VOICE Home Page: http://www.os2voice.org

[Newsletter Index] [Previous Page] [Next Page] [Features Index]

The pipes, the pipes are calling.

Good Bye Dan Casey. To anyone that may wonder where the title of this article comes from, it's part of a line from the song "Danny Boy". It's a song I can't get out of my head since I heard that Dan Casey had died after a very short, but very serious illness.

Dan has been President of VOICE for 3 years now and most recently was elected to President of Warpstock within the past month. If that were all, he would be sorely missed, but Dan was a lot more then just a leader of two great OS/2 oriented organizations.

Dan was also one of the most helpful people in our small, close-knit community. He helped everyone that he could, and asked for nothing in return. What always amazed me most was that Dan wasn't an IT professional. He was a general contractor who just happened to love computers and of course OS/2. If he didn't know the answer he usually knew who might be able to help. He was Abraxas or DCasey on IRC. Dan was not one to put on airs, and he always had a kind word for just about everybody.

His passing is a major blow to VOICE, as he has been our strength, and the person either leading a project or helping with it. He was the main force behind our Warp Doctor site and our participation in the past three Warpstock events. He was deeply involved with our decision to purchase our own server. Dan was one of the most prolific contributors to our Newsletter.

At this point I'm not sure what else to say other then I am truly stunned and saddened at this turn of event. Condolence messages have been coming in at a volume for which I have not been able to respond to each and every one. We are passing them all on to Dan's family. Please watch the news list for any information on a memorial fund contribution for anyone so interested.

For a bit more on this sad topic please read Abel McClendon's view -VOICE, The Volume Lowers, The Mission Continues.

Warpstock 2001 will take place October 6th through the 8th in Toronto Canada this year. For the first time in 4 years, Dan won't be there in person, but he will be there in spirit. If you can make it, we can all toast a farewell to Dan, even if it's with root beer instead of the real thing.

VOICE Server Update: In case you haven't noticed yet: VOICE now also has a homepage in German language on our server. It can be reached at http://de.os2voice.org. Most of the original homepage has been translated, although a few section will remain English since the amount of work doesn't pay due to future projects. A big thankyou goes to the members of the Newsletter's translation team who helped with the translation and to Abel McClendon for his input and setting up the server. In case of any problems with the new pages please contact web.de@os2voice.org.

We are still working a few bugs out of our mailing lists. There was a problem with the members list this past month which resulted in a looping message. We have identified the cause and are working on preventing a recurrence. We appologize for the problem but it was unintentional.

On Monday, February 19th we held an IRC meeting to discuss member services that we would like to provide using our server.

Our News service continues to grow at a fast pace. As of February 18th we had over 450 subscribers to the VOICE News list. To subscribe to the VOICE News list send an email to majormajor@os2voice.org with the following text in the body of the email:

SUBSCRIBE NEWS
END

SUBSCRIBE GENERAL
END

HELP
END

If you have any announcements you would like posted to the VOICE News list, please send it to submit@os2voice.org. Please include a valid reply address and a real contact name.

If you have any thoughts on this or other services, please let us know. Either attend a meeting, or send your thoughts and ideas to http://www.os2voice.org/contact.html. If for some reason we do experience any more down time, you can also access our pages including the newsletter at our mirror site - http://os2voice.ibmforum.com.

Also as a reminder, VOICE offers several other mailing lists open to the OS/2 Community. A Meeting Announcement list, General Discussion list, the Warp Doctor list and the Help list. These are all currently under utilized, and volumes are low. You can subscribe to all or any by going to the VOICE OS/2 Mailing Lists page - http://www.os2voice.org/mailinglists.html. The VOICE Help list doesn't require subscription to use it. just send your question to help@os2voice.org and people who are subscribed to the list will respond if they have an answer.

In February we had a couple of general meetings on IRC in the #voice channel.

The Sundial Speakup normally scheduled for February has been cancelled. Instead we are moving that bi-monthly event to March and it will continue every two months from then on. So the Speakup with Sundial Systems on IRC is now scheduled for March 5th at 8PM EST(01:00 GMT, 02:00 Berlin). No topic has been set yet, but these sessions with the Sundial guys are always informative and entertaining. There will be also be a general meetings on March 19th at 8PM EST(01:00 GMT, 02:00 Berlin).For more information on attending online VOICE IRC meetings please see the VOICE Meeting Information page - http://www.os2voice.org/meetinginfo.html

If you have an idea for a Speakup event, please submit it to liaison@os2voice.org, and we will try to schedule something. Also on the VOICE Calendar are weekly Warp Doctor team meetings every Wednesday at 8PM EDT (01:00GMT, 02:00 Berlin). As always, please be sure to check out the updated VOICE Future events Calendar in this newsletter or on the VOICE website at <http://www.os2voice.org/calendar.html> for more details on future VOICE events.

For March we have an article on Writing Effective Product Announcements, by Esther Schindler. Though this is geared toward developers on how to write a press release, it is also good reading for anyone that plans to submit an announcement to the VOICE News list, OS2.org, OS/2 World Steve Wendt's OS/2 Warp News and Rumours site or any of the other OS/2 or even general news sites.

Next we have the first in a series of articles on Emacs 20.6.1 under OS/2 - Part I , by Oliver Heidelbach. Oliver looks at installing Emacs, which is a text editor and more. Emacs includes support for many languages and is highly customizable via it's own scripting language Emacs Lisp.

If you have one of those new-fangled Palm devices you will be interested in Teruel de Campo's article on running the Windows32 app Palm Desktop under OS/2.

For a bit of a lighter moment in our time of sadness, we have If IBM made colas by Andrew Stephenson. This was first posted in Usenet, and I found it so funny and true that I asked Andrew if we could make it more widely available for others to enjoy.

This month we have a hardware review by Gilbert Lefebvre. Gilbert tells us about his success running a fast new video card under OS/2 in The AOpen PA256MX display card and Scitech Display Doctor for OS/2.

Finally we have the VOICE Newsletter OS/2 Tips page and the Letters, Addenda, Errata page. If you have any OS/2 or eCS tips you've uncovered, please send them to tips@os2voice.org. If you have any comments or suggestions about the newsletter or articles in it, please send them to editor@os2voice.org

Just a reminder that we now have a full Newsletter Master Index page. All the feature sections of the current and previous issues can now be found on this one page. Additionally, we have added a Java based search function to this master index page. It will allow you to search all past issues for a specific word or phrase. So try it out and let us know what you think. If you have any ideas for improvements let me know at editor@os2voice.org.

That's it for this month. Finally, coming up in April, we have a long awaited look at the IBM MCP (Merlin Convenience Pack) by Isaac Leung and Oliver Heidelbach's second article on using Emacs. Also we will have Christian Hennecke's article on Ogg Vorbis (No it's not a cave man).

We are always interested in your thoughts and views on subjects related to OS/2, and would like to see opinion/editorial pieces as well as hardware/software reviews. If you can help by writing an article please contact me at editor@os2voice.org. Guidelines for Article Submissions to the VOICE Newsletter.

Mark Dodel and Christian Hennecke
Editors, VOICE Newsletter
editor@os2voice.org