This month we have a talk from Tim Nash – Developing headless web applications.

Who needs or want humans to get in the way of your applications on the web, more and more systems are moving to headless web service applications, be it checking the latest exchange rates, or sending information about an order to a third party for processing web services should be the cornerstone. Many people have been tortured by SOAP based web services fear not the solution is here with REST based applications, this talk will look at developing REST applications, backend deployment on linux systems use of Memcache, queueing systems like beanstalkd and how you can have it all up and running in under an hour or so.

The talk will start at 7:00pm, but the room will be open for coffee, tea and chat from 6:30pm. Afterwards, we usually go to The Fenton pub, across the road from OBH, for more geeky chatter.

Location:
Old Broadcasting House
148 Woodhouse Lane
Leeds
LS2 9EN

More location details on the OBH contact page or on Open Street Map.

This month we have a talk from Tom Hall.

Tom will be giving an update to his ZFS talk of 2 years ago, recapping
that talk and introducing shiny new features that have appeared since. He will also look at btrfs and discuss why though the feature list is similar, underneath it is quite a different beast.

He will be announcing a new project to build the Storage Pods from a design released by Backblaze mid last year and a brief survey of clustered filesystems/high availability solutions to try and get robust file and block level storage on commodity hardware.

The talk will start at 7:00pm, but the room will be open for coffee, tea and chat from 6:30pm. Afterwards, we usually go to The Fenton pub, across the road from OBH, for more geeky chatter.

Location:
Old Broadcasting House
148 Woodhouse Lane
Leeds
LS2 9EN

More location details on the OBH contact page or on Open Street Map.

This month we’re fortunate enough to have a talk from Tim Schofield, who has spent much of the last 18 months implementing an open source solution in rural East African hospitals.

Tim will talk about some of the technical challenges and provide some entertaining “tales from Africa” anecdotes.

The talk will start at 7:00pm, but the room will be open for coffee, tea and chat from 6:30pm. Afterwards, we usually go to The Fenton pub, across the road from OBH, for more geeky chatter.

Location:
Old Broadcasting House
148 Woodhouse Lane
Leeds
LS2 9EN

More location details on the OBH contact page or on Open Street Map.

Update: The slides from the talk are available to download here: wylug-2010-01-11.odp

For the last three years we have gone for a meal at the Spice Quarter (combination Chinese/Thai/Indian/Italian buffet restaurant). This has served us well and it seems like a good bet for this year too.

As in previous years, we’ll meet at the Victoria pub on Great George Street at 7:00pm and head over to the restaurant for 8:30pm.

If you’d like to come, please let James Holden know and he’ll keep the restaurant updated with the number expected. They have provisionally agreed to waive the requirement for a deposit but would like to know about the numbers as soon as possible.

It’s £18.95 per head for as many courses as you can manage.

For the benefit of any stragglers on the night, James’ mobile number is 07989 702968.

Robert sends cameras attached to helium weather balloons high into the stratosphere to take pictures of the Earth. An on-board computer takes pictures at timed intervals in various directions and then handles phoning home when it lands.

He’ll be talking to us about the challenges involved in designing and building these devices: GPS, HAM radio, nitrocellulose explosives and dealing with interest from the ministry of defence (they tend to notice unidentifiable devices 35,000 feet up above the Earth).

Robert will also be bringing along some of the stuff he’s launched for us to see.

The talk is open to all and starts at 7:00pm but the room will be open for coffee, tea and chat from 6:30pm. Afterwards, we usually go to The Fenton pub, across the road from OBH, for more geeky chatter.

Location

More location details on the OBH contact page or on Open Street Map the road from OBH, for more geeky chatter.

He’ll be talking about what “Digital Freedom in Education and Youth (DFEY)” is all about and how free software communities can engage with young people.

This talk will be recorded and posted online under a Creative Commons Licence.

Tim is an active member of the Manchester Free Software group and is well known at many other technical events. Having just finished his A levels, in his spare time, he enjoys dinghy sailing.

The talks starts at 7:00pm, but the room will be open for coffee, tea and chat from 6:30pm. Afterwards, we usually go to The Fenton pub, across the road from OBH, for more geeky chatter.

Location

More location details on the OBH contact page or on Open Street Map the road from OBH, for more geeky chatter.

UPDATE: Attached a LyX LaTeX and TeX expanded notes PDF.

The meeting officially starts at 7:00pm, but the room will be open for coffee, tea and chat from 6:30pm. Afterwards, we usually go to The Fenton pub, across the road from OBH, for more geeky chatter.

Location

More location details on the OBH contact page or on Open Street Map the road from OBH, for more geeky chatter.

We’re currently looking for sponsorship for food (£7.50 per head for about 15 to 20 people) if anyone would like to volunteer. Otherwise we’ll probably go for a curry at Akhbar’s afterwards. We’ll post an update here if we get sponsorship in time.

Location:

Directions:

• Open Street Map
• Google Maps

Matthew Bloch is the Managing Director of Bytemark Hosting, a geeky UK hosting company specializing in Linux and virtualisation. His commercial software experience previous to Bytemark was in PC emulation and Java VM implementations, and he continues to work on systems-level code within the company, as well as supervising its day-to-day operations. As yet he has not achieved his ambition of becoming a rock-star games programmer.

The meeting officially starts at 7:00pm, but the room will be open for coffee, tea and chat from 6:30pm. Afterwards, we usually go to The Fenton pub, across the road from OBH, for more geeky chatter.

Location

More location details on the OBH contact page or on Open Street Map

Ian will be talking about the INGOTs qualifications and, no doubt, many of the other things he does to further the goals of free software in the education arena.

The meeting officially starts at 7:00pm, but the room will be open for coffee, tea and chat from 6:00pm. Afterwards, we usually go to the Victoria pub, behind the Town Hall, for more geeky chatter.

Location

More location details on the OBH contact page or on Open Street Map