Hi folks,

I mentioned previously that I'd heard from two people, both
in Japan, running into trouble with time zones in the latest
update. I've since heard from Steve Renshaw, also in Japan but
running US Windows 2000, also encountering this problem.

That led me to do some Internet searching, and I found out
that the function I'm using has an oddity, for Win2000/NT/XP,
if the current time zone does not use daylight savings time.
And Japan, apparently having more sense than the US in such
matters, does not change its clocks twice a year for no
logical reason.

I'd expect the same bug to occur to Guide users in
similarly enlightened time zones (Arizona, part of Indiana,
Saskatchewan... several places around the world) using those
operating systems. To fix it, download this file and unZIP
it in your Guide directory (about 480 KBytes):

http://www.gwi.net/~pluto/time_fix.zip

(Basically, this just replaces the 'guide8.exe' file.)
This also includes the fix Gino asked for, in that you can
click on a line in the "Tables... List Stars" function, and
have Guide center on that star. Also, you can click on
some of the title lines in More Info-type boxes to sort text
on that subject ("RA", "dec", "elong", etc.)

Joe, Guide _can_ control Gemini mounts. I learned
recently of a timing issue, though, that can cause Guide
to emit meaningless complaints (i.e., tells you there was
an error when there really _wasn't_ an error). I've just
written up a few paragraphs about how to fix this on the
"RAQ" ("Rarely Asked Questions"):

http://www.projectpluto.com/rare_q.htm#gemini

Jeff, about ACL and ASCOM: I would _really_ like to
support the latter (and thereby, indirectly, the former).
It would save me a lot of time if, instead of having to
write fresh code to support each bizarre variation in scope
control, I could tell people: "Just get the ASCOM driver
for that scope." I'd hate to tell you how much time I've
spent puzzling out the idiosyncracies of the protocols
of various mounts (especially ones to which I lacked direct
access, and therefore had to do "remote debugging"). I'm
doing things now so that I ought to be able to add in ASCOM
as painlessly as possible.

I would have added it long ago... except that handling COM
from C/C++ is, strangely enough, _very_ tricky. I really
don't know why this is so; I've seen ASCOM used from other
languages with just a few lines of easily-understandable code.
Examples I've seen from C/C++ run to hundreds of lines of
gibberish. (Incidentally, I'm only using WATCOM for the DOS
software; the Windows version uses Microsoft Visual C++.)

Some recent comments on the ASCOM list have suggested
that the situation may no longer be quite so bad. When the
time comes, I'll ask around again and see if I can get a more
positive answer than I have previously.

-- Bill