Firefox

Firefox is a very popular alternative to Internet Explorer that is not only cross platform (so it works on Mac and Linux computers too) but standards compliant and far more secure.

May 2010: Law, Open-Source, Linux

No. Attending: 19 We had David Forbes giving us the main talk of the evening: Law, Open-Source, Linux. In (very) brief: David put technology into sides -the Force and the Darkside The Force covered much on bringing technology to all people. He spent some time talking about making the web accessible - with reference to a case study of a blind person. The Dark side focused on licences, copyright, and how people fall foul of these legal instruments. He covered the SCO claims around Linux needing to be licensed to them. Summed up by "Establishing provenance is a about documentation"

April 2010 – Show and Tell

Among other things....

• David S – How to build your own Geographical Information System
• John Demoed – Marble Desktop for KDE
• Bernie’s Python Animation
• Wayne’s Ubuntu Netbook Edition

March 24th 2010 Privacy and the Web

Alice told the story of privacy and the Web. In the beginning, ownership was confined to a few with most people in serfdom; then mortgages allowed people to begin to own things. In computing, one started with the mainframe where you didn’t own anything; then people got PCs which allowed them to own the hardware but not the code; Linux allowed people to own the hardware, the code and the data. With Web 2.0 you once again don’t own the hardware or the code or even your data; with the cloud you don’t own the hardware. In future IPv6 will be able to be used as ID numbers.

January 2010: 40 years of Unix

History is a useful tool for helping us find out why we do what we do today. If it we’ren’t for Unix, there’d be no GNU/Linux.

November 2009: Show and tell and Group Business

We started with a demo of Google’s ChromeOS, (built from the recently released source), by both Dick and Wayne. we saw a  machine boot up to a login screen that uses your googlemail details to get straight into a familiar Google Chrome browser. And that’s about it – for people that live on line.

October 2009: Introduction to Web Services

Lorna Mitchell gave us a introduction to ‘web services’, and some idea about how to go about consuming them using PHP as your language of choice. This was run through of the talk she’s due to give at the PHP Barcelona Conference on the 30th/31st October. She can describe it better than I can….

September 30th 2009 Show and tell

John demonstrated Xfig which provoked some interest but also dislike of the interface.

Mike talked about FreeSWITCH, a rewrite of the Asterisk code which, when combined with a billing package, can provide an alternative. Currently people are restricted to Skype and Gizmo [no longer available] as there aren’t many subscribers to open systems or gateways between the different providers.

August 2009: Introduction to Python

This month Bernard Czenkusz, of Skipole Networks gave us an introduction to the popular programming language Python

July 2009 : Show and Tell

With the abscence of a speaker/presentation we went for a ’show and tell’ session with people spending roughly 5-10 mins showing the rest of us something good!