December 16th 2013 Answers to the Quiz

Here are the answers to the quiz:

Which database? MariaDB or MySQL?

The MySQL database was one of the most successful free software projects of the 1990s; it became an indispensable part of many websites as the Internet grew not least because it became cross-platform over fifteen years ago. Today it provides the storage for many content management systems such as WordPress, Joomla and Drupal.

December 16th 2013 FOSS, IP, IXLeeds and much more

IT Stuff: 21st November 2013

• Console Wars - discussion about the PS4, XBone, and Steam OS
• Passwords - big companies have been hacked again and passwords exposed. What do the IT Stuff presenters think about all this password nonesense?
• News, including, YouTube, selfies, quantum computing, and does your laptop smell of cat wee - it may not be your cat's fault.

November 18th 2013 logstash, money and SlackBuilds

Alice introduced logstash, a tool for managing logs, parsing them and storing the results for later use, in their case to produce graphs using graphite; logstash has good documentation. In response to a question, she also mentioned using splunk to find errors in logs.

Life after XP

After twelve and a half years, most of them as the most popular operating system in the world, Microsoft will be pulling the plug on Windows XP on 8 April 2014. There will be no more security updates, leaving those users who choose to connect to the Internet vulnerable. Though anti-virus programs will continue to work, they will not protect users from any security holes that cybercriminals discover and which Microsoft will no longer close through their monthly security updates.

Stanbury Hill Project

Back when the world was younger, there used to be a saying: ‘A Yorkshireman is a Scotsman with the generosity taken away.’ Offensive sayings like that are thankfully rarer these days, but that one may have had a grain of truth. There's still a cultural reluctance, here in the West Riding, to spend hard-won cash on overheads like IT that benefit far-away corporations, particularly when one is volunteering one's own services for free to a community project.

GnuCash

If they use software for their accounts, many voluntary organisations will start off with a spreadsheet. These are perfectly adequate for many small organisations; my sister in law manages their church accounts entirely in a spreadsheet.

October 21st 2013 Ogg Camp, Libertree and snooping (again)

Brian described his experiences at the Liverpool Ogg Camp from which he had just returned. His choice of accommodation in the Youth Hostel had not proved entirely satisfactory. Open Street Map had worked well and got him to the University Arts Building; most of the arranged speakers were not very interesting but reps from Canonical and Mozilla were there to show off Ubuntu Touch and Mozilla OS. He had met Graham Morrison from LinuxFormat and Ben Nuttall who organises the Manchester Raspberry Jam.

September 16th 2013 Fifth Birthday, snooping and wearable technology

After we had cut the cake John H did a quick resumé of the events of the past year.