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Brian Grainger

brian@grainger1.freeserve.co.uk

As Christmas Eve approaches it is time to put away the keyboard and enjoy the festivities. This means, for me, a break from Christmas to New Year. There will be family get togethers on Christmas Day, Boxing Day and possibly, New Year's Eve. There will be the usual problems about how to watch all the recorded episodes of Coronation Street and EastEnders before the next ones come up! There will be the problem of how to eat all the food that has been bought for the occasion and the new year problem of how to get the weight back down again!

Christmas and Boxing Days tend to be TV free zones, apart from the Queen's Speech maybe. However, I do look forward to two aspects of TV that only appear at this time of year. It is as much a ritual of Christmas for me as all the more usual festivities.

First are the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures. These appear daily for 5 days from Boxing Day. These lectures, about some aspect of science, are produced for children. However, they are equally educational for adults and, ever since Eric Laithwaite explained the mysteries of gyroscopes many years ago, these lectures have been a favourite of mine.

At the end of the holiday, on the morning of New Year's Day, I like to relax to the music of the Strauss family by watching and listening to the concert from Vienna. This is as much a fixture of the BBC musical calendar as our own Proms and shows that the English are not the only race to get enthused by 'their' music. Just as we enjoy 'Rule Britannia', 'Land of Hope and Glory' and 'Jerusalem', so the Austrians get involved in the 'Radetzky March'.

Christmas is a time for giving and receiving presents and I think it is important to include oneself on ones own list! Here are three computer related suggestions:

If your computer does not already have one then now is the time to think seriously about a CD Rewriter. It was the iMac that pioneered the idea of a computer without a floppy disk drive. However, it was a little before its time because it assumed that the Internet would be used instead. The Internet was not developed enough at the time to be used for file transfer and it still has not developed as a file storage medium. However, the CD writer has come along in leaps and bounds and is now so cheap that it comes as standard on most machines these days. There are now adverts in the papers for PCs, (from Evesham Micros), that do not have floppy drives. The time has come for the demise of the floppy and you better be prepared.

This is one present that does not cost anything, except the download time. If you want an Office package the one to go for is Open Office. This is the Open Source equivalent of Microsoft Office and survives the comparison. Available for Windows or Linux it provides the functionality you need, can read Microsoft Office files and the user interface is as near the same as is legal. Great software without being tied to the constant injection of money required to keep Microsoft software up to date. One word of warning. I am beginning to get concerned that the media are already calling Star Office, (which is now being offered on Sony PCs), open source software. It isn't. Star Office is now a proprietary product from Sun based on the open source product Open Office, which also has the backing of Sun. Although Star Office is currently much cheaper than Microsoft Office it is still under the control of one company. I am sure Scot McNealy will not
clarify the confusion, since it helps in his fight against Microsoft!

How about a book. It has been out three years now but, if you have not read it, Weaving the Web is an excellent read. This tells the story of how the World Wide Web was developed, written by the Englishman who invented it. It is said that when Caxton invented the printing press he revolutionised the world. In the future we may well be saying the same about Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web. Published by Orion in hardback and Texere in paperback this may well be an historical document!

Well, there are some ideas for you. I hope you have a happy Christmas and I will be back, bringing you the latest news and views from the computer world, in the new year.

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