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Tales from the Terminal RoomOctober 2001, Issue No. 25 |
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Please Note: This is an archive copy of the newsletter. The information and links that it contains are not updated.
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Tales from the Terminal Room ISSN 1467-338X October 2001, Issue No. 25 Editor: Karen Blakeman Published by: RBA Information Services Tales from the Terminal Room (TFTTR) is a monthly newsletter, with the exception of July and August, which are published as a single issue. TFTTR includes reviews and comparisons of information sources and search tools; updates to the RBA Web site Business Sources and other useful resources; dealing with technical and access problems on the Net; and news of RBA's training courses and publications. In this issue:In this issue:
Welcome to the October edition of Tales from the Terminal Room. Autumn is upon us and Christmas is fast approaching, which for many of us means preparing for the International Online meeting in London. This year, the conference and exhibition will be held on December 4th-6th in the Olympia Grand Hall, London, with satellite events taking place on the Monday and Friday of that week. The exhibition is free to visitors and, as usual, November's TFTTR will be previewing what appear to be the more interesting products that will be on show. If you are interested in attending the exhibition yourself, or would like to book a place on the conference or any of the satellite events, you can find further information at http://www.online-information.co.uk/ Karen Blakeman ReviewKarnakhttp://www.karnak.com/ Following my review of three PC based meta-search tools in September's TFTTR, Duncan Cross of Info>>fast (http://www.infofast.co.uk/) emailed me about a Web based service called Karnak. "I especially like the way it teaches you to configure a search properly. It has a great no nonsense approach and works whilst you work!" he said. With a recommendation like that I had to investigate for myself. Karnak is the name of a village in Egypt and the site of three famous temples, but the company behind this Karnak is VedaSource and based in Atlanta, Georgia. Nevertheless the Egyptian theme is followed through on most of the pages with some atmospheric background images, which thankfully do not take long to download. The information on the home page neatly summarises the main features of the service:
Karnak is a priced service, more of which later, but you can sign up for a free guest account that gives you two research "shelves" and limits the number of expert topics that are available to you. Test SearchesSo let's cut to the chase. I decided to be really mean and give it one of my market research test searches for starters: confectionery per capita consumption in the UK. As with any search facility, you can type your search terms in any order and Karnak carries out a reasonable search. But it does, as Duncan mentioned, suggest ways of refining your search, for example by prefixing terms with plus signs to make them mandatory, placing double quote marks round phrases and using minus signs to exclude pages containing specified terms. Boolean search operators are not supported, nor is the ability to limit searches by date. The default search topic is "General", which I assume means a general Web search, but you can change this to Current Events or Quick Reference. Other expert topics available to guest users are legal and medical. Subscribers have access to additional topics including chemistry, agriculture and information science. (I did find it a little off-putting that there is no information on the Karnak site with respect to the resources covered by these topics or the search technology behind it all.) The first time your search is run, the results take some minutes to come down. This is because Karnak actually checks the validity of the links - so no "Error 404 file not found" messages when you click on a result - and carries out an analysis of the relevance of the documents. Your results are presented in order of relevance, indicated by the number of gold stars next to each result, and you browse through them as you would with any search engine. If you find an irrelevant result, you cannot delete it from the list. Instead you "hide" the site. This is because Karnak saves your results list and compares it with new results when it updates your search; if irrelevant results were deleted they would be "found" at each update and displayed as new references. The results for my +confectionery +"per capita consumption" +UK were impressive enough, and compared favourably with results from Google. But it is after the first run-through that Karnak comes into its own. Your search and results list are saved on the Karnak Web site and Karnak periodically re-runs your search. It emails you when it identifies new or changed results. You then login to your research area and view your results by relevance or, more usefully, just the new or altered pages. It is this ability to highlight new and changed pages that I found most valuable, especially when researching markets and industry sectors. For the second test, I tried my standard search on news about Armenia and used the Current Events topic. Karnak made a valiant effort with this one but didn't come anywhere near the excellent results I currently receive via my Northern Light news alert. With Karnak, I had to "hide" nearly three-quarters of the results and it did not seem to have the International or European/Asian coverage of Northern Light. For the third test, I asked Karnak to carry out a general search on the oil company Lukoil. Karnak runs your search terms through a spell checker and offers alternatives, so it asked me if I really wanted to search on Lukoil rather than luckily, luke, lurid, or lipoid. A useful facility for spotting typos early on in the search and it is easy enough to ignore the suggestions. Karnak did not give me as much detailed information on the company as I retrieved from Google and Northern Light; I would definitely still use those if I wanted to carry out a comprehensive search on a company. Karnak did, though, pick up Lukoil's various Web sites and successfully monitored these for changes. Inevitably, I ran a search on myself! As with the Lukoil search, the results were not comprehensive but came up with what I regard as the more important pages. Furthermore, I was able to "hide" sites that mentioned my various namesakes, including the manager of Health Dimensions and a staff reporter on a Hawaiian newspaper. Membership LevelsOnce your month's free trial is over, you are invited to subscribe to one of the membership levels. Subscription rates range from USD 9.99 per month, which allows you to have five research topics active, to USD 19.99 for ten research topics and USD 49.99 for twenty-five research topics. Membership also enables you to customise your email alerts and to prioritise your research. ConclusionsLike any search service, free or fee based, Karnak will not always present you with perfect results for every type of search or topic. Neither does it give you comprehensive results, but that can sometimes be a strength. It does seem to work very well when monitoring markets, industry sectors and individual companies. The off-line updating facility and ability to view new and changed pages is especially useful. Definitely worth signing up for the guest account to see if it works for you. Information ResourcesChanges to stock market and company financials listings The RBA Stock Markets & Company Financials page has been split into two separate pages: Stock Markets and Share Price Information (http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/stocks.htm) and Company Financials and Annual Reports (http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/finars.htm). The Stock Markets and Share Price page has had a major overhaul and now lists most of the stock exchange sites from around the world, as well as third party sites that repackage data. Finsight http://www.finsight.co.uk/ Finsight provides a free delayed share price service and a priced "Portfolio" service that gives access to historical data, as well as enabling you to download daily updated information. Many share price services allow you to view graphs of historical data free of charge, for example Yahoo! Finance (http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/) and Hemmington Scott (http://www.hemscott.net/), but since the demise of MarketEye there is no site that currently offers a free facility for downloading files of the actual data for UK companies. To use Finsight's Portfolio you have to install special software. This is sent to you by post on CD-ROM. Mine arrived the day after I requested it and it was straightforward to install. However, it is not entirely clear how you set up your portfolio as the Help files stop short of telling you how to select shares for monitoring. If you are just going to be monitoring shares and not actively buying or selling online, you set up a "dummy" account. To add shares to the portfolio you open the Portfolio, select the Detail tab and then Buy. From then on, the screens take you through the share selection process, number of shares you want to "buy" etc. An incredible amount of information is provided on the CD. As well as the historical share price data, the Events Diary tells you when announcements on dividends are to be made, dates of AGMs etc. There are a series of standard graphs for displaying share price movements and, if you prefer to carry out your own analysis and comparisons in your favourite software package, you can use "Edit, Export Shares" from the top menu bar. Daily closing prices updates are available for download from 6pm each day. What Iarticularly like about this service compared with, for example, Etrade is that the data is stored locally on your computer - no hassles with Internet connectivity or slow downloads - and a substantial amount of data is bundled with the product from the start. Free trials are available for Finsight Portfolio. If you decide to continue with it there are two subscription levels. The standard subscription costs GB 12.95 a month (including VAT) and gives access to 15 minute delayed prices for shares in your Portfolios throughout the trading day. If you want unlimited real time prices, the subscription is GBP 24.70 per month (including VAT). You can pay by standing order (one month payable in advance), or quarterly or annually by cheque. Etrade http://www.etrade.co.uk/ Support for SMEs http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/sme.htm Startups http://www.startups.co.uk/ Go4gain http://www.go4gain.co.uk/ BigWales http://www.bigwales.com/ UK/British Employment Law http://www.emplaw.co.uk/ Miscellaneous day to day essentials http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/misc.htm Changes to xrefer http://www.xrefer.com/ One of the more important changes is that the default search now uses AND rather than OR to connect search terms. Also you can exclude references containing a term by preceding the term with a minus sign. In addition, xrefer is about to launch a new service for libraries called xreferplus. The new service will cover over 100 books and is currently in beta-test. If you are interested in a preview contact xrefer's Customer Support team at info@xrefer.com for a test ID and password. These things are sent to try us!Where should my MTX_.EXE be?One of the more interesting aspects of my work is the technical consultancy. We don't offer sophisticated networking advice but ever since I started the company in 1989 we have helped various people get their PCs online, or "sorted them out" after some technical disaster has completely mangled their programs and data. One such project recently involved an old friend and colleague - we'll call him George - who felt that he wasn't getting the best out of his PC. I was about to go on a month's holiday when he contacted me so we agreed that I should get in touch when I got back. On my return, I phoned him to ask if he still needed help. "Yes please" he replied. "I've got a problem with the Norton Internet Security that I've just installed [1]. It tells me that mtx_.exe is in the wrong place - or something like that. Can't remember exactly what the message was. Where should it be?" "NOWHERE!!!!" I screamed in panic. This was bad news. It sounded as though his PC was infected with the W95.MTX virus, the details of which are as follows:
Since my colleague and I regularly correspond via email, I thought that I would have noticed receiving any unusual attachments in empty messages, especially if they were telling me that I am fat! So I began to wonder if his PC really was infected. Then I remembered that, like me, he doesn't use a Microsoft emailer but a program called AMEOL, which is far less obliging than Outlook Express for example, in responding to the demands of viruses. Confirmation that his PC was indeed infected came when he commented that he couldn't make the Symantec live update work, and that every time he switched on his PC it attempted to log onto some weird Web site. Urgent action was required. Since the virus prevents access to anti-virus Web sites (neat trick that!) we first had to gather all the necessary information and tools via an uninfected machine. The Symantec web site provides a fix tool called fixmtx.exe together with detailed instructions. The W95.MTX fix tool can be found at http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/fixmtx.exe but if you are already infected and cannot access that site try http://www.tucows.com/ and use the search function to locate a copy of fixmtx. We also found a detailed set of instructions on how to remove MTX manually should fixmtx fail. Just pray that you never have to try and follow them: at 10 pages of detailed command line editing, they look horrendous. Thankfully, the fix worked. I started to look through the log of files that it had repaired but gave up at around line 100. It was not a pretty sight. The final step was to run a full virus check. But it didn't turn out to be the final step because the vital virus checking component of Norton Internet Security (NIS) was missing - the virus had seen to that. So we had to uninstall NIS and then re-install it. Once NIS was properly installed and updated we set it off to check the whole PC while we all tackled some real work. That was the end of that, except...... A few days later, George emailed me to say that his PC now kept crashing at the most inconvenient moments but in a predictable fashion. After some serious thinking and searches on Usenet and various discussion forums, we suspect that the problem is being caused by NIS. Some people think it is brilliant whilst others have no end of problems with it trashing their PCs. All of which means that we are going to have to uninstall NIS, see if the PC reverts to its previous good behaviour, install a different and separate virus package and a separate firewall, and if that doesn't work .... I think I'll cry :-((( [1] Norton Internet Security comprises an antivirus package, a personal firewall to block unauthorised access to your PC and Norton Privacy Control, which monitors cookies, blocks advertisements and pop-ups. Meetings and WorkshopsNovember 27th TFTTR Contact InformationKaren Blakeman, RBA Information Services ArchivesTFTTR archives: http://www.rba.co.uk/tfttr/archives/index.shtml Subscribe and UnsubscribeTo subscribe to the newsletter fill in the online registration form at http://www.rba.co.uk/tfttr/index.shtml To unsubscribe, use the registration form at http://www.rba.co.uk/tfttr/index.shtml and check the unsubscribe radio button. Privacy StatementSubscribers' details are used only to enable distribution of the newsletter Tales from the Terminal Room. The subscriber list is not used for any other purpose, nor will it be disclosed by RBA or made available in any form to any other individual, organisation or company.
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| This page was last updated on 30th October 2001 | 2001 |
