Coding Freedom review

A review of Gabriella Coleman's book Coding Freedom is available in PDF format.

IT Stuff: 4th April 2013

The bulk of the show is based around an interview Brian did at a RepRap workshop in Hebden Bridge recently. Links from the feature:

• http://reprap.org
• http://www.openscad.org/
• http://tvrrug.org.uk/

The rest is news, and a couple of articles about on-line security, 'cyber' this and that, fake sites and the such like.

• http://www.actionfraud.police.uk/

March 18th 2013 Show and tell

We had an impromptu Show and Tell this month. Alice explained how the classical approach to scaling websites was no longer appropriate for websites serving many pages. The time taken to generate material from a database, render it and despatch it was typically 6-800ms. You could reduce the load where many of the requests were for the same data by adding a cache or squid proxy. But this could create further problems keeping the cache or proxy up-to-date.

Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi was the unexpected success story of 2012. Designed by a team led by Eben Upton, who as a tutor at Cambridge had become concerned about the poor computing skills of university applicants, and including David Braben, a veteran computer game designer, this credit card sized computer aims to put the fun back into computing.

Mobile web strategy

With mobile becoming more and more important in internet-based outreach, it's good to think about your mobile web strategy. You are recommended to build websites capable of display on desktop, tablet and mobile devices; we call this responsive design, a design which responds to the size and capabilities of the screen being used.

IT Stuff: 7th March 2013

In the March 2013 edition of IT Stuff: David C talks briefly about technology and some projects he is involved in. http://cyclebradford.org.uk/ http://www.recordclub.org.uk/ News City Wifi in City Park http://www.thetelegraphandargus.co.uk/news/local/localbrad/10266125.Free_Wi_Fi_is_launched_in_Bradford/ EU fines Microsoft again over Browser Ballot http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21684329 Office 2013 locked to a single PC? Since the recording they have climbed down! Damn them! http://www.engadget.com/2013/03/06/microsoft-office-2013-license-transferable/ Credit: Brian Apple developers afflicted by malware http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/19/us-apple-hackers-idUSBRE91I10920130219 Credit: Brian

February 18th 2013 memtest86+, FabLab, BCB and SUSE

David S introduced memtest86+ which can diagnose faulty RAM which may cause random crashes, the storage of faulty data, incorrect checksums and a range of inconsistent errors.

GIMP: the FOSS Photoshop

GIMP, or the GNU Image Manipulation Program, is the FOSS alternative to Photoshop.

LyX: the document processor

Most voluntary organisations do not need to produce high quality reports, papers or even books but, for those who do, the best software for the past twenty years has been the free software LaTeX, particularly if their reports or papers need to have references, indexes, formulae or high quality images.

Web developments: time to update?

The arrival of Windows 8 RT in tablets and on mobile ’phones on October 26th and the announcement that Orange and T-Mobile have been given the go-ahead to offer 4G mobile ’phones raises the premium on HTML5.