The David Graham Consultancy

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ret'd Professor RJ Gale of LSU, BatonRouge La.

Robert Gale has a longtime interest in power sources, molten salts and electrochemistry. Together, we have authored and edited texts on these subjects. He also has a book on photoelectrochemistry.

ret'd Clive Daniel of Hemel Hempstead

Clive was a network engineer with Cable and Wireless and, previously GPT, specialising in telecomms and networking. Something of a computer guru, he tries to answer the difficult questions.

Drs George & Eileen Frame II of NY

George & Eileen are both analysts with special interests in pcb's and icp methods. George is an amateur astronomer and both are ardent travellers and fun-runners/volksmarchers. They commune with cats, but also like birds!

Due to spam abuse email links have been removed. Lunatic behaviour of fringe humanity and organised crime.

Dr Paula M Deano of BatonRouge La.

Paula is another analyst, retired from a multinational formerly working in crop protection, and health and safety issues. Paula is one of the best-informed about festivals, customs, travel and locations in the Deep South, recently returned from an overland journey to Alaska. Visit!

David with Rioja Anahara at the third Grove Fuel Cell Symposium,

Imperial College London on the occasion of Rioja's award of the Grove Medal.

The Grove VII Fuel Cell Symposium, London, 2001.

This Symposium, entitled Commercialising Fuel Cells: The Issues Outstanding, was held at the QE II Conference Centre, London 11-13th September 2001. It attracted a record number of around 750 attending, including exhibitors. The ZeTek AFC taxi was demonstrated, as well as their commercial van, the GM truck, the Ballard go-cart and the ENEA bike. Extended abstracts were circulated at registration in hard copy and CDRom and appear on the website. A full research session parallelled one on military applications. Dr GJK Acres, retiring Chairman of the Grove Committee, was nominated as first President of the group and received the Grove Medal. Strong support was evident from the oil companies, car makers, and finance houses as well as government, academia, and industry. Further details from: www.grovefuelcell.com and

sm.wilkinson@elsevier.co.uk Tel: +44 (0)1865 843691/fax...843958

Don Cameron is secretary to the Steering Committee.

The Grove VI Fuel Cell Symposium, London, 1999.

About 400 attended this Symposium at the The Queen Elizabeth Hall, London SW1, 13th - 16th September. The meeting followed the usual 2�day format, with the medal presentation to Bernie Baker of FuelCell Energy (formerly ERC), acceptance and opening address on the first evening. A prior workshop included an address by Rt Hon John Gummer MP, former minister at Environment and UK govt. rep. at the Kyoto Conference, who asserted that the time of the fuel cell had arrived! The symposium theme concerned fuel cells as a competitive option for sustainable energy supply. The challenges, opportunities, technical progress, demonstrations and future prospects in both stationary and mobile fuel cells were considered. BG Technology announced an important new strategic fuel cell development alliance with Alstom. This correspondent edited the meeting Proceedings; eighty two papers were processed. These appeared as a 568 page special edition of JPS Vol:86 (1-2), 2000. Thanks to all those authors, referees and the coordinators in Elsevier, Shannon who offered their support and cooperation. All delegates should have received a personal copy of the Proceedings issue, gratis. Phillipa Orme of The Conference Company coordinated organisation of the Sysmposium on behalf of Elsevier; outstanding organisational enquiries may be directed to her.

To enquire about any residual Editorial matters concerning the Proceedings, please send me an EMAIL, (below). PLEASE NOTE: I do not accept unauthorised ATTACHMENTS (protocol compatiblities, encoding, viruses, etc!) - not only will they be deleted but fees and downloading charges will be billed to the sender. File transfer is possible by Zmodem or other protocols: 56,600,8,n,1,-, at prearranged times: other arrangements may be possible on a strictly personal basis and at cost - please enquire. Those who miss deadlines for Grove Proceedings can usually submit papers for regular JPS issues with a suitable footnote; please refer to the Guide for Authors or inside covers of Journal. To enquire about journals, papers, general editorial matters, etc EMAIL Elseviers' Ireland office.

To enquire about future conferences EMAIL their Oxford office.

Tip on completely removing time-expiring software demonstrations.

How often have you loaded trial software only to find out afterwards that it has a time-expiry period after which you are unable to access some or all of the applications' functions? It then becomes necessary to uninstall the program. Sometimes an 'uninstall' icon is provided, but if not, you have to laboriously remove all the files, directories and icons through the File Manager. Having done all this, it is really annoying to discover that residues of the offending software can still exist and may interfere with the proper running of your system. To deal with this situation, you should use a text editor to edit your WIN.INI and SYSTEM.INI files (use SYSEDIT if you have it iconised). Search out any rogue files belonging to the deleted application and remove them; if it is unclear which ones they are, try to compare them with previous versions of INI files, preferably date-stamped with the day you installed the offending rubbish. When all these have been deleted, it is necessary to exit to DOS and delete the file REG.DAT (the registration database) from the WINDOWS directory. Restart WINDOWS, open the registration information editor (this can also be iconised for convenience), open FILE, open MERGE and select SETUP.REG from the WINDOWS/SYSTEM directory. It may also be necessary to re-register OLE2 files through MERGE. All this sounds a little protracted, but in practice it only takes a few minutes. The process is similar for WIN95, but remember that there are TWO copies of registration information (.dat & .da0) to deal with (five rb00x.cab under W98) and attributes to open and reclose. If you reckon you're smart enough to grapple with WIN95 (I'm not! but W98 is ameliorated somewhat), then this should not be a problem for you (but try John Worams' W98 Registry book). Having successfully achieved a clean system, you may be discouraged from making the same mistake again. Moreover, it may be illegal to reload the same software again, depending on the terms and conditions of use. Next time save .bak versions of key .ini files and maybe load software through a tracking application, eg Windelete, if Installshield wasn't activated. If cover disks and time-limited trial software really annoy you and you're determined to fight back regardless, you might wish to advance your system date by a year or so BEFORE you install. Resetting the correct date afterwards may provide you with 365 days + of use. Beware though, as this may be illegal in some cases, so read the Terms & Conditions first. Apparently, this will not work with Windows XP, which is NOT a recommended product.

If you're looking for a superb hardware, including cpu-overclocking issues,Website try www.tomshardware.com, and the associated links including the Delphi chat/Q&A areas. Also of interest are www.sharkyextreme.com www.anandtech.com www.aceshardware.com www.ocworkbench.com www.overclockers.com and www.zdnet.com www.wired.com for computer industry news.

Why not strike a blow for freedom? Decline to use Windows98/W2K/ME/XP/Vista - they are deeply flawed and bloated products and ultimately doomed, according to William himself! Beware of automated ungrades, too; if they fail, you may have little chance of a repair and be left with a corrupted system (but there are books, eg by John Woram, Peter Norton,etc.). Furthermore, W98, W2K and, in particular, XP may permit Gates' folk to snoop around your system at any time under the pretext of dynamically upgrading your system: don't be surprise if your screen freezes and your modem dials out without your express instruction! Ask yourself: "Do I really want my machine upgraded by MS without my knowledge?" given their record of bugs! You could be worse off when you next switch on. Indeed, if you use W98 ME, you may not be able to read this at all - more illegal proprietary browser mods. from Redmond. But you 'aint seen nothing yet' - the latest plan, .NET, is not to sell an OS at all or Win XP, which requires certificates for everything, lack of drivers and several patches each week. In the former case, the OS will be held on servers and you pay everytime you switch on and access it. This is utterly unacceptable and you should certainly let Gates' folk know! Then there's CPRM/DRM and Palladium! And, now arrived but shunned by most, Vista - another twist in the hardware upgrade spiral. Can you bear the wait for WinFS?! Why not consider installing freebies Caldera Open DOS and its SpiderWeb web access software (both fit on a single floppy!) or a version of Linux, eg Fedora 8, Mandriva 10, SuSe10.3, MEPIS, Ubuntu 7.10, (100m users can't be wrong?!). Best of all, the Knoppix Linux CD (now we have Knoppix 5-series DVD) can run on almost anything without interferring with the installed OS; for those of a perverse disposition, the Knoppix CD can even be used in Konsole mode by skilled folk to repair Windows every time it fails! SystemRescue0.42 is the one to delete WXP passwords. DamnSmallLinux, and a plethora of other small derivatives can even be booted from a USB pen drive. Try Puppy Linux - you won't be disappointed. You'll like the Custom version of NimbleX - construct your own .iso online, while you wait. Don't worry about the SCO fiasco - they have failed. Linux distributions can, of course, be downloaded FOC, but for those without broadband, CDs can be purchased for a few $$,€ or GBP from companies advertising on Distrowatch.com e.g. uselinux.co.uk, and linuxiso.com. Remember: Linux is already 64-bit compliant, so no need to deploy another bent creation from Billy boy. The PC, and computers in general, have tried to become too smart for their own good. Only a tiny fraction of users need fast 3D rendering, high-level CAD/CAM, etc. Those users would be better served by installation of professional hardware. Gamers are better using consoles. New developments are aim to merge entertainment centres, including TV, video, music with PCs. The ITX systems from VIA are small, silent and power-economically. Watch this space. For Net browsing, try Opera, the choice of professionals, which includes an email client and is available in Welsh & Gaelic (both!) with a new Linux version. Firefox 2.0.011 (3.0 imminent) and Thunderbird are also excellent cross-platform options available for download, gratis. For emailing with better security try Eudora, Sylpheed (Claws derivative) or Fox. Overshadowing them all, however, is Evolution for Linux, if you like Gnome! In any case, removing IE/OE with IEradicator from 98lite.net is a very good idea. For embedded systems, consider DRDos7-based, Symbian and ARM-RISC offerings with Linux variants now much in evidence - embedded systems in mobile phones and netbooks are a rapidly merging technology. Techies will want a copy of the now-defunct DOS Arachne - guaranteed not to attract any attention by junior anarchists! Watch for IBM, Novell SuSE (although the M$ liaison is ominous), Sun and Red Hat alliances for new Linux-friendly options. Simplified, maybe task-specific devices, especially a mobile emailer and/or web browser, possibly with embedded Linux on ROM are popping up everywhere; 3G is still not perfected and nobody seems to want mobile TV! Probably avoid MS X-Box, however, even for gaming. The PS3 with Linux is a superior, if not cheaper, alternative, although Wii has proved the winner, presently, having a great following in old folks' homes, too. Rationality might still prevail within the industry!

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