St Mary's College, Rathmines won the 1997/98 nationwide Microsoft/TCD Spin-A-Web competition last week. The team of six won with "Rathmines: Past and Present". They will represent Ireland at a special Microsoft Honours Day during Expo '98 in Portugal on September 9th. Nine other European schools will also participate. Dr. Padraig Cunningham, TCD, said that the winners used "a lovely, simple design". Runners up were CBS Tramore and CBS Naas. St Patrick's, Cavan, produced the site most accessible to the visually impaired. See www.cs.tcd.ie
FG: A revamped Fine Gael website was unveiled at Websters Cyber Cafe, Limerick last Thursday. John Bruton has promised to email a daily message to the site. Computimes hopes to analyse all of the party political websites soon.
Viagra Rises: Users of anti-impotence drug Viagra now have a protected, physician-moderated site to discuss their experiences with the drug - at www.bigv.com. Only genuine users are allowed participate.
Arty Artifact: Arthouse's Artifact, the largest database (3000 images) of contemporary Irish visual art, is now available on CD-ROM. It's described as an eclectic selection of furniture, glass, batik, ceramics, metalwork, murals, printmaking, stained glass and textiles; the largest selections cover painting and sculpture, of course. No computer knowledge is necessary to use it; while in Temple bar, it's worth checking out Arthouse's range of multimedia and web design courses
Libraries: Last chance to make a submission to the National Policy for Libraries and Information Services: email john.cullen@leabharlann.iol.ie or see www.iol.ie/libcounc/policy.htm
K-TEL: The company famous for compilation albums will feature Billboard magazine's singles, album and video charts eah week on the K-tel site at www.ktel.com
Cassini: NASA's Cassini spacecraft swings past Venus en route to Saturn. Cassini is on an 11-year reconnaissance mission that may shed light on the origins of the universe amongst other scientific matters. See NASA's homepage at http://observe.ivv.nasa.gov
New Web Searches: Jon Kleinberg, at Cornell University, has written a Web searching program called HITS (Hyperlink-Induced Topic Search). The algorithm works by analysing how Web pages are linked to one another rather than simply examining the text they contain. www.officialsearch.com is a new search site for `official' sites only (that could be a bit limiting).
Refugee Crises: The US Committee For Refugees has launched a site at www.refugees.org offering news and information on refugee crises throughout the world as well as the latest on USCR national and international efforts to respond to the needs of refugees.
Cisco Not Kidding: Cisco has announced a voice/fax feature card for its AS5300 universal access server to provide voice/fax services over the Internet.
Quare Name Great Stuff: ISOCOR's N-PLEX Enterprise v1.3 Internet messaging server has been named Product of the Year by Network Magazine (US). N-PLEX Enterprise features POP3/IMAP4 messaging services designed for corporate Internet/intranet environments. ISOCOR has now announced N-PLEX Global v2.1, the latest version, for Windows NT.
Big And Small Dec: Digital has announced 4 varieties of a one terabyte data warehouse based on the Alpha Warehouse family running Oracle8 and the latest notebook computer, the HiNote VP 765 powered by an Intel 266 MHz Pentium II processor with MMX. The latter processor, codenamed "Mobile Deschutes", was concurrently announced by Intel.
Electric Acorn: is the first fully online literary revue from an Irish writers' group. It's at www.dublinwriters.org - this modern venture is produced by Dublins' oldest writers group. It commendably includes a Haiku section in collaboration with the respected Irish journal of Haiku, Haiku Spirit. Budding poets and writers may submit their work.
ICTA: is a new(ish) body representing the computer industry in Ireland - founded six months ago, it currently has 30 members. email: info@icta.ie
Security: Net Associates, formerly McAfee, won Secure Computing Magazine's main award for "best security software" with VirusScan.
FIX2000:New Era Technology of Clonmel announced at Windows World that their fix2000 product does just that, ensuring that your PC knows the correct date, whatever about the software running on it.
Business Database: ENKI will launch its new Business Names Database, a sister CD-Rom to its Companies Data- base next week.
In Brief...IBM introduces an international 56K PC card modem for ThinkPad and notebook computers; it comes with GSM and PCS1900 support. Big Blue also announces a new series of ThinkPad notebooks featuring Intel's new Pentium II mobile processor. . .WUGNET/Microsoft pick-of-the-week is Firesock by Trumpet Software. . .HP and Intel co-operating on the new Mercred chip with view to running HP's Java. . .Oracle has announced plans to put Java into the next version of the Oracle8 database server, expected by the end of this year. . .ADOBE Photoshop 5.0 announced for Windows and Mac. . .Ireland On-Line and Networks Telephony announce new PC telephone service using non-Internet private backbone. . .Borland to change name to Inprise Corp. in June. . .Lycos purchases Wisewire Corp. to improve Lycos searching and compete with Yahoo. . .Eastman Kodak and Intel in digital imaging joint venture. . .