h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hi there and welcome to The Hitch Hikers Guide Narf... My name is Greebo T. Cat, and me is an Assistant Community Editor here at H2G2. If you need any help then ask away, me will try to help all me can.

Here is a handy link to a page me wrote for new researchers to the guide such as yourself, it has several links to parts of the guide that you might like to visit. So if you have the time, why not pop over to http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A517286

Well it looks like you are having no troubles with moving in... me is glad that you are liking the place... and its great that you have already written your first guide article... ~Greebo grins broadly~

The journal part of the guide is good for writing down your thoughts etc... but remember it can be read by others.. so therefore you should be carefull with what personal stuff you include...

We (at h2g2) were all saddened by Douglas' death, he meant a great deal to us all.. and we share your feelings at losing him so suddenly, so early in ,life...

If you do require any help, with any aspect of the guide, then just let me... or any of the other ACE's know... and we will try our utmost to help you out...

Hugs Greebs.. xx

Thank you for the welcome. It is great to finally be here. I had heard about this years ago, but only now did I think to check it out. I hope to be quite active here, and in the coming months may be able to contribute as a volunteer.

A couple of questions: I hope to have my first entry complete soon, and I was wondering how long it takes before the entries show up during user searches.

Also, how many people are involved in the voluteer forces. I notice that new researchers are welcomed quite quickly.

Keep up the great work, and I hope to join you soon.

Hey, Narf! I noticed on another thread you were getting into Palm OS programming... I'm considering a bit of that myself, and to that end have signed up to the official Palm Developer Exchange programme - you'll find a link to it on the front page of their official site. It's free to join up, but you have to sign two copies of a (real, paper!) non-disclosure agreement and post it off to them. In return you get a password to their "restricted" website, with downloadable documentation in PDF format covering all aspects of programming the little critters...

If I ever get around to it, I want to see if I can get the Atari ST OS running on a Palm Pilot - it used to run on an 8MHz 68000 with 512K of RAM and a monochrome bitmapped screen, so the porting shouldn't be too hard - I have version 1.00 on floppy from the days of my first ST!

This will, of course, serve no practical purpose other than to be able to run a few simple Atari games and accessories... Still, it's a neat idea, and that's reason enough to try it...

I signed up for that too, and downloaded the GNu prc-tools and the SDK. There is thousands of pages of documentation to sift through, so I will be very busy. My first project is a Bus schedule app for the Grand River Transit (the local transit here in Kitchener). After that, I was thinking of exploring a Palm interface to the Guide here.

Good luck on the Atari port to Palm hardware. I know that there are several projects like this being worked on. Linux has found its way to palm hardware already, and since the Atari computers used the 68K, it sould be easy. I will mention your goal to some friends I have who are "atari-philes" (for lack of a better word).

As for the Palm Guide interface, I would appreciate any input, and could really use assistance, so if you or anyone else is interested in helping at a design or code level, please let me know here.

Hardware-wise, I just have a "classic" Pilot, running Palm OS 2.04 in 512K of RAM, with the monochrome screen. I guess a Guide implementation would benefit from at least a greyscale screen, if not colour... Still, I can always do stuff on the emulator.

It's possible that the BBC will eventually provide AvantGo access to their sites anyway, which might make it somewhat of a moot point.

I'm a web designer by trade these days, so if you need any interface icons or widgets I'd be happy to have a shot at it for you, in return for a tiny credit in the finished documentation...

The Atari port appeals to me, as the GEM implementation has a simple pair of constants built in for screen-width and screen-height, and should scale the interface accordingly without any actual programming on my part - all I have to do is tell it where the screen is mapped, the bit-depth (1!) and the size. I'm thinking of using a "trackpad" algorithm (those little squares you sometimes see on the front of laptops) to move the mouse pointer, so you just "nudge" it in whatever direction by stroking your finger across the screen...

I will let you know when I have need of your service. I would probably also need someone knowledgeable in the engine that navigates the Guide, so a Sync conduit could extract the info required and properly format postings and Guide entries.