WYLUG June 2010 Meeting – Social Meet

June 14th, 2010

The next WYLUG meeting is on Monday the 14th of June 2010 and will be a purely social meet.

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

April 12th 2010: Social Meet at The Fenton

April 12th, 2010

The next WYLUG meeting is on Monday the 12th of April 2010, and will be a social meet at The Fenton.

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

March 8th 2010: Developing headless web applications

March 1st, 2010

The next WYLUG meeting is on Monday the 8th of March 2010 at Old Broadcasting House.

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.

February 8th 2010: ZFS / btrfs / Petabytes on a budget

January 26th, 2010

The next WYLUG meeting is on Monday the 8th of February 2010 at Old Broadcasting House.

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.

January 11th: Open Source in East African Hospitals

January 4th, 2010

The next WYLUG meeting is on Monday the 11th of January 2010 at Old Broadcasting House.

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

December 14th: Traditional Birthday and Xmas meal

December 3rd, 2009

This month’s meeting will be the traditional birthday and Christmas meal. WYLUG will be 12 years old this month, which makes it one of the longest established LUGs in the country.

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.

Spice Quarter
Electric Press Building
Great George Street
LS2 3AD
0871 811 5151
(Entrance in in Millenium Square)

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.

November 9th: Icarus Project, high altitude automated photography

November 3rd, 2009

The next WYLUG meeting is on Monday the 9th of November at Old Broadcasting House. The is talk by Robert Harrison about his Icarus Project “high altitude ballooning and photography”.

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.

Icarus box

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

Old Broadcasting House
148 Woodhouse Lane
Leeds
LS2 9EN

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

October 12th: Engaging Young People in Technology

October 7th, 2009

The next WYLUG meeting is on Monday the 12th October at Old Broadcasting House. The talk is “Engaging Young People in Technology” by Tim Dobson from DFEY-NW.

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

Old Broadcasting House
148 Woodhouse Lane
Leeds
LS2 9EN

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

September 14th: LyX, LaTeX and TeX: Producing superior documents

September 7th, 2009

The next WYLUG meeting is on Monday the 14th September at Old Broadcasting House. The talk is “LyX, LaTeX and TeX: Producing superior documents” by John R Hudson.

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

Old Broadcasting House
148 Woodhouse Lane
Leeds
LS2 9EN

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

August 10th: The WYLUG Social – straight to the pub

August 3rd, 2009

August is traditionally the WYLUG social event, so no talks we just meet at the Victoria Hotel pub. We have “Albert’s Room” booked from 6.30pm until closing on Monday the 10th August. Everybody is welcome!

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:

Victoria Hotel
Great George St, Leeds, West Yorkshire LS1 3BB
Tel: 0113 245 1386

Directions: