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
| 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.
| 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 |