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UNIRAS courses on implementing Version 6 and on an overview of the software have been held in London and Edinburgh. David Rolfe from UNIRAS gave a useful insight into the structure of the software, the use of profiles, drivers and a load of other tips. The course was focused on Vax and Unix implementations but the concepts were applicable to other systems. Mark Mason also contributed to the course and gave many of us our first glimpse of a Unibox! We tried not to get too excited, honest!
The overview course was given by Norman Wiseman from the NERC who gave an introduction to the range of software on offer. This again was very useful and was accompanied by an excellent set of notes which are being input into the pool of training materials being developed for the community. If there is enough interest these courses could be rerun. Please contact me if you would be interested.
I have been talking about these for some time now and we are now close to the time when they must get out to you if they are to be of real use. We are on schedule and I am determined to keep to this as I appreciate that it is critical that you receive the documents in good time. An order form will be mailed to UNIRAS site contacts in early August and the materials will be available towards the end of August.
They will consist of: workbooks for the interactives which can be standalone self-teach materials or part of a course; picturebooks for the software with examples and details of how to produce the pictures; an overview document; factscards for the interactives giving details of the menus and hot keys; factscards for the subroutines; a set of OHP slides accompanied by lecturer notes to enable you to give an overview course. There may also be a set of example glossy slides produced by UNIRAS as part of the pack. Sites can order a pack of all the materials which include a set of masters which can be used for local copying. Bound copies of the workbooks and examples can also be ordered.
These materials are the result of a lot of effort put in over the last few months by various people, most notably at NERC and Edinburgh University. The work is being brought together at a workshop which will produce the final drafts. I am sure that we will all benefit by this work.
Work has also started at Newcastle on the production of video material for UNIRAS. Again timing is agreed to be of vital importance and the first video about the UNIGRAPH product is targeted for mid September.
Information will be circulated about obtaining these materials and they will be on show at the UNIRAS User Group meeting in September.
The proceedings of the SGML workshop are available from me. Please mail me if you want a copy. A Technical Report on the relationship between the Computer Graphics Interface (CGI) and X-Windows by David Arnold and Graham Reynolds from the University of East Anglia can also be obtained from me.
This is another one that seems to have been around as a topic for some time. Progress is being made both on field testing and contractual negotiations and we will make an announcement as soon as possible.
I have had a request from our Maths department for some software that will calculate cell aggregations according to certain rules specified under certain conditions specified and to display the results graphically. Someone might already have something written for biologists but there are many potential applications of such software. I guess something in the fields of chaos and automata would be suitable. The software needs to run on SUN computers. If it does the graphics via some standard or other (GKS, UNIRAS!!, etc) then so much the better! If anyone knows of anything I'd be very glad to hear from them.
Readers may be interested to know that a fourth year student, Simon Lonsdale, in the department of Electrical Engineering at Bradford University, has developed a version of the TDS server which includes a GKS server. This programme runs on a SUN3 workstation and accepts GKS commands from an OCCAM programme running on the transputer. In this way the SUN workstation acts as a GKS server for the transputer network.
Currently, tds2gks supports all the functions of the UNIRAS version of GKS (UNIGKS). The OCCAM programmer communicates with the server via a small Occam process, running on the transputer. This accepts commands and parameters from the transputer based application programme via two channels and passes these to the SUN side of the server via two file channels.
It is intended to convert tds2gks to run as an integral part of the new iserver. This will be done over the next few months and details will be passed to the community via this Newsletter. Details of the current version of tds2gks and the new iserver version can be obtained via email from gjp@uk.ac.brad.eeng, or myself at the Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Bradford.
The UNIRAS UK User Group invites entries for a Plot Competition from users of the UNIRAS software in both the academic and commercial sectors. The winners will be announced during the forthcoming User Group Meeting at the University of Oxford on 12th and 13th September 1990.
Plots will be judged in two categories - the most innovative and most practical plots. A personal prize of fifty pounds will be awarded to the winner in each category.
Plots of any reasonable size may be submitted and can be either colour or monochrome.
Entries should be received by 31st August 1990. Judging will take place prior to the User Group Meeting. There is no limit to the number of plots that may be submitted by an organization. The entries will be displayed at the Meeting.
Good luck!
The User Group meeting will be held at the University of Oxford this year on 12th and 13th September. The Meeting provides an ideal opportunity to present information and experiences, meet other users and discuss topical issues relating to UNIRAS.
A similar format to last year will be adopted. The main Meeting will take place on the second day with Tutorials and special interest events on the first day. The Meeting will be held in The Mathematical Institute with accommodation available at St. Anne's College.
The outline of the Meeting is as follows:
We hope that a number of UNIRAS personnel will be able to attend, including senior staff from the Copenhagen headquarters.
Programme details and a booking information will be mailed out in due course.
We look forward to seeing you in Oxford.
An agreement has recently been reached with CGM Technology Software in the US for a site licence for 2 CGM products which will be useful for supporting packages with a CGM interface. The products are: Metacheck which tests metafiles for conformance and reports back on the contents; and Metaview which allows you to preview a metafile on a PC.
Metacheck is a stand-alone program for checking a report on metafiles written to the CGM standard. It is available for PC/DOS, Apollo (SR10.1), Sun (3 and 4) and VAX/VMS systems. It will take as input a CGM in any encoding which claims to be written to the CGM standard. It will verify it to see if it conforms to the standard. It also allows you to have a trace of the contents of the metafile and a summary of the contents. The whole metafile can be analysed or individual pictures or groups of pictures selected. This will be a useful tool for people developing CGM software or having problems exchanging pictures between different software packages. On a PC it requires at least 512K RAM. Hard disk and math coprocessor are recommended.
Metaview is a stand-alone program that takes a CGM in any encoding, checks that it is a conforming metafile and displays it on the screen. The software is available for PCI DOS systems. It requires at least 512K RAM. Hard disk, math coprocessor, and EGA or VGA card and colour monitor are recommended. This is a useful previewing package for looking at CGMs prior to output.
The details of these deals is being announced by CHEST to all sites. Keep your eyes open for information on these useful products.
I am trying to get some evaluation carried out of CGM software. If you have any comments on CGM software or any metafiles which could be used for testing please contact me.
