Last modified | DDT |>| FRI.SEP,960913,20:40 |

CoSy/Language/APL96
The APL96 Conference @ Lancaster England in annotated images

The major bit of formal news was Mike Kent`s presentation of the Ken Iverson award to Roger Hui , in absentia , for his authoring of Ken`s J .

  • Chairman DieterLattermann greets Professor Don McIntyre sunday evening .
  • RayCannon : Hirsute , English , APLer .
  • GarthFoster , JimBrown , ChrisJones .
  • JanKarman , BobHoekstra , Sveta y Sasha , JohnWarden outside Fox conference ctr .
  • The first evening , the first pub , Galgate : John , YoshinoriSaigusa , BobH , BobA , KyosukeSaigusa , JanKarman
  • DickHolt , HankBeisnert & JackRudd checking their geoposition after differential keynote .
  • Pub in old wine cellars near castle .
  • The past survives in Lancaster .
  • AdrianSmith & HeinzRoggenkemper discuss the success of APL & Causeway for a large system configuration product @ SAP
  • GerardLanglet , probing the computational foundation of everything with quintesential APL thought . We trust he keeps his spinal cells in line and continues illuminating our intelectual world .
  • BobHoekstra & JaakkoRanta chat in front of the new name in APL vendors .
  • APL is full of big and tall and left handed .
  • Lunch buffet .
  • AlexanderSkomorokhov simplifies language of genetic algorithms ( if you understand Russian man ) .
  • I believe I see Steve Jaffe , PhilBenkard`s back and JohnScholes visage at John & Peter`s Dyalog booth .
  • A dock protected by locks from tidal grounding in some tiny town down some tiny lanes toward the coast .
  • We find Thurnham Mill Tavern ! Elias drove .
  • ( some slides elided ) . BobH with the McIntyres , next morning after the tide retreated .
  • TimoLaurima connecting everyone with TCP/IP using AndreKondreshev`s AP119 . The youngest conference attendee attending in the forground .
  • We return to Miller`s canal side with reinforcements .
  • Our table , overseen by serving wench .
  • Next morning BoGrave nests logic .
  • PhilB thanks DieterL .
  • Finns ( & a couple of Brits who did time in RSA ) share >.5 alcohol solutions for end of conference .
  • OlliPaavola (that's me and my long hair) Kai Sjöblom standing next to me . ( Added 0916 ) .
  • WalterSpunde & daughter enjoy banquet .
  • MartinK , JimRyan & Roy&KyleSykes early in final Evening Seminar .
  • Russian kisses lampshade later in seminar .
  • And JimLucas sooths the savvy BobH .
  • On the drive bak to London with Sasha & Sveta , BobH shows us the Peaks District .

    Looks like next year`s conference will be held in New Jersey USA .
    `98 in Rome .

    Please feedback any corrections or elaborations .

    Teknikal koments :

    Although my logo is a 6-cube drawn with a single line , until a year ago color graphics seemed so irrelevent to the use of a notebook that I never felt the cost and battery load worth it . I stayed in CGA where I had direct access to the bitmap of the screen . When the Compaq Aeros hit $1K , monochrome & CGA died . But the Aero has just 1Byte VGA color ; it no longer suffices .

    Netscape suks at displaying color on these machines . Paint Shop , which I downloaded from CompuServe to convert the images to .GIF does the best I`ve seen along the path I`ve taken to get this stuf up . But I guess I`ll have to wait til I get to a cyberCafe to see what they really look like .

    9608202302 | Turns out I had to go to the public library here in HP IL to get some tax forms . The library has 2 dedicated net browsers for anyone to walk up and use . They seem to have the 256 color pallet GIF is designed for . The GIFs clearly do not seem have all the detail and range I see in the originals . Some of the images definitely need to be lightened up .

    I had some wrong specs on the Casio QV-10a ; I`m not sure where each error came from . In particular ,I saw something about the camera having 16MB flash memory . I assumed bytes ; http://www.casio-usa.com/html/products/ccameras.html http://www.casio-usa.com/html/products/qv-10adetail.html makes it clear they meant bits , i.e. : | 16 % 8 |>| 2 | MBytes .

    Although I have seen it said in a couple of places that the image sensor is ' a 250,000 element, 1/5" CCD ' , the best I understand is that the images start off as | 480 x 240 |>| 115200 | pixels .
    The images tho , are | 320 x 240 |>| 76800 | pixels , of which the view finder shows 65k . Casio`s proprietary ( I have suggested to them that they post it on the web ) .CAM format , based on JPEG , with the nice feature that it permits appended comments , produces files averaging under 26K per image : 

      |(|
       ‘S Q is ( DIR '\QVPC\ALBUMS\APL96' ) CON 'CAM'  |>| 79
       AVG NUMS , SP , 2 pik  ‘SPLITCOL DRB Q          |>| 25835.33    |#|
  |)|
    This is very efficient compared to both .BMP and .GIF formats
    |(| 230454 55000 % 26000 |>| 8.86 2.12 |)|

    Even with my current limited hardware , I can see the ability to change contrast and brightness is very powerful . When I get bak to NYC , one of my first purchases will be a CD-ROM so I`ll not only finally have a walkman , but will be able to look at the ADOBE software which came with the camera . See also http://www.wherry.com/gadgets/qv10/ .

    Casio seems slow to understand the advantages of making their software available for use as an open transfer format by their customers . Their help suggests that TIF may be the prefered format for external use . In the native 320 x 240 format , both TIF and BMP require just over | 76800 x 3 |>| 230400 | bytes , and seem to be completely equivalent . The transformation | CAM --> TIF(320x240) --> TIF(640x480) | appears identical to | CAM --> TIF(640x240) | . Same with BMP . So there seems no advantage to transfer expanded images .