Trinidad and Tobago Computer Society

Category: blog

  • TTCS pizzalime on Wednesday February 13th, 2008

    The Trinidad and Tobago Computer Society will be having a pizzalime on Wednesday February 13th, 2008 from 6pm to 9pm at Pizza Hut, Roxy Roundabout.

    Come join us as we eat and chat about :

    Contribution of $30 towards refreshments is expected. Copies of TTCS OSSWIN CD are available for $40TT. See you there!

  • Ping times in Trinidad with broadband from Flow or Blink

    Since I’ve gotten Flow broadband I’ve been playing online games (Quake 3 Arena, DotA Allstars) with another Flow subscriber using Hamachi.

    The ping times are great ; typical ping times between two Flow subscribers (one in St. James, the other in Glencoe) are around 15-25ms. However, the ping time between a Flow subscriber and a TSTT Blink Broadband subscriber is around 220ms which results in some lag during gaming.

    Anyone knows what the ping times are between two Blink Broadband subscribers? Let us know in the comments.

  • Warcraft III v1.21b latest patch

    Two bits of recent (and good!) news for Warcraft III players  :

    First, Blizzard has released a Warcraft III patch v1.21b which allows you to run the installed game without the Warcraft CD.

    Secondly, possibly the most popular game using the Warcraft III engine, DoTA AllStars (my friends haven’t played regular Warcraft III LAN games since we discovered since discovering DoTA Allstars) has a new AI version (i.e so you can play with/against bots) : 6.48b AI+ v1.52 (login required).

  • Summary of TTCS meetings held in 2007

    We hold two types of meetings : Pizza Limes and Tech Meetings. A Pizza Lime is the name given to our monthly discussion forum which is usually held at Pizza Hut, Roxy Roundabout, Port of Spain on the second Wednesday of the month. The tech meeting is when we have computers on site to demonstrate a particular type of hardware or software.
    (more…)

  • Trinidad and Tobago and DIS29500

    The Trinidad and Tobago Bureau of Standards (TTBS), a P-status member of ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 (JTC1 SC34) will soon be voting on DIS29500 (aka Office Open XML ; OOXML ; OpenXML).

    The Trinidad and Tobago Computer Society has updated the wiki page on DIS29500 containing details such as :

    • Timeline of what’s happened with DIS29500 with links to relevant documents
    • Background/related links about DIS29500
    • List to proposed criteria by the TTBS to evaluate OOXML and other ISO standards in SC34
    • Upcoming standards in SC34 that the TTBS has to vote on.

    The TTCS welcomes your thoughts and suggestions regarding DIS29500 and on the proposed criteria to be used to evaluate OOXML. If you can assist with technical understanding and analysis of DIS29500, this is also needed and appreciated. You can edit the DIS29500 wiki page or send email to admin a-t ttcsweb d.o.t org

  • Send text messages to Digicel phones via the Internet

    Perhaps old news to Digicel owners in Trinidad and Tobago, but you can send text messages to Digicel phones via the Internet. TSTT has yet to re-enable sending text messages to TSTT phones over the internet, since 2005.

  • Sesame Street video clips

    Yay! You can now watch video clips from past Sesame Street episodes! All the videos are tagged so you can search for videos but the site doesn’t provide a way to link to specific Sesame Street clips.

    Some search term hints :

    • “Kermit”
    • “Monsterpiece”
    • “Sherlock Hemlock”

    Look at Wikipedia’s List of Sesame Street Characters for more ideas.

  • updates to software on the TTCS OSSWIN CD since v1.84

    Did several updates to the TTCS OSSWIN CD that will be available for this Saturday’s meeting. Here’s a list of the updated software since v1.84 was released December 29th, 2007 :

    • Sumatra PDF 0.8 slim, portable, open-source PDF viewer for Windows.
    • ConvertAll 0.4.1 Unit Conversion program
    • Wikidpad 1.8rc12 Wiki-like notebook for storing anything you can think of to write down
    • Stellarium 0.9.1 Map the night sky on your computer
    • Sokoban YASC 1.423 Yet Another Sokoban Clone – for Windows
    • Scorched3D 41.3 turn based artillery game based on the classic DOS game Scorched Earth. Supports LAN and internet play
    • GIMP 2.4.3 bitmap editor suitable for photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.
    • Paint.NET 3.22 image and photo editing tool for Windows XP and greater
    • FileZilla 3.0.5.2 fast FTP and SFTP client
    • Halite 0.3 download files via BitTorrent, a client file-sharing protocol created to overcome the obstacles of transferring large files over the Internet
    • ClamWin Free AntiVirus 0.92 ClamWin is a Free Antivirus for Microsoft Windows 98/Me/2000/XP/2003/Vista.
    • KeePass 1.10 KeePass is an open-source password safe

    However, due to the increased file sizes of the updates, three programs were removed from the CD :

    • Jools 0.20 puzzle game similiar to Bejeweled
    • wxMusik 0.4.2.2 An open-source, cross-platform multimedia player and library.
    • Rainmeter 0.14 customisable performance meter and other applets for the desktop

    Been working on a DVD version of TTCS OSSWIN, but too much activities occupying my time now.

  • Cell phone text, voice messages submitted as evidence in Trinidad and Tobago Court for first time

    Text messages, pictures and voice mail stored on a cell phone was submitted as evidence in a Trinidad and Tobago court for the first time on Wednesday January 16th, 2008.

    The court case is against a man accused of murder in a preliminary inquiry being held at the Port-of-Spain Eighth Magistrates’ Court. The victim’s girlfriend Nokia’s cell phone contained the voice messages from the accused. According to the Newsday article :

    Three voice messages, left on the Nokia phone of the victim’s girlfriend by the accused, were extracted by police from the phone’s SIM card using a special software called Pure Voice.

    The messages were tendered into evidence in the Port-of-Spain Eighth Magistrates’ Court as audio files saved on a CD-ROM. Also on the CD-ROM were seven digital photographs, as well as a special forensics report of the phone compiled using Cell DEK software.

    The phone had initially been examined by PC Daniel Hernandez, of the Analysis Unit of the Homicide Bureau and yesterday he told the court how he used special software to extract the three messages and then saved them on a CD-ROM.
    ….
    Yesterday also marked another first, with the court being shown 30 text messages from the phone of Ash, which was also extracted from her Nokia bmobile phone using special software.

    Found a link for Logicube CellDek which I believe was used for the forensics report for the cell phone ; although a link to Pure Voice which I believe is from Qualcomm is hard to find.

  • The Copyright (Amendment) Bill 2008

    The Copyright (Amendment) Bill 2008 was introduced in the Trinidad and Tobago Senate on January 15, 2008.

    The Copyright (Amendment) Bill 2008 can be downloaded from the Trinidad and Tobago Parliament’s website :

    According to the introduction :

    The Copyright (Amendment) Bill, 2007 seeks to amend the Copyright Act, 1997 (Act No. 8 of
    1997) (hereinafter called “the Act”) to facilitate Trinidad and Tobago’s accession to the World
    Intellectual Property Organization Copyright Treaty (hereinafter called “the WCT”) and to the
    World Intellectual Property Organization Performances and Phonograms Treaty (hereinafter called
    “the WPPT”) and to strengthen the enforcement provisions of the Act.

    (Update : 17 Jan 2008 – Here is a link to the Trinidad and Tobago Copyright Act, 1997)