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2006-10-19
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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