Catamaran Sailing
Catamaran Pictures

How many of your remember that monumental article in On The Wire where Bill and Frank develop a unique way to rid the waters of personal water craft with rockets? OK, you might remember the article, but where do you find it again? Gotcha!! What edition is it in? How do you find it in a hurry? Where are those OTW archives? How can you show the article to a friend without having to log on to the internet?

If you can't answer these question easily, then read on. Archiving your own copies of OTW is a simple procedure, almost as simple as pitchpoling a Hobie 14 in a good breeze.

Internet browers do not just forget those pages you only look at, they store them in a cache on your hard disc. This cache is set to a certain size, normally 5 MB of disc space. As the cache fills from the top the earlier pages are lost from the bottom. In theory you can just go back through the cache to find old web pages. However, browsers are not really happy doing this, and they can lose the sense of connectedness between pages and their pictures. A browser is happier when it can go out on the web and bring things home, kind of like when I was a kid bringing all that junk back home. Junk from the back shed was not as exciting as new junk from around town.

Your browser would prefer to get pages directly from the internet, but there are other programs which will deal with your cached pages. When I went looking for shareware cache browsers I found some easily. Here is a review of one of them, Secret Agent, and some notes about another two.

Secret Agent opens with the option of updating its knowledge of the browser cache. Click OK and it takes seconds to read the cache and give you a screen full of entries. You have the option of showing HTML pages, graphics, or both. By scrolling down the page you can see where you have been on the internet with all entries listed aphabetically be web address. This means that all entries from any site are listed together.

By double clicking on any entry Secret Agent takes you to your browser and opens the page or graphic. If you select a graphics entry you just get that graphic on screen. If you select an HTML page it loads with all its graphics in place. This happens without having to be logged on to the internet. Your browser is now reading directly from the cache. If you click on a link when the browser is running under Secret Agent, then that link opens just as if you were connected on line. You can tell when Secret Agent is controlling your browser as the little man in the hat sits in the top right corner of the browser screen. Just click on him to go back to the Secret Agent cach list.

The other principal function of Secret Agent is to take selected cache entries and dump them in another directory under a general title which you nominate. By using this feature you prevent those early cache entries from being overwritten by later entries. Secret Agent will take the pages and graphics you nominate and put them in the subdirectory you nominate and keep them under your chosen title. Reading such a set of stored files is as easy as reading from the cache or the internet. You can store as many sets of web pages as you like, each with a different name.

This makes it easy to rapidly move through the latest edition of On The Wire and log off. You don't have to read it while you go. When you are off line, open Secret Agent and tell it to show all html pages as well as all graphics. Select everything that comes from www.west.net/~lpm and dumped the whole lot. Then you can give it a title that relates to that issue such as OTW-Oct97. Now read it at leisure, or come back to it anytime, without have to go on line and wait until Bill Mattson gets out of bed to send you one page at a time.

Secret Agent also makes lists of pages or graphics it has dumped. Pages are listed by title with the web address shown. Graphics are listed with a thumbnail of the picture. You can click on an entry and it will open.

Secret Agent offers you a 21 day shareware trial version which has most features operating. What are the additional features? A full set of GIF image summary pages,  JPEG image summary pages,  facilities to grab pages, missing images and missing links automatically on-line, append to existing dumps, facility to search for web pages containing selected words.

Secret Agent works with most browsers and most operating environments, as long as you have a PC. Mac users? Sorry, Secret Agent is not for you. But then, why would a Mac user want to be sailing a Hobie?

You can find Secret Agent on a not-so-secret website at http://www.ariel.co.uk/sagent.


Downloads are available for all PC operating systems. Current version is 2.02, or 2.03 for Netscape 4.


Licensing fee is 25 Pounds sterling, about $40 US. This entitles you to the additional features and email support. You'd pay that much for a subscription to On The Wire, so why not give it a go?

Now, where is that article about Frank Pineau in the jet powered Hobie trailer?

So what about the other two programs I spoke of in the beginning? I tried three cache programs for this review. Secret Agent, CacheMaster, and Cachet. Here's what happened to the other two.

CacheMaster.  When I unzipped the download file I found that I also needed three other very large files. One of those files was 2MB, a second was 1.5MB, the size of the third was not given. So I did not go any further. We Hobie sailors do not have time to wait around for "lead sleds", whether on the water or downloading in cyberspace. The people who make CacheMaster would like you to try it, but I could not be bothered waiting around getting those other files. Cut it down, give it all, or don't bother.

Cachet. This came in 30 day trial version with a license fee of "less than $20", but no real price was given. It installed itself easily. Cachet is a permanent floating tool bar which sits on your Netscape screen and stays where you put it. It has the Cachet logo icon with an arrow each side. Click the logo and you will see the list of pages in your cache. Double click a page and it opens in the browser. Click either of the Cachet arrows and you will go into the page before or after the one shown. However, I could not get it to load the images with the pages. Not a single image opened. Nor could I find out how to get a list of images. It might be that I have not got it configured properly, but it just won't work for me no matter what I tried.  Cachet has buttons for showing the page without graphics, or showing the document with graphcs. But no graphics. So what did I do? I hit the help button, and was taken to my browser which tried to log on the Cachet website. Ironic, isn't it? Try to set up an off-line cache viewer and you have to be on line to see the help file. So I did not persist with Cachet. By the time you read this article it will be deleted from my computer, along with CacheMaster.

Conclusion. If you want to check these out for yourself you can find Cache Master at http://www.neosoft.com/~osl and Cachet at http://www.benlo.com. If the theory behind shareware is "try before you buy" then having tried I would not bother with these other two. Secret Agent can help me find what Bill Mattson did to Frank Pineau in any edition of On The Wire. Why go further?

Kim Miller
stalbans@wts.com.au

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