"Last weekend several people castigated me for suggesting that Quanta should be
wound up.
Now it's time to see if you are prepared to put your money where your mouths
are.
I am not asking you to to do anything drastic like joining the committee, but
something more simple to show your support for Quanta and the Quanta committee.
Unlike most of you I have frequent unofficial contact with members of the Quanta
committee. In public they are frequently criticising the members for their
apathy. In private their language and emotions are much stronger. I think it is
fair to say they are bitter and disillusioned by the lack of support from the
members. They are having to double or triple up committee duties to keep Quanta
alive and feel a lack of concern and interest from the members. Over the last
year they have continually warned that the future of Quanta was in jeopardy, but
apparently no one was listening. At the moment committee morale is at a low ebb
and has been made worse by two factors. For the first time a Quanta committee
has had to be prepared for the real possibility of advising the closure of the
organisation at the next AGM. They have also had to cope with a serious problem,
the details of which I cannot go into, that has proved more difficult to solve
than first thought. Some advanced plans for Quanta on which the committee have
done hours of preparation have had to be put on hold. Inevitably this has led to
some tension between members of the committee.
So I am asking you all now to give the committee a good morale boost. Below is a
list of the problems that face the committee. It is a little frightening in its
length. Let's now give the committee some detailed help and feedback on these
issues.
1: QUANTA MAGAZINE
Quanta has been unable to find a permanent editor for its magazine for about 6
years. There is now an acute crisis with no editor or acting editor. Producing a
magazine is a highly skilled task and the people on the committee with those
skills are already overworked with other duties. I doubt if the committee now
has the resources to produce a magazine. What should they do in these
circumstances?
2: WEBSITE
The Quanta website has not been updated for 6 months. Although Quanta has had
websites for about 10 years it has never mastered the art of keeping a website
up to date. How should they tackle this problem?
3: SHOWS
Quanta can now manage only one show per year and the attendance is usually low.
Quanta is legally obliged to hold an AGM each year. Although in recent years
attendance has improved, three or four years ago attendance levels were
dangerously near the quorum. How should Quanta organise its AGMs in future?
4: SOUTH EAST
Apart from a small, and, in my opinion, somewhat secretive subgroup, Quanta has
had no presence in the South East for almost 4 years. How do we re-establish
contact with the South East?
5: FINANCE
Some years ago I wrote a piece in QL Today about the falling membership and was
accused of being anti-Quanta. When I wrote that item subscription income covered
more than 80% of expenditure. Today that figure is more like 60%. Quanta has
survived financially in recent years because Rich Mellor has traded in second
hand hardware on their behalf, but this is a diminishing source of income. What
would you do about the gap between subscription income and expenditure? Would
you be prepared to accept increasing the subscription to a maximum of £25? (And
just a warning for those people who suggest structurally using the capital. You
would be condemning Quanta to a short term future. In the worst case scenario
you could count the years left on the fingers of one hand.)
6: CONSTITUTION
Several people suggested amending Quanta's constitution to save the
organisation. What specific amendments are you proposing? There is no need for
detailed proposals - that could be a job for the experts. Bear in mind that
constitutional amendments are not a quick fix. The earliest that constitutional
amendments affecting the committee could be implemented would be 2013.
7: SUBGROUPS
This still seems to be a fairly successful area for Quanta. However they have
great autonomy and, with the exception of London, all the subgroups could
continue if Quanta closed down. Is there a need for more structured links
between the sub groups and the central organisation? There must be a lot of
things happening in subgroups that could be of interest to all members. They are
also in a position to provide valuable feedback to the committee.
8: KEYBOARD MEMBRANES
Not really a problem, but something for Quanta to boast about. Without Quanta
there would have been no new keyboard membranes. Any ideas for other good uses
for the capital? But don't forget you can't use the capital for both projects
and to make up shortfalls in the subscription income/expenditure balance.
I want to add some personal comments about the South East situation. Five years
ago it was the life blood of Quanta, and Manchester and the north were the poor
relations. There was always at least one show, and often two a year, whereas the
north had just one show every two years. The last South East show was held in
2007 and the decline in interest in Quanta (and perhaps the QL) was
frighteningly rapid. How often do you now see the former stalwarts of Portslade
and Byfleet contributing to this list? Almost never.
At one time a quarter of Quanta members lived in London or the South East. I
expected to see some old friends at Quanta's centenary, but only one person from
the region attended. It appears that Quanta now means nothing to them.
That is a warning for us all,
Best Wishes,
Geoff"
The response was robust and in fact as Geoff was attacking Quanta, the organisation was gaining a new editor.
At the same time two doyens of QL hardware and software were releasing news of progress with their projects. First Peter Graf and then Adrian Ives.
"Now that we finally seem close to new QL hardware, I wonder if it's the
right time to ask for another decline in QUANTA activities.
I rarely attend an AGM, but I consider to come this year. If I find the
time, I would demonstate some of the QL projects I had started but
abandoned due to the operating system situation.
This would include
- Prototype of a new QL hardware
- Native ethernet drivers
- QL internet applications
- Cool looking GUI without need for pointer environment
- Parallel port SD card interface
Sorry that I can not commit myself. I'll try to let someone else show the
hardware prototype if I can not attend.
All the best
Peter"
"I have no idea if anyone is remotely interested in this project to attach
USB devices to a QL using a small card called a USBWiz. This device presents a serial interface and accepts AT style commands to communicate with many classes of USB device. I started working on this last year, but
was delayed by some family problems and a move to another part of the country. My prototype hardware is a little black block that connects via a serial lead to a QL or Hermes serial port. The box has an SD card slot and two USB ports.
In the past two weeks I have turned my original prototype driver inside out (not a trivial task, no wonder I missed an errant "me equ 0" statement). The first version suffered from problems encountered when trying to do serial I/O while in supervisor mode (in effect, a driver on top of a driver). Today I successfully completed a test which involved writing a text file to a native QDOS format SD card, then reading it back again.
The new driver switches to user mode to do asynchronous I/O over the standard serial port driver through an I/O queue which is managed by a Queue Manager job. In this it is very different from other device drivers and so will need a lot more testing. Not the least of which under QDOS as the driver has been developed under SMSQ. The framework is also in place to support real time communication with the driver core through a pipe mechanism. This is intended to allow queries to be sent to the driver, as opposed to its devices; a variation on a paper that I read about the possibility of implementing meta devices on the QL. Some time in the future I envisage a USB "thing" to act as the interface to this feature.
Anyway, that's where I am.
The new device driver has the name USB; USB1 is the SD card slot, USB2 and USB3 are the ports which can mount standard external hard drives or memory sticks. It reads and writes, but the format routine still needs completing (formatting is currently done with a S*BASIC utility)
As well as the native QL driver I also have a File Manager which needs no driver (only a free serial port) and can read and write FAT format SD card and USB hard drives. This software also supports the automatic saving and retrieving of the QDOS 64 byte header. This program currently runs in menu-driven character mode, but it is my intention to migrate it to a GD2 compliant pointer app in the very near future.
So, my question is this: Is anyone actually interested in me devoting more time to finish this project? If (and it is still an if) the driver can be brought to a release-stable state, is there interest in a commercial product
based around this?
Adrian"
No comments:
Post a Comment