BARUG NewsAugust 2003
July's speaker was our own David Summers, who enlightened us on the use of ProCAD+ for garden layout, design and estimating. Thank you for your insights into a complex program, David: I'm sure I wasn't the only one who learned a lot from your talk! The summer months are traditionally a quiet time, and this year is no exception. Very little news from the manufacturers and developers this month. Still no sign of my Omega, although at least one person on the newsgroups has admitted to having received one as part of an order via one of the dealers. Perhaps others will follow shortly. Personally, I'm actually quite used to having deliveries delayed with little notice or explanantion: in my professinal life, one of my radio procurement contracts is now in Year 7 of a 3 year contract, largely because the overseas manufacturer seems to regard actual delivery of his product as an optional extra... :-(( I was given a small USB mass storage device recently, which is most useful with my PC laptop. Unfortunately, it refuses to work with any RISC OS driver to which I have access. However, I've now bought another from Stuart Tyrrell which does have a RISC OS driver, so now I can move files up to 64Mb between my RISC OS machines at home and the PC laptop I have from work. Very useful when moving quantities of digital pictures between the two systems! For details see Stuart's website: I have also taken delivery of a wireless broadband router and access point, but after 4 days have still failed to make the wireless part work. Unfortunately, the Vice-Chairman - who seems to know about networking - is on holiday and unable to bail me out ..... The August meeting will be held on Wednesday 27th August. The guest speaker will be Mr Joe Taylor, a retired lecturer in Mathematics from the University of Sussex where he was a former chairman of the Computing Committee in the School of Mathematics & Physical Sciences. This month's topic is to be on AppBasic, a freeware application "which provides the easiest way to write standard RISC OS applications for the desktop. Working applications can be written in high-level BASIC (without the need to manipulate byte arrays). Finished applications are standard and efficient; they require no 'in-house' aids to run." For more details see: http://www.jettons.co.uk/riscos/toolbox/ I look forward to seeing you again next week. Steve |