Hutt meeting 14 December 2009

The last meeting for the Hutt SIG should be interesting.

No cake, but we will have Google's recently announced ChromeOS to demonstrate. This is Google's cloud-based operating system that is expected to be released next year.

Also Picasa 3.5, with face recognition (a new feature in Picasa, which has had face detection for some time). Many people are of the opinion that Picasa's face recognition is one of the best performing implementations, even beating iPhoto. Picasa runs on Windows, Linux and Mac, so no excuses for not attending this meeting.

If time permits, a quick look at Microsoft ICE, an excellent tool for automatically stitching images together (useful for panoramas). Microsoft research is producing a range of very useful and interesting image manipulation tools, ICE is just one of several initiatives from Microsoft in this area.

See you there!

Wgton meeting, 16 december 2009

Ah... the Christmas party, and Roger's cake.

Yes, it's that time again (as if you didn't already know). There will be the usual goodies: wine, grape juice etc for refreshments.

In addition, Nathan Mercer from Microsoft will talk about the company's latest version of Office, called Office 2010. How does it differ from Office 2007, I hear you ask? Obviously, you will need to come along and find out -- that is, if you haven't already been sufficiently enticed (or bribed, if you prefer to look at it another way). If you were present at the meeting last month, when Richard gave us a refresher course on Office 2007 and even earlier versions of the software, you will have a head start with the comparison, so I hope to see you there.