We’ll be in Mr Foleys on The Headrow, Leeds from 7pm onwards.

Feel free to bring your Linux problems and issues down for the experts to take a look at (laptops only, of course).

If you’re new to Linux and want a little hand-holding, do come along, or if you just fancy a bit of geeky chat there’s always lively debate on a range of geek and non-geek subjects.

Mr Foleys

This months meeting will be on the 12th of July at Old Broadcasting House in Leeds.

Tim Nash will be giving a talk on pre-emptively scaling systems based on predicted demand.

Whenever a big humanitarian crisis occurs, major non government organisations and charities put out appeals for money, to provide aid to those in need.

Sadly not all attract the media or publics attention, in an age where a single tweet can bring in thousands of visitors these organisations donation system have to be able to handle strain of massive peaks in traffic as you would expect when the requirement of high performance, high availability is out there Linux based systems can be found.

Tim is going to discuss his recent work with the United Nations World Food Program, in delivering a high scalable system and looks how you can preempt and prepare for spikes in traffic using similar methods to track tsunamis. Ultimately allowing agencies to ratchet up their donation platforms a head of major surges in donations and then reduce down the needed nodes when the public has forgotten and the real work has started.

Tim is a “stuff consultant” currently working with the United Nations World Food Program to help deliver a donation system distributed across the internet, through a REST based API sitting on Linux (Debian), Nginx, PHP/Ruby infrastructure.

The talk will begin at 7:00pm, with the doors opening from 6:30pm for coffee and chat.

After the talk, we will move to Mr Foley’s on the Headrow for beer and geeky chatter. No formal booking has been made, but if the back room is available, then it would make sense to congregate in there.

Links/directions:

• Old Broadcasting House
• Mr Foley’s

We’ll be in The Fenton on Woodhouse Lane, Leeds from 7pm onwards.

This month, it’d be great to kick off some discussion of any potential talks people may be considering, or whether anyone they know may be amenable to speaking. Ideas and requests for talks are always welcome too.

Feel free to bring your Linux problems and issues down for the experts to take a look at (laptops only, of course).

If you’re new to Linux and want a little hand-holding, do come along, or if you just fancy a bit of geeky chat there’s always lively debate on a range of geek and non-geek subjects.

The Fenton, on Google Maps

Whilst there’s no offical start time, people will probably start to gather at around 7:00pm to 8:00pm.

If people want to bring laptops or have any Linux related problems they’d like some advice on, there should be knowledgeable folks on hand to help!

Location:
The Fenton
161 Woodhouse Lane
Leeds
LS2 3ED

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.