BARUG NewsApril 2003The guest speakers at the March meeting were Jack Lillingston and John Ballance, of Castle Technology. Jack gave a most impressive demo of the new Iyonix machine, with technical insights from John. Their talk inspired at least 3 members to reach for their cheque books in the car park afterwards! Thanks to both Jack and John for making the long journey to visit us and for their insights into one possible future development path for the RISC OS scene. May I remind you that the AGM will take place at the April meeting on Wednesday 30th, when we do not have a guest speaker? I have distributed nomination papers for Committee places on a previous emailing, and paper copies at a previous meeting, so if you haven't already let me have yours back, please keep them safe and don't forget to bring them to the April meeting. Previously completed nomination forms help to keep the AGM short! There will be spare papers available on the night. After the AGM formailites are complete, I hope there will be a 'mutual support' session, so bring along your problems and hopefully someone will solve them for you. For those who are fed up with waiting for the long-promised portable, there is always the possibility of using a RISC OS emulator on a PC laptop. I have now got Virtual A5000 installed on my work laptop, and have just recently also installed the Red Squirrel emulator: thanks to Chris Hall for his help in solving problems with the latter. I'll bring the laptop with me to the meeting: if you are interested, you may have a play with it. Thanks also to Tony Cropper for teaching me how to network the laptop to my RPC - a black art, if ever there was one! Fortunately, the RISC OS scene doesn't suffer from the constant threat of innovative and dangerous viruses in the same way as the MickeySoft world does. It's all too easy to get complacent about vigilance for virus attack, especially if you run both types of machine. The IT system at my workplace has just been taken out for 6 days with a virus infestation: many colleagues are up and running again, but the lucky few - including me - have had their terminals disconnected from the network because they appear to be infected so badly that hand-cleansing is required. The IT Dept is allegedly working over Easter to sort the problems, but I've no confidence I'll actually be able to do any work when I return on Tuesday. I mention this sorry tale not to gloat about the inadequacy of PCs, but rather to remind readers that if you also have a PC, you do need to buy into anti-virus protection of some sort and keep it up to date. It's debatable whether this is needed for RISC OS, but it assuredly is for a PC, especially if you are on the InterNet or give and receive files from outside sources. I received the final invoice for my Omega machine at the end of March, but having authorised credit card payment I have still not received the machine as yet. As of tonight my credit card account has not been debited, so I guess I must continue to be patient! If anyone is looking for a SCSI CD-RW, I have a Yamaha 8424 drive available and can supply a RISC OS driver and a copy of the PC software disc which came with the machine. I no longer use this drive, having bought an IDE CD-RW for my office RPC which is not equipped with a SCSI card, so I'm open to offers! Contact me before the meeting if you are interested and would like me to bring it along. Don't forget to let me know if you have any items 'for sale' or 'wanted' and I'll add an entry to the next newsletter. See you soon! Steve |