CERN Accelerating science

Letter from the Editor

You will discover, in this CNL issue, quite a different structure for our Computer News Letter; this is most obvious in practice from the re-naming of most of the chapters, and the re-organization of the articles inside these chapters.

The CNL is still popular (looking at the number of people who continue to register) and constitutes one of the most important information channels of the Information Technology (IT) Division at CERN. The main objective for defining such a new structure was to offer to our readers something more oriented towards services rather than IT-internal (i.e. group-related). If the structure is well defined, readers should be able to know immediately, just looking at the table of contents of the CNL, where they will find the piece of information they are interested in.

I will summarize and explain briefly the new structure we intend to use. This is the new list of chapters you will find in this CNL:

• Announcements
• (*) Physics Computing
• (*) Desktop Computing
• (*) Internet Services
• (*) Application Software
• (+) Desktop Publishing
• (+) Informatics Training
• (*) User Documentation
• (*) Problems & Queries from Users

All chapters which are preceded by (*) should be considered as "regular", meaning that they should appear in (almost) all CNL issues; chapters preceded by (+) are also regular, but in a less extensive way, and could be left aside more frequently.

The Announcements chapter will only contain "punctual" (limited in time) or/and "divisional" information, such as the announcement for the "1998 CERN School of Computing" made in the last CNL, or changes of structure inside IT division or internal to groups.

The design of the proposed chapters is:

• Physics Computing: oriented towards the functional description of all the Central Public Services, specifically oriented to use by the Research sector, either for interactive (central and CPU intensive) or batch processing. Articles related to the Oracle Database Central Services, or to central networking issues can also be included.

• Desktop Computing: has more or less the same scope as today, with all articles related to the CERN desktop environment centrally provided either on UNIX or on NICE (NICE95 and NICE-NT), plus details about the support CERN users may expect for this environment.

• Internet Services: with everything related to Internet in a large sense; i.e., all technical Web issues, as well as various communication and network issues (mail, news, connection from home, video conferencing project, security issues on the network, etc.).

• Application Software: will group all articles related to any kind of "application software", including the "engineering applications", like the PaRC applications, or the ones developed/maintained by the Controls group, "software engineering" applications provided by the "Software Development Tools Service", or, finally, the scientific applications and libraries from CERNLIB and LHC++, mainly used by the Physicists.

• Desktop Publishing: "renaming" of the old Text Processing chapter, with a "look towards the future"; it should be more and more oriented towards HTML issues but will also include all kinds of articles related to text processing in general: LaTeX, Word, Framemaker, etc.

• Informatics Training: should contain (in the future) announcements made by the "CERN Education Services / Technical Training Programs", and digests of what is provided by the "IT Informatics Tutorials", but also computing tutorials, like the very interesting one on "Object Oriented Technologies" we have in this CNL issue.

• User Documentation: "renaming" of the Computer Documentation chapter, with the regular series of articles: "Book News from the UCO", "The UCO Reference Cards - Current List" the "UCO Book Catalogue", and the new series of articles sub-titled "COBS Review", rating the books offered at the COmputing Books Selling Service. Everything else related to "documentation" should be included in this chapter.

• Problems & Queries from Users: "renaming" of the "Questions and Answers from the UCO" section; this chapter can be extended with contributions from all groups in IT who maintain any kind of "Frequently Asked Questions" database.

In addition to that pre-defined list of chapters, it could be that occasionally a "special" chapter is added, such as the "The `Year 2000' Problem" chapter in CNL 228. Readers who are interested in a more precise description of this new structure can refer to the IT/User Support internal document, "Proposal for a new structure of the CNL" - IT-US/1998/01.

Any comments from readers concerning this new structure is welcome, and can be addressed directly to me at:

I guess that one other wish the CNL readers may express is to review the "appearance" of the CNL and to make it more "fashionable"; as you may know, this work was already undertaken for the "Computing for Engineers Newsletter" which certainly looks more attractive than our present CNL. However, even though this task seems quite easy to achieve today by using one the various tools available on the PC-market, one goal of the CNL is that it should be easily and quickly accessible to everybody, for instance by using the most basic Web browsers (like the free public domain Mosaic). Also, one must be aware that we must keep the printing cost of the CNL as low as possible, so that we can continue to distribute it freely outside CERN. Consequently we are still waiting for some stabilization in Web technology (see, for instance, the article "The Web Prepares for the Future" in the last CNL) to go further in that direction. In this domain, a common agreement for all kinds of documentation distributed by IT division will have to be reached: a working group is being set-up for this (huge) task.

Let me finish this particular and long "Letter from the Editor" section and wish you an interesting reading of this new issue (no 231) of a "revised" CNL.

Nicole Crémel
CNL editor, IT/User Support