This will very much be a hands - on evening. You are encouraged to bring along any gadgets, software, etc. which you find useful or admire and would like to show us. This is not just confined to computer related or even electronic items and the "stuff" is up to your imagination! Alongside this we also will be demonstrating DVD burning with dgs showing Martin Würthner's DVDBurn software on RISCOS and Peter showing DVD burning on a PC and Gareth on MacOS. As this is a relaxed evening near to Christmas, perhaps you would like to bring some light refreshments which we can consume whilst chatting. I shall be bringing some mince pies(Ed.).
It should be a fun evening so please come along.
Gareth suggested that it would be worthwhile visiting the Open Source and Open Document formats since there was an increasing number of Administrations advocating their use for all documentation. Gareth ran his presentation from his Mac laptop and the following text is largely based on his slides. I have augmented these where specific questions were raised or points expanded.
There are several advantages for the use of Open source software. There is a significant quantity of software with the source available in both source code and binary form. The software ranges form single commands and utilities through to full applications. There are libraries, compilers, editors and web browsers, spreadsheets..., etc. There can be Open formats too e.g. PNG instead of GIF and OpenDocument instead of Word.
This was created by StarDivision, a German company founded in the 1980s and later acquired by Sun Microsytems in the Summer of 1999. StarOffice 5.2 was released in June 2000. The first widely known releases were on Windows and UNIX. All versions since version 6 have been based on the source from OpenOffice.Org and written in C++. They consist of a full Office suite of Wordprocessing, Spreadsheets, Database and Drawing applications.
Sun release much of the code from a development build of StarOffice 6 to create OpenOffice.Org as a community project. It comprised the full office suite except for the Commercial database, Dictionary, Thesaurus and printing libraries. These omissions have since been replaced by community developed (Colab.net) or Open Source equivalents. OpenOffice.Org has compatibility with Star Office (same file format) and generally good compatibility with MS Office. There is an active community for development and porting.
The native format is XML based the text format is human readable (for the brave) and is supported in word processor, spreadsheet and presentations. ( Impress is an OpenOffice equivalent of Powerpoint. The format packages as a single JAR file (Java zip file) consisting of
a Document which is actually a compressed file with Manifest which contains
This is based on OpenOffice 1.0 XML format. Improvements and changes were made to the document structure. It conforms to OASIS( Organisation for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) Standard, which is a fully documented open standard which can be implemented by both commercial and open source GPL projects. The US State of Massachusetts recently mandated government documents to be an open format.
This is the most recent version of OO.o and has significant performance and compatibility improvements. The native format is now OpenDocument and many platforms are supported and even more are being imported. Sun StarOffice 8 is based on OO.o2 and is commercially supported. Gareth's presentation was running on MacOS X11.
The following ports are available now.
Ports in development
Gareth demonstrated opening a new document in OpenOffice by scrolling across to document type and choosing from document, spreadsheet or database or presentation. The general text files are saved as fname.odt with fname.ott as templates. Impress is the presentation application which is compatible with Powerpoint but has different macros. The file can be opened in command line with > jar fname. There can be problems with font compatibility and equivalent fonts need to be present. Gareth showed it was quite possible to inspect the code behind the application format and it was all quite readable. Not full of non-printable characters as MS Word is. XML can be displayed in a browser with a stylesheet which tells it how to interpret the XML.
This was first released following a student project in 1996. It was rather basic but with a plugin system for developers. it was famously used to design Tux, the Linux Penguin.
Version 0.60 was released in 1997 with significant improvements. There are many tutorial and bug/feature sites and it has some commercial support, funding development. It is supported on many platforms e.g. Linux, Windows, MacOS and Solaris. It has run via remote X display on RISCOS (Peter Naulls). There are many tweaked versions, GIMP.app, GIMPShop etc.
So what is it like? It supports many advanced filters and tools. Most tools are implemented as
scripts and you can download more or write your own. The User interface take some getting used to and the tweaked versions help e.g. GIMPShop adds Photoshop style menus. It is rumoured to be the open source equivalent of Adobe Photoshop. Gareth said that it was difficult for him to compare it to Photodesk since he had not used GIMP or Photodesk that much. It runs but is not yet useable. The GIMP has been compiled by Peter Naulls but requires an X display and that runs very slowly on RISCOS currently.
We had a quick look at the GIMP which runs from GIMP.app which holds internal files in a similar approach to RISCOS apps. Gareth using some of his mobile phone camera pictures of ... you've guessed it, a bright red kit car! He demonstrated cloning and cut and paste and some of the filters available.
Many thanks to Gareth for all the hard work he put into preparing this very well presented talk.
At our Committee meeting on 23rd November we decided that we would keep a watching brief on Projectors of a suitable minimum specification in order to identify suitable candidates. We are aiming to wait until March/April before making a serious purchase. If anyone sees a particular model say 1200 lumens brightness at SVGA resolution or better in the range of £500-600 perhaps they would let the committee know. We are only considering purchase of a new model, not second hand, since we need at least a 12 month guarantee and a long lamp life.
Please note that there have been some updates to the future programme and we have made a definite booking of the Crown Hotel Manningtree for the Social evening on 18th January. Please let me know as soon as you are sure whether you can come to the dinner. The menu will be sent out via email as soon as I have received the latest version from the Crown for you to make your selection as in previous years. I will need to tell the Crown exact numbers and menu selections by the 14th January. Friends and family members are all welcome to come to the Social evening.
| Date | Topic | Speaker |
| December 7th 2005 | Gadgets, DVD burning etc. | Club |
| January 18th 2006 | Social evening at the Crown | |
| February 1st 2006 | JPEG slideshow 10mins per person | Club |
| March 1st 2006 | Outside speaker TBA | TBA |
| April 5th 2006 | AGM + TBA | |
| May 3rd 2006 | Printing with Uniprint and VA & GIMP print | Tony & Frank et al |
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 8NP , 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.
None this month.
Continuing our publicity for EAUG events - please see their Website for details of their next meeting.
13th December "Christmas Special"
Meetings are at the Great Baddow Village Hall,
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.watsnees.demon.co.uk/fw/eaug/ven.htm
or 'phone one of the contacts on http://www.watsnees.demon.co.uk/fw/eaug/ppl.htm
See you soon!
Frank.
"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.)
I am open to suggestions on what people would like to have included in the new 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