RMS Surrey

Retired Members Surrey

PC Group

RMS Surrey
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Information and Communications Technology

The group discusses all aspects of Personal Computing as well as Information and Communication Technology, and organises presentations of interest to members.

Meetings are held at Newdigate Village Hall (Click for Scalable Map), Kingsland, Newdigate, RH5 5DA (OS Ref TQ195422) and are normally on the THIRD Wednesday of the month. For actual dates see list below. Visitors are welcome to our meetings. After the meetings there is an opportunity to have lunch at the local hostelry.

Some pictures of a meeting can be found on the Gallery page.

Membership

Membership is currently £9 a year. For people wishing to receive the newsletter by post rather than email there is an extra fee of £8.
The Application form (PDF) can be downloaded here.

Newsletters

Newsletters from current and past years can be found here.
The newsletters contain reports of the last month's meeting, topics discussed, interesting information and Leslie's Puzzle page.

Current programme

DATE
SUBJECT
PRESENTER
2013
May 15th 10.30 for 11.00 Ladies Lunch with Guide Dogs presentation in the Village Hall before lunch in the 6 Bells. We also plan to show a clip of a dog-cam to show the capabilities of a dog. Liz Meakin
June 19th Email - chaired discussion Tony Barnes
July 17th The (failed) NHS IT system - NPfIT In 2001 the Department of Health embarked on a major IT investment for the NHS in England. This was the NHS National Programme for Information Technology or NPfIT. The motivation was based upon the twin beliefs that (1) the NHS was an organisation that had not made the best use of Information Technology and that savings would be possible; and that (2) centrally held electronic patient records would be a smart way of improving patient safety and improve the efficiency of communications. 10 years on and the Health Minister (the ever popular Andrew Lansley), scrapped NPfIT in 2012. How did this happen? What lessons can be learned from this major programme failure? Geoff Balls
August 21st Open Forum The Members
September 18th TBA TBA
October 16th Commercial Computing - LEO How Lyons produced one of the first large commercial computers. Geoff Cooper

Past programme

Note that Newsletters contain detailed reports of past meetings, link above.

DATE
SUBJECT
PRESENTER
2013
April 17 AGM + Open Forum with overview of the Windows Registry. The Committee + Chris Rosenberg
March 20 Networks Chaired discussion Seb Welford
February 20 Making MS Access 2010 and Excel work together A Case Study Jan Spencer
January 16 Search Engines How Google works - the maths behind the performance. Chris Rosenberg
2012
December 19 EGM and Open Forum with Mince Pies The new constitution was available to members and was confirmed. The Members
November 21 Passwords and Security John Steel
October 17 Computer Security - chaired discussion Part 2 - External (beyond the firewall) Guy Meakin
September 19 Computer Security - chaired discussion Part 1 - Internal (inside the firewall) Guy Meakin
August 15 Open Forum with suggested topic ‘The Cloud’ The Members
July 18 Domestic (heating) Control Systems, A "Madam" with unpredictable tendencies - 7th July 1951 - Alan Turing Ron Everitt
June 20 TV interfaces Where they came from, and HDMI details David Bradshaw
May 16 Ladies Lunch with Pictures of Scotland The Committee and Peter Dulley
April 18 AGM and open forum The Committee
March 21 The CPU The beating heart of the computer Seb Welford
February 15 Making Presentations and using PowerPoint Brian Arthur
January 18 Web Site Creation Jan Spencer
2011
November 16 Spreadsheets (continued)
Chris showed us more things that can be done with spreadsheets, especially using Office 2010.
Chris Rosenberg
October 19 Network Encryption Guy Meakin
September 21 Photon to JPEG
The talk followed the path of the subject information arriving as visible light at a camera lens to its ultimate destination stored as a compressed image file. The stages of processing was described in terms of the various technologies employed and the underlying physics and mathematics.
Chris Rosenberg
July 20 Spreadsheets
Seb discussed the basics of spreadsheets and what they can be used for. He used examples and showed how to avoid basic errors.
David then demonstrated a spreadsheet that displayed the polar diagram of a radio transmitter using information downloaded from the Ofcom web site.
Seb Welford and others
June 15 Gimp (Graphics in Linux)
This is a pixel based image manipulation programme similar to Adobe Photoshop and Corel Photo-Paint.
Don described his limited experience of using Gimp during the past year and showed what he has managed to do achieve in the form of before and after results from several photographs. Don followed this by demonstrating how the various results were obtained.
Don Andrews
May 18 Ladies Lunch with talk on New Zealand
The meeting was in the Six Bells pub.
Tony Barnes
April 20 AGM & Open Forum The Committee
March 16 Tables in Word, Excel & Access Leslie Haddow
February 16 Computer Communication by Numbers
An exploratory and explanatory walk through the world of DHCP, MAC addresses, Ethernet frames, ports and all those other things you keep hearing about but haven't a clue what they mean.
Chris Rosenberg
January 19 Digital Terrestrial Television
This presentation looked at the technology and network behind digital terrestrial television. This included an overview of the MPEG compression and COFDM modulation techniques as well as a description of the network itself. It concluded by giving a glimpse of some of the significant challenges involved in digital switchover, which started in Cumbria in October 2007 and is due to complete in 2012.
Keith joined the transmission division of the BBC as a Technical Operator in 1973. Following a five year spell in Operations and Maintenance he transferred to the projects division, where he has effectively remained ever since, progressing to his current role of Principal Technologist. Arqiva is the ultimate result of past privatisations of the transmission divisions of the BBC and IBA. Keith has worked in many fields, specialising particularly in digital technology. Having played a significant role in the development of the UK DAB transmitter network he went on to act as the Technical Manager for his company’s roll-out of the UK DTT network in 1998. He subsequently acted as the Technical Manager for the re-launch of the UK digital TV network as Freeview. Keith represents Arqiva on many industry bodies, in particular the UK DTG and DVB.
Keith Hayler, CEng MIET, Principal Technologist, Arqiva Warwick, UK