In recent years, it has become increasingly popular in business and at home to use software such as "VMWare" to run more than one instance of Windows or Linux on a host machine. These systems are used for servers, to save money on hardware by running multiple server operating systems on one physical machine, or on the desktop for development and testing.
At the meeting, we will have hands-on demonstrations of VMWare for Linux and a similar product "Parallels" on Mac OS X, to show examples of virtualisation where the operating systems are designed, and compiled for the same CPU as the system.
Time allowing, we may also look at an example of virtualisation where parts of the physical system are not compatible and must be emulated, such as Virtual Acorn emulating a RiscPC in order to run RISC OS.
Gareth
I am quite interested to see how this works out. (Ed.) I hope as many as possible will attend.
John very kindly agreed to give this reprise of his talk at EAUG for us at short notice. It was, of course, a very good evening and very entertaining.
John pointed out quite early on that you should not consider researching your own family history unless you were prepared to
a) find out a scandal or skeleton in your family!
b) find that it is a very addictive activity and can lead you into spending a lot of time doing it.
That said it is extremely interesting and rewarding.
John has researched his own "Rye" family extensively and now acts as "an international clearing house" for those of the Rye family who wish to make contact with each other.
The use of computers and the Internet has revolutionised the study of Genealogy in that communication is so much faster and consultation of censuses and records online is now both rapid and informative. John reckoned that what could have involved a journey to London and taking a day with the additional travel cost can now be accomplished in an hour or so online.
The work of all those putting census data online has made all this possible.
It is quite possible to keep the information you find out on cards rather than use a computer but the computer makes drawing family trees and sorting data much easier. Some of the software is based on a record card structure.
Data is held for fields such as
Name:, Tree Number:, Sex:
Estimated date of birth:, Place Born:
Date Married:, Place Married:
Child1 name:, Sex, Dob, etc.
Child2 etc.
.........
Date Died
Education:
The estimated date of birth is a keyfield. Often it has to be inferred if no birth record is found. Often is needed to identify a family member as the same first names occur in families.
Various records can be consulted such as
1) Civil Registration started in 1837 and you can get all data except for recent ones need to pay £7. Many results are on the Internet.
2) Birth certificates. Time of birth is shown for twins. Father's name and occupation but not always.
3) Marriage certificates.
4) Death Certificates.
5) Census, every 10 years from 1841 till 1901 principally used for counting people but also show which county they were living in or were born in. Their ages can therefore be deduced to within 5 years. The Mormons in 1881 started indexing the census material. The Government started indexing the 1901 census using prisoners, but there were significant mistakes. Also some commercial ventures at indexing e.g. Ancestry & Storm but will mistakes.
6) Probate and Wills.
7) War Dead - Commonwealth War Graves Commission.
8) Directories, e.g Kelly's. Leicester University is putting these on the web.
9) Army or Service records.
There are problems with using computers such as imprecise data, Recording sources, and need a system to record records searched. The Mormons were spurred on to find their ancestors so that they could baptise them. They developed a data system consisting of various tags for the data fields called GEDCOM which is very useful and is used by most software however there are 260 - 270 tags and not all software uses them all. One advantage of the system is that they are plain text files and so can easily be read and edited.
e.g.
0 Head
1 Source !Family for RISCOS ver 2.20
0 @I1@INDI ( an individual - cross reference value I1 )
1 NAME Jack Jones
1 SEX M
1 BIRT
2 DATE 1 Jan 1940
2 PLAC Ipswich Hospital
2 SOUR Birth Cert.
1 BAPM (Baptism)
2 Place Ipswich Hospital
1 FAMS @ F1
1 Note 1970 -
Extensive use is made of notes. The system has levels 1,2 etc so that each tag can have multiple levels of detail below it. The Tags NAME, DATE , BAPM are used here but there are many more.
In order to assist in identifying varied spelling of surnames over the years a method called SOUNDEX was developed. You take a name and take the initial letter then take the number of the next 3 consonants one at a time, ignoring vowels, according to the following scheme:
1 B,P,F,V
2 C, S, K, G, J, Q, X, Z
3 D, T
4 L
5 M, N
6 R
With this scheme "Barbary" becomes B616, "Schafer" becomes S160 and "Higgins" H252.
Another system is Chapman codes which use 3 letters to code and are now a British Standard.
!Family has good tree representation but has poor at support for tags. It uses !Draw files and notes can be used for biography.
!Ancestry has a graphical card representation for Children 
and can link to pictures but trees are poor.
John gave us quite a lot of real data to look at on both his own and Frank's ancestors. Many of the sources were scans of original documents some of which were quite difficult to read and you had to learn how they were defined i.e. "dto" in a ledger meant "daughter to... "
Using Ancestry.com costs £70 per year and gives access to the registration indexes which is a lot cheaper than going to London several times. Free BMD (Births, Marriages and Deaths) is an amateur activity and gives quarterly updates; April, June, September and December. Data includes Christian Name, Registration district , Reference number, 2 marriage certificates per page. The Registration number gives a list of names associated with a Christian name. There is an Australian Website which gives details of all serving Service personnel. County records offices are now issuing CDs with County records all indexed with Parish Registers with a name and date index. Kent is particularly good.
John's Talk was as you can see very detailed and very entertaining and I hope I have given a reasonably accurate account of it here. Many Thanks John, I sure you will have stirred a few more of us to get involved.
We wish Tony a speedy recovery from his illness. Please see my email for more details.
| 2007 | ||
| July 4th | Virtualisation - running multiple platforms on one machine. | Gareth |
| August TBA | Social evening. | All |
| September 5th | Outside speaker | TBA |
| October 3rd | JPEG Slideshow presentations | All |
| November 7th | What is a server? - (Microsoft based) | Michael |
| December 5th | Gadgets and party evening | All |
So far we have only one evening planned with a visiting speaker but this may change.
Talks with Visiting speakers are shown in Red. We will give more details as soon as they are confirmed.
Our meetings are held at the Bourne Vale Social Club, Halifax Road, Ipswich IP2 8RE , for a map and other details please see the website. http://icenicomputerclub.users.btopenworld.com
The first visit is free and subsequent visits for non - members is £2. The membership fee is £18 due from the AGM date in April, but may be reduced for those joining late in the year.
Continuing our publicity for EAUG events - please see their Website for details of their next meeting.
| 10th July 2007 | "Voice Recognition" |
| TBA | "BBQ" |
| 11th September 2007 | "Voice over Internet Protocol" |
Meetings are at the Great Baddow Village Hall, on the second Tuesday of the month
opening at 7:30 p.m. for a start at 7:45 - 8:00 p.m.
For directions see below (note the new web addresses)
http://www.eaug.org.uk or 'phone one of the contacts on http://www.eaug.org.uk/ppl.htm
"ICENI does not have any Insurance cover for computers or other equipment so please be advised that you bring machines to the club at your own risk."
P.S. My insurance company have added my computer cover away from home with no extra premium required, yours might do the same.(Ed.)
If anyone would like a copy of the CD of our old newsletters this could be arranged.
I am open to suggestions on what people would like to have included in the website.
Our website URL is
http://icenicomputerclub.users.btopenworld.com as a virtual domain,
it can also be reached using http://www.btinternet.com/~icenicomputerclub
Email to: iceni@woolridge.org.uk