ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN LIMA NEWSLETTER APRIL 1992 LETTER FROM AUSTRALIA No. 1 ----------------------------- Tony McGovern Mar/17/92 A while back I made the suggestion to Charlie Good that instead of writing letters in which a lot of the material could well be of general interest as newsletter articles, that I might as well do the relevant parts as a disk file under the name "Letter from Australia". No sooner had I made this rash suggestion then Charlie accepted it before I could change my mind, and had the idea that it could be a bit like Alastair Cooke's Letter from America which is broadcast on the BBC world service. That was indeed the model I had filched for the name - I regularly listen to the program on ABC radio here most Sunday evenings at 7.15, but I don't think it is going to be in the same journalistic league. I always enjoy the mixture of whimsy and often very penetrating comment on the state of the US of A. We'll be more concerned with the TI-99 world, or what remains of it. First for the whimsy. The question arose here a little while back as to whether security guards would be more effective if they had a solid classical education, particularly in ancient Greek. The incident that set this off wasn't really anything to do with George Bush's flying visit here on the way to Japan, but it did follow on in a sort of way. Now George's table manners in Australia were impeccable, and our newly minted Prime Minister made a truly awful speech, but that wasn't it either. It was in fact a Trojan Horse that caused the problem. A what ? Well, Australian farmers are quite unhappy about the way the US is soaking its own taxpayers to subsidize wheat sales around the world to do battle with the EEC who do even more of it. They don't really care about anyone else's taxes, but they do care about their markets, and were demonstrating to make their point to Mr Bush. They rolled out a metal horse made by a former political candidate for campaigning in a previous election. The body of this thing is a metal tank like the ones that get buried in the driveways of gas stations, so you have an idea of the scale of the thing. After the official visit the metal horse was hauled back to Sydney on a very large truck. In the meanwhile one of the banks, they are no different here, had decided to foreclose on the business of the ex-political candidate. The bank locked everyone out of the factory and posted security guards around it with instructions to let no one in. This was all publicized in the newspapers. A day or two later the owner rolled up in the huge truck and asked the guards if he could park the Trojan Horse in the factory yard - according to reports in literally those words. Of course once it was inside, out piled 30 or 40 of the factory people and retook possession from the bank. The rest of Australia was still laughing a day later, and wondering about security men who had never heard of a Trojan horse. There can't be anyone with an interest in computers who does not have some idea. It has been summer here, but not one to remember. First it was drought and heat, then rain, and the surf conditions ranged between bad and dangerous. So some programming got done, and Charlie should have something new and interesting to show at the May festivities. Not much new finds its way to Newcastle these days, and I'm so busy programming that I don't bother with commercial software, no matter how cheap it is for the TI, because I never get around to using it. Besides there is really only one game worth playing on a computer - programming it to do the ultimate it is capable of. The commercial software seen here has not been all that inspiring. Al L. bought a spell-checker, and from what I've seen and heard of it, while it may be a fine spell-checker it needs major rework to get its disk handling into acceptable form. For my part I could always spell, it is just that my typing is lousy. So I have no direct user interest but I am concerned that there be a viable spell-checker, be it commercial or fairware, to complement the Funnelweb system. It has not been entirely a drought on the fairware front. On my wish list for some while has been a GIF picture file loader for 80 column cards in the TI-99 that would also convert to Myart format. For all its problems, stemming from buggy early Myart releases, this format is the easiest and fastest picture format to load on the TI-99, even if the disk files show less compression than GIF. Funnelweb's DiskReview has a fast and reliable Myart loader for convenience, but there is no way that a GIF loader could fit in. We were stuck between Geneve software that would not run on a 99, and an older German program that would load GIF very slowly but not convert. Now the wish has come true thanks to a computer student in the Netherlands, Ton Brouwer. There are some other items on my wish list. Chief among these is an update to the Horizon RamDisk ROS that will allow 800 Kb DSQD equivalent disks to be set up. It is only very recently that we have had a HRD big enough for this to be of relevance, but several projects such as DiskReview and the Editor rewrite have reached the point where it is getting difficult to fit source and object files on a 400 Kb RamDisk. I may be a more obsessive commenter of source code than many, but I am sure there must be other programmers out there with big projects running into the same problem. No, I do not regard the Myarc HFDC as a viable device unless its maker gives it at least one more serious development stage - from alpha to beta phase. A not very productive direction was taken in the Vn 8.1x HRD ROS development to cater for zillions of small equivalent drives instead of a few decent size ones on larger HRDs. Maybe Bud Mills will have something good in that line in Lima for May. In the meanwhile we may have to redo the ROS for the local Quest RD so its 512 Kb can be used as a single drive. Well, that's enough for now. Until next time, goodbye to all Bits, Bytes & Pixels readers from the Hunter Valley. .PL 1