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Happy New Year to everyone. And yes it does seem like an age has passed since Christmas, but it's only a month. Since we returned in January there's been an explosion of interest in LSS and our training bookings have gone through the roof. With all the doom and gloom of the past couple of weeks when we all saw our pension pots devalued by a jittery stock market, LSS users seem to be bucking the trend and keeping incredibly busy.

If you need to recruit personnel then please use the forum to add your own adverts. The service is free.

It sounds a bit like a type of dance, but actually Co-Go is short for Coordinate Geometry. Still puzzled? You're not alone.

Put simply, its a way of editing a survey using a library of pre-defined rules such as straights, intersections, parallel and perpendicular lines etc. This type of task is mostly done within CAD, but what we've now done is added the functionality straight into LSS as a series of edit commands.

Why duplicate what's already possible elsewhere? You might ask. But as usual we're doing it a little differently from the rest of the industry. As you will be aware, LSS has always been strong on Quality Control. Simply adding points into a survey with no reference to how they were added isn't what we do. For instance, if you move an observation so that it is perpendicular to the end of a link you don't want to lose the reference to which survey station it was originally observed from. Maybe you want to generate a new link which is parallel to an existing one, but when you've done it you want to be able to perform a traverse adjustment and not worry that the new link won't move with the stations.

But you don't have to be a land surveyor to benefit from Co-Go. The range of options should prove useful for everyone using LSS, whether it be a building internal or a quarry. Take a look at what we've been up to by downloading the Beta version of LSS from our website.

GEO-8 used to be called Geomatics World and before that the World of Surveying. Whatever they call it, it's an exhibition showing off the latest kit and software for land surveyors and engineers. This year it's being held at Coventry City's Ricoh Arena, though we're assured that it's indoors and not on the pitch!

Come along and introduce yourselves. We're in an open-sided stand opposite the refreshment area, so, unlike last year when we were hidden behind a big wall, you shouldn't have any trouble finding us.

By the way it's taking place on the 9th and 10th April. Click HERE to visit the organiser's website.

As we have already mentioned, we have done more training in the past six months than at any other time in the company's history and it doesn't appear to be letting-up. As you may be aware, we run regular courses each month at our offices here in Gloucestershire, but in February we're spending a week just off J40 of the M1 near Wakefield and again in mid March at our usual venue in East Kilbride. There are a few places left on some courses in Wakefield and several more on courses in Scotland, so if you wold like to attend then please complete the on-line booking form on our website and we'll take care of the rest.

Automatic update news. After running into problems with the off-the-shelf solution we bought at the end of last year, our plans to implement automatic program updates for LSS have run aground somewhat.

What we will be doing is writing a solution ourselves, but this won't be available for a while and not before extensive testing has taken place. It's just a shame that the claims made by the authors of the software turned out to be false.

Many thanks to those users who tested our first attempts. We will be in touch again when we are ready to test the new solution.

We came across a great bit of software a few weeks ago and we thought you'd like to know about it. Back in December Nigel had a demo to do which involved showing the prospective client 3D fly-throughs for an area covered by 100 high resolution aerial photographs. The 12.5cm resolution images were just too big to use in 3D view. Not doing the demo was never an option and as 3D views were to become a vital part of what the client would use the system for an alternative approach was required.

After a bit of Googling we found a product called Irfanview (pronounced Ear Fan). It's a powerful image editor, slideshow producer and multimedia player. It has a batch mode, so resampling the 100 images down to 0.5m resolution was a really quick and easy exercise. The software will even rotate images which will please some users who have been asking to do this in LSS for some time.

While the software is free for personal use it costs 10 Euros or 12 US Dollars per copy. Check it out at irfanview.net

Thank you for reading this e-bulletin. We hope you found the information contained within it of interest.