WYLUG

Monday June 8th: Ian Lynch, INGOTs qualifications

johnl — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 11:23:26 +0000

This month’s talk will be given by Ian Lynch. You may remember that Ian gave us a talk on OpenOffice.org a couple of years ago when he was education lead on the OOo project. Ian is director of new business development at The Learning Machine Ltd (TLM). TLM is an Awarding Body Accredited by Ofqual, DELLS and CCEA, the regulators for qualifications in England Wales and Northern Ireland. TLM is responsible for developing and managing a new and innovative family of qualifications called The INGOTs (International Grades - Open Technologies).

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

Old Broadcasting House
148 Woodhouse Lane
Leeds
LS2 9EN

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

Monday May 11th: Change of speaker, Smylers on “When MYSQL bites”

tomh — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 20:33:35 +0000

Chris Street is unwell today so Smylers has agreed to bring forward his talk from next month to this month.

When MySQL Bites: Quirks to Watch Out For

MySQL is a very popular DBMS. Or rather, it’s very widely used, which is not necessarily the same thing. It has quite a few quirks, behaviour that many people wouldn’t expect and which if you aren’t aware of can be the cause of much frustration, pain, and data loss.

In the hope that more people being aware of these infelicities will reduce the damage they can do, a collection of them is presented here, along with tips and techniques for dealing with them.

There’s also an examination of why so often the MySQL feature is tantalizingly only available in one version higher than the one you’re running.

For those that dont know, Smylers was a founding member of Wylug, and after a period exiled to London returned to Leeds last year when he persuaded his employer to invent a position for him. So he’s now Hosting Analyst for web hosting and domain names provider Webfusion — a job title so vague he
pretty much gets to make it up as he goes along. Previously he was Head of Perl Training at GBdirect, where he taught Perl to Yahoo!, Microsoft, Sony, and the Nationwide building society among others, and was the lead developer for top UK IT news website ‘The Register’.

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

Old Broadcasting House
148 Woodhouse Lane
Leeds
LS2 9EN

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

Monday 6th April 2009 (NOT THE SECOND MONDAY OF THE MONTH AS USUAL): Andy Davidson - “Dynamic Routing with Open Source tools”

tomh — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 13:50:27 +0000

The next talk is Mon 6th April, Andy Davidson on “Dynamic Routing with Open Source tools”.

THIS IS NOT THE USUAL SECOND MONDAY OF THE MONTH AND NOT THE USUAL ROOM, ROOM G05 IS OURS FROM 6-8.30

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

Old Broadcasting House
148 Woodhouse Lane
Leeds
LS2 9EN

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

Monday 9th March 2009: Talk on HTML5 by Dave Fisher

tomh — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 22:50:35 +0000

HTML 5 - What’s New, Why It Matters, And What You Can Do With It
==============================

==================================
1 New elements and attributes
2 Modified elements and attributes
3 Deprecated elements and attributes
4 Images and multimedia elements
* figure, audio, video and embed
5 Scripting
* Canvas and GUI scripting
* More support for web-apps
* Detailed DOM spec
6 Forms
* New controls
* Scripting support
7 Prescriptive browser behaviour
* Error handling, including invalid content
* Non-XML serialisation
* Rendering consistency

Dave’s last talk was superb and I am glad he has agreed to come back
so soon to do another.

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

Old Broadcasting House
148 Woodhouse Lane
Leeds
LS2 9EN

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

Monday Feb 9th - pfSense, a freeBSD based firewall distro

tomh — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 11:52:08 +0000

The talk is by Rob Goodair and is on pfSense, a very cool freeBSD firewall distro.

The meeting is on Monday 9th Feb and 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

Old Broadcasting House
148 Woodhouse Lane
Leeds
LS2 9EN

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

WYLUG Monthly Meeting: Monday 12th January 2009

johnl — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 13:17:15 +0000

The first meeting of 2009 is also the first meeting at our new venue, Old Broadcasting House

The meeting is on Monday 12th January and 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.

The talk is still to be confirmed.

Location

Old Broadcasting House
148 Woodhouse Lane
Leeds
LS2 9EN

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

Social Meet on Dec 8th, New Venue From Jan

tomh — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 09:17:34 +0000

Spice Quarter:

The next meet will be a purely social one, meet in the Vic on Great
George St from 7 then head over to Spice Quarter for 8.30
http://www.spicequarter.co.uk/leeds/leeds.html
Electric Press Building - Great George Street - Leeds City Centre -
LS2 3AD - 0871 811 5151

New Venue:
We will no longer be using the university from Jan, I want to thank
Mark from all of us for his assistance with the venue for so long.
The new venue is provided by NTI at Old Broadcasting house, they will
kindly be providing refreshments also.
NTI are the “Northern Technology Institute” and are part of Leeds
Metropolitan University’s Innovation North faculty.

From their about page:
“We provide digital and multimedia training courses but we’re more than
just a training centre. We believe in fostering innovation through
training, collaboration and shared ideas. And as part of the university
we also want to build skills in the region and act as a networking hub
for new and established talent.”

You may have been to a few events there (Barcamp Leeds, Opencoffee for
instance) and it is a great venue

http://www.ntileeds.co.uk/about/
http://www.ntileeds.co.uk/old-broadcasting-house/
http://www.ntileeds.co.uk/find-us/

WYLUG Monthly Meeting: Monday 10th November 2008

johnl — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 16:16:13 +0000

Our next meeting will be on Monday 10th November 2008 in Leeds University’s EC Stoner Building.

This month we have two related talks. First up is Paul Brook on RAID in Linux: What RAID is, what it gives you and how it is implemented in the Linux kernel.

Moving up the stack a little, John Leach on LVM: Virtualise your storage on Linux: What LVM can do, how it does it and how to use it.

The meeting room is sign-posted from the main EC Stoner Building entrance (level 7, the side facing the Parkinson Tower).

The meeting officially starts at 7:00pm, but the room will be open for coffee, tea, biscuits and chat from 6:30pm. Afterwards, we usually go to the Victoria pub, behind the Town Hall, for geeky chatter.

Location:

Active Learning Lab., (Level 9, near staircase 2)
EC Stoner Building (aka Physics/Admin)
University of Leeds
Woodhouse Lane
Leeds UK
LS2 9JT

Directions:

Tell others you’re going with the upcoming event page for this event.

WYLUG Monthly Meeting: Monday 13th October 2008

johnl — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 16:22:15 +0000

Our next meeting will be on Monday 13th October 2008 in Leeds University’s EC Stoner Building.

The meeting room is sign-posted from the main EC Stoner Building entrance (level 7, the side facing the Parkinson Tower).

Talk: Dave Fisher on Why Internet Explorer Breaks Everything … and How To Fix It

Every web developer or designer knows that cross-browser design can be tricky.

A minority know that it’s IE’s fault, because they’ve seen that standards-based designs work identically, and non-standard designs break similarly, in non-IE browsers.

A much smaller number of people know precisely why IE breaks things, and even fewer know how to fix them in a consistent and reliable way.

This talk will explain the three underlying causes beneath scores (possibly hundreds) of apparently different IE rendering ‘bugs’:

1. The non-standard ‘Box Model’
2. Floats that aren’t really Floats
3. The proprietary hasLayout property

The primary purpose of the talk is to use an understanding of these IE ‘features’ to outline a comparatively simple set of procedures for building robust page layouts that don’t need constant tweeking to accommodate new and alternative browsers.

If time permits, the talk will also cover a small number of unique bugs and version-specific gotchas which are not caused by IE’s big three underlying design flaws … including CSS hacks which can and can’t be relied upon.

Location:

Active Learning Lab., (Level 9, near staircase 2)
EC Stoner Building (aka Physics/Admin)
University of Leeds
Woodhouse Lane
Leeds UK
LS2 9JT

Directions:

WYLUG Monthly Meeting: Monday 14 July 2008

admin — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 13:19:51 +0000

Our next meeting will be on Monday 14 July 2008 in Leeds University’s Stoner Building.

The meeting room is sign-posted from the main EC Stoner Building entrance.

The meeting officially starts at 7.00pm, but the room will be open for coffee, tea, biscuits and chat from 6.30pm.

Talk: Linux - Is it ready for work?

Linux has moved forward in great leaps over the last two or three
years regarding user friendliness. Installation is easy and the range
of applications designed to enhance business processes has grown
rapidly in quantity and quality.
Mike Goodman will introduce how Linux is being used in micro businesses
currently, which applications are most popular in his experience, and
lead a discussion on how we can go on to encourage further use in this
sector.

Location:

Active Learning Lab., (Level 9, near staircase 2)
E.C. Stoner Building (aka Physics/Admin)
University of Leeds
Woodhouse Lane
Leeds UK
LS2 9JT

Directions: