if you're searching for the members of your 1954 graduating class in order to invite them to a reunion, or if you're searching for 150 of your favorite army buddies, this program is well worth having. And one thing's for sure--the price is right.

As you've seen earlier, I had a few problems getting the program to operate like it should. The Getting Started Manual only gives the bare bones setup and instructions for operation. The availability of technical support is extremely important to me. I always appreciate having a toll free number to call for technical support, and one isn't provided for Pro CD. However, they're fairly good about answering email questions within a 24-hour period, and their website provides answers to the most common problems.

At $41.95, Listings Deluxe is a great program for a darn good price. 

Pro CD
<http://www.procd.com>

Installation/Ease of Use: Gold
User-Friendliness: Silver
Quality: Silver
User: All

7=> Product: Front Page Sports: Golf with Coeur d'Alene - game/sports
Reviewed By: Doug Reed, mailto:dr2web@sprynet.com
Category: Golf/Game
Requirements: Pentium-60, 16MB RAM, 20 MB HD, SVGA, 2x CDROM, Win95
Reviewed on: Pentium-166, 24 MB RAM, SVGA, 16x CDROM, Win 95 OSR2
MSRP: $49.95

Since the days of the old Commodore 64 there have been golf games for your computer.   And in all that time, the basics of these golf games has remained the same.  Oh yes, the graphics have improved, going from virtual-reality polygons to photo-realistic backdrops and finally painstaking duplications of actual courses.  But in all that time, the essentials have stayed the same.  Look at any other golf game currently on the market and you'll see that they are almost exactly the same when it comes to the "golf swing" - the good old "Tri-Click".  You know what I mean - one click to start the backswing, one to set the power and start the downswing, and a third to finish the stroke and set the accuracy.  Since time immemorial, that has been the way in which you play computer golf.  Now, in a bold move, Sierra has introduced a new wrinkle: a new way to swing, more natural than the "Tri-Click", which Sierra has dubbed the "True-Swing".  In essence it works in much the same way as the "Tri-Click" but uses the movement of the mouse instead of clicking the mouse to give a more realistic "feel" to the game.  True-Swing is quite an innovation, and adds a lot to a genre of games that has begun to grow a little stale.  Until now, the only reason to buy a new golf game was because of the courses it came with.  Even if you already own another, you might want to give FPS: Golf a try.
	
Beyond True-Swing, FPS:Golf has several other things going for it.  First, the designers are those who designed the award-winning Links386 for Access.  Secondly, the game features some courses rarely seen before in golf games: the Pete Dye course in West Virginia, the Prince at Kauai, Hawaii, and the Coeur d'Alene in Idaho.  The designers also added some rather interesting new twists to the actions of your little golf player.  In most golf games your little player icon never says a word, never swears at a bad shot, praises a good one, nothing.  In FPS: Golf, however, miss an easy shot and hear your player mutter under his breath.  Overswing a drive and watch him fall on his posterior!  Take too long planning a shot and the golfers waiting behind you will start to heckle you!  These elements add a great deal of comic relief to the game; hardly "necessary" but still quite enjoyable and lots of fun.  Your player never actually curses (this is a family game after all!) but you still get the point.  Finally, Sierra designed FPS: Golf to be playable over a LAN or the Internet in single games or tournaments via Sierra's free Internet Gaming Service (SIGS).
	
The version of FPS:Golf that I tested came with the Couer d'Alene, which is an additional course offered with the original game for a limited time only.  Installation is a snap, but you absolutely must install it to the default directory.  Why?  Because when you install additional courses to the game (even the Couer d'Alene!), it installes them without asking in the default directory.  The installation program apparently doesn't check whether the game itself is installed there!  This is only a problem when you try to load the course- the game will recognize that the course is there but won't recognize that you installed it to the hard drive and will instead try to load it from the CD.  Even on my 16x CDROM, it took more than 10 minutes to load the Couer d'Alene course this way.  So if  you want to play additional courses, install it to the default directory!
	
The graphics in FPS: Golf are certainly up to par with other golf games; showing the game to friends and relatives elicited lots of oohs and ahhs.  Sierra has added a 3-D golfer which the player can customize by skin color, sex, and clothing color.  The 3-D golfer is the most realistic looking yet; while still faceless, the animations of the golfer both during the swing and in the cute animations following good/bad efforts are very well done.  For those without the latest, greatest CPU, you can turn off the 3-D effects and revert to a more plain 2-D golfer.  The same is true of the surroundings: with maximum effects turned on what you see is not just the course and pretty backdrops but actually, 3-dimensional buildings and other structures that make up or surround the courses.  Screen re-draws following shots are also fairly quick, at least on my machine.  On a slower machine with a slower CDROM, I am sure that the delays would take more time. Long-term replayability is an issue with any game, and FPS: Golf has lots of it thanks to the ability to play over a LAN or the Internet.  Although the information was a little hard to find, FPS: Golf can apparently be played with up to 8 people over a LAN or up to 64 over the Internet (in a tourney).  All of the various tournament rules are available, including skins, scramble, Ryder Cup, Best Ball Greensome, and Best Ball Bloodsome.  More than enough to satisfy even the most jaded of computer golf jockeys, I would hope.  Certainly I was impressed.
	
FPS:Golf is an impressive effort, and a real shot across the bow to Access, the publishers of the popular Links products that have dominated the computer golf genre for so long.  Sierra has already committed to creating a number of additional courses for the game, which along with the ability to play over the Internet greatly adds to the games longevity and value.  True-Swing is quite an innovation, and one that I really like.  Some people may be turned off by it, however, because until you learn how to use it your scores will rise rather dramatically.  Once you learn it, though, you will profit from the much greater control that True-Swing gives you over the swing.  I'm not much of a golfer, in the real world: when I took lessons I was the class expert on worm burners. <g>  FPS:Golf gives me everything I really need to enjoy golf: beautiful surroundings, fun, humor, and a chance to really work on my golf swing (mouse swing, that is).  A very nice effort, indeed, and worthy of a thumb's up!

Sierra On-Line
<http://www.sierra.com/>

Ratings:
Installation: Silver 
User-friendliness: Gold
Quality: Gold
User:  All.

8=> Product:  <Coloring Web Graphics> by Linda Weinman & Bruce Heavin - book/webmastering
Reviewed By Doug Reed, mailto:dr2web@sprynet.com
Requirements: Novice or better web designing skills
MSRP: $50.00 US/ $70.95 Canadian
	
<Coloring Web Graphics>, the third book by Linda Weinman concerning web graphics, concerns the use of color on the World Wide Web.  For web designers, color is an issue of incredible importance, because the potential audience of web surfers include people using a wide array of platforms, monitors, and web browsers, all of which affect color and the way it appears on a web page. For this effort, Linda Weinman has teamed up with Bruce Heavin.  Bruce Heavin, mentioned in <Deconstructing Web Graphics>, created a non-dithering color palette that exceeded the 216 color limit imposed by web browsers.  He just also happens to be Linda's husband & paints all of the rather unique covers that appear on Linda's books.  Actually, the husband & wife team-up seems to have been a perfect idea: of all of Linda's books, this is my favorite.  The book combines just the right amount of reference material and tutorial, all written in Linda's easy to read, conversational style.  Where does Bruce fit in?  He seems to have helped with the generation of the fabulous color palettes that comprise the reference section of the book.

The book is comprised of only 7 chapters, a great deal more concise than <Designing Web Graphics.2> and <Deconstructing Web Graphics>.  As with the other two books, the first few chapters bring the reader up to speed with a discussion of the different browsers & platforms, differences in file formats (including gif & jpeg), and the browser-safe color palette (and Bruce's rather nifty technique for getting around it). Chapter 4 covers the principles of color application, including hue, saturation, brightness, and texture.  Chapter 5 deals with imaging techniques, from creating your own palettes and CLUTS (Color Look-Up Tables) to reducing the size of your images. Chapter 6 provides the real reference material; all of the colors of browser-safe palette and the hexadecimal code needed to generate them.  But the real prize of Chapter 6 is a huge color section that shows how color combinations go together.  Starting with Red, then Green, Blue, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and finally Monochromatic, the sections illustrate what various color combinations will look like on the screen.  Each page shows three background colors/graphics with various colors for text & links.  For web designers, this is a boon - in one place a huge collection of color groupings that you can glance through and find a color combination that fits your needs.  Wow!  This section alone is worth the price of the book.

The book finishes off with Chapter 7, a description of the various HTML tags that can be used to put color into Web pages.  The book was originally published in 1996, which might explain why no mention is made of style sheets; one can only hope that in a subsequent revision that oversight will be corrected!  All in all, this is probably the most useful book on web site design that I have read so far.  How I got by without it is a mystery to me now --I know that from now on I will keep it close by my desk for quick consulting when designing web sites.  Thank you Linda & Bruce: <Coloring Web Graphics> is a real gem!  Oh yeah - I almost forgot to mention it - the book includes a CDROM with browser-safe palettes and CLUTS for Photoshop, Paintshop Pro, and Painter, as well as tons of clip art and other images you can use, including some rather nifty-looking graphics that can substitute for horizontal rules.

New Riders
<http://www.mcp.com/newriders>

Legibility: Gold
User-Friendliness: Gold
Quality: Gold
Users: Novice to expert web site designers.

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