BARUG NewsBARUG NEWSLETTER, MAY 2002
Last Month's meeting.....For those who weren't present at last month's meeting, we were treated to a virtuoso demonstration of Photodesk, expertly given by Chris Hornby of Photodesk Ltd. Chris also gave us the benefit of his knowledge on digital cameras and some inside titbits on the RISC OS development scene. Thanks very much for coming, Chris: it was good to see you again! For those who could stand the excitement and stay awake, the AGM was held immediately before Chris' talk. The following were appointed as Committee members for the next year:
This month's meeting.....This month's meeting will be held on Wednesday 29 May, at the usual venue at 7:30 pm. The guest speaker is David Ruck, of The ARM Club. David is responsible for The ARM Club's software maintenance, especially !DiscKnight, the hard disk fault diagnosis and repair programme. This is the first programme which will cope with the new 'long file names' format for RISC OS 4. In his note to Jack confirming his visit David writes: "Yes, I'm thinking of (giving) a little history of why I developed DiscKnight due to my own disc going splat, plus a brief confusathon on the mysteries of the RISC OS disc format, but stopping before anyone's head explodes :-) Then maybe some Q & A on DiscKnight or anything else of a technical nature, as you might as well make use of me in my capacity as ARM Club technical support thingy." David adds that he'll be bringing some copies of !DiscKnight if anyone wishes to buy the programme. It has been continuously enhanced ever since it was launched about 18 months ago, and has been warmly received and gratefully acknowledged on the RISC OS newsgroups by those who've had to use it 'for real'.
Future MeetingsThe meeting in June will be on the 26th, when the guest speakers will be from Fortran Friends. There will be demonstrations of their specialised programmes to generate the regular mathematical shapes called polyhedra, and their programmes to teach the art of bell-ringing. I understand their stick-man bell-ringer animation is fascinating! The programming language FORTRAN is of course one of the oldest around, but refuses to lie down and die, despite being written off many times! The Committee has received an invitation from the Wessex User Group, of which John Stonier is a member, to hold a joint meeting. The Committee suggests that this might be in July. The Wessex Group meets at the Fleet Air Arm Museum, RNAS Yeovilton, on a Saturday afternoon. The Chairman will raise this next week to see if members are in favour.
The Wakefield ShowThe Wakefield Show has come and gone for another year, with the usual claptrap on the Newsgroups about whether or not it was a success. No major launches apparently although just before the Show two manufacturers launched new enhanced network cards, allowing much greater transfer speeds for RISC OS machines connected to suitable PC networks. Castle has also announced a new USB podule: full details at http://www.castle.uk.co/castle/inter.htm The other USB podule, to which Chris Hornby referred last month, does not appear to have been launched as yet. In both cases it may be some time before drivers are available to allow RISC OS users to start to catch up with their PC counterparts. I'm unaware that anyone from BARUG went to Wakefield: if you did, perhaps you could emlighten the rest of us at the next meeting?
Membership RenewalsMembership is now due for renewal. Martin will be happy to receive subscriptions, which remain at £7 per annum, at the next club evening. Members wishing to renew after that will have until the end of August to do so.
Newsletter formatThis month's newsletter is plain text only (Oh, no it's not! wm), as I have left it a little late to do much else. The Committee discussed the thorny issue of which format to use for the newsletter. The consensus is that we should use HTML, since that will also allow us to put a copy on the website. If anyone strenuously objects to this, please raise it with the Chairman at the next meeting! Talking of the newsletter reminds me of the problem I had recently with distributing the last Chairman's Report. Five of the twenty-ish email addresses which the Membership Sec had passed to me just a week or so before turned out to be incorrect. It is imperative that if you change your email address, you must let the Membership Sec and myself know ASAP, or else you will risk losing contact with the Club. Members will also wish to know that the Group now has its own web domain. The new URL for the website will be
AOBThe Chairman recently got a new email address at Talk21. He wishes to advise fellow members that he is NOT impressed with this particular service! Those with digital cameras who run short of memory may wish to look at this month's special offers on the Maplin website: Maplin is offering a 64Mb SmartMedia card for only £23, and a 64Mb Sony Memory Stick for £37. These are much cheaper than the same memory cards just a few months ago and give a large capacity even for high resolution pictures. On my Olympus C-2100UZ, at 1600 x 1200 resolution. a 64Mb card gives me 128 photos!
Finally......the newsletter is YOUR newsletter. If you have suggestions for items to be included, or items to sell/items wanted, or need advice, please email me or contact me by phone (office phone 0117 913 1216). Steve |