All posts by johnl

December 14th: Traditional Birthday and Xmas meal

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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:

July 13th: Matthew Bloch on virtualisation with KVM

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Everything you always wanted to know about virtualisation but were afraid to ask”. It’ll be a brief tour through the systems and networking concepts that a jobbing sysadmin ought to know before thinking about using virtualisation for the first time, and the software options available (though focussing on KVM).

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

Old Broadcasting House
148 Woodhouse Lane
Leeds
LS2 9EN

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

Monday June 8th: Ian Lynch, INGOTs qualifications

Announcements,

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

WYLUG Monthly Meeting: Monday 12th January 2009

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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

WYLUG Monthly Meeting: Monday 10th November 2008

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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

Announcements, , , ,

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).

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.

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: