I am pleased to report that QL2004 will definitely go ahead on 16th October 2004 from 10.00 - 17.00 at the Pleincollege St. Joris in Eindhoven, Netherlands. We hope to have a web page available giving details of location, travel possibilities and hotels, but it could be a little while before this is ready.
There are no cafes in the immediate area of the venue, but Sin-QL-Air will be providing refreshments at cost price. We are also considering a show dinner - details at the end of this message. So far we have 2 activity workshops planned and have ideas for more, but we need help on those. We shall be able to use projectors for demonstrations so it is helpful if your system can be connected to these. The idea of the activities is not only to see what has been developed in the last few years, but to give an impulse to future developments. INTERNET CONNECTION WORKSHOP: This is being run by Jon Dent with help from Jan Bredenbeek at the Dutch end. Most of us know that it is now possible to email from a QL, but not much more about how easy it is. The answer is in Eindhoven! Probably Jon needs more testers and people in every country who are prepared to look for suitable ISPs. COLOUR WORKSHOP: This will be led by Wolfgang Uhlig, who will be demonstrating the tools he has written to help programmers use the new colours in their programs. It would also be interesting to hear from all the people who have been working on sprites etc. Bring your work along! A lot of work has been done in developing the colours and Wolfgang has made it easier for us to update our old programs and put them in a new jacket. Incidentally at Eindhoven I saw a possible new version of EasyPtr - very nice - could we get any copyright and similar problems sorted out before October? The activities we would like to do in order of difficulty: NATIVE HARDWARE EXPANSION: Could someone let us know the state of play here? There was a suggestion of approaching QUANTA over financing. Has this been done? If not, is any help necessary? This is important as the QUANTA AGM is in a fortnight's time and any proposal should be in by them. Remember, subject to AGM approval, I shall be on the QUANTA committee and pushing for this. We would like to have some talk or demonstration on the new cards at QL2004. Any offers? Q60: At the moment this could be the weak spot of QL2004. The QL2004 organisation team are unanimously of the opinion that the Q60 deserves an important place at the show. We are hoping to have some ex-QLers from Germany and the Netherlands at the show and they may be interested in the Linux possibilities of the machine. We are still working on this problem, but can anyone help? PRINTERS: A controversial subject, but one that has to be solved. QL-ers often buy PCs as part of a package and then find they cannot use QPC with the supplied printer. We believe the answer is via the filters suggested by Marcel. Initially only available for the QPC, but possibly later to the Q60 and even native hardware if the new cards are developed. It would be nice to see some progress on this before QL2004. One again, would finance oil a few wheels? Also: QL FORUM: We have had several suggestions for the experts to lead the discussion. Unfortunately this is not quite as balanced or as long a list as we would like. Also there are some experts who do not enjoy "the limelight". More suggestions welcomed so that we can decide on who to ask after our next meeting on 12th June. SHOW DINNER: There is a long after show tradition of a visit to the NIEUW CANTON restaurant. This provides a Chinese-Indonesian buffet for about 11 euros. (So far the prize for the biggest eaters has joint winners of Freddie V and Stuart H.) Would you like this to become a formal dinner? We would have to sound out the restaurant first, may (and I stress may) have to restrict numbers and certainly charge a deposit. Geoff gwicks @ beeb.net PS All the railway stations of the Netherlands are filled with posters warning you that joints can make you mad, bad at sport and impotent. How times have changed! _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List
