tensixtyone

It’s that time of the month again, Liverpool LUG has snuck up again and it’s time for me to post the details.

Liverpool LUG Meeting
4th February 2009 @ 7:00pm
Liverpool Social Centre, 96 Bold St, Liverpool, L1

This month is a little different, thanks to the Liverpool Social Centre we have a meeting space available to use for this and future meetings.

This months talk will be given by Vladimir Jakubovskij and is regarding his recent research paper “Open Source perspective: The current situation with online music piracy and the future of free music distribution”. Vladimir will be discussing the topics in his paper at the talk. The paper will be published under the CC license at a later date.

If Vladimir is unable to give the talk for some reason or another, Then Joanne Roberts will (hopefully) have a quick talk devised on Open Street Map.

This will be our first meeting at the Liverpool Social Centre on Bold Street. Access is currently through the door next to the News From Nowhere bookshop entrance. Ring the doorbell (the small white one to the left of the main buzzer) for admittance. If you have any difficulties finding the event, please call 07530 709 263. I’ll be in Liverpool quite early to make arrangements and organise things.

Afterwards, we’ll head to a local drinking hole for a few off topic drinks and banter.

The Liverpool Social Centre is a non-profit volunteer ran operation who usually charge for their space, but they’ve offered this location on a free basis in return of support for their compute cluster. For the first month it would be good to give a small donation of £5-£10 from the group to cover costs, so if you could bring 50p or so to donate they would appreciate it. For more details about the location check the website.

Hope to see you all there

On an additional note, I’ll be there with my Tikitag reader and related software to show off my pyTikitag stack for reading the tags in Python and also to generally fool around with them.

So, I finally got round to giving a talk at LivLUG, anyone who knows me will know i’m not the best public speaker in the world and I get quite nervous at the thought. It was time to grab the bull by the horns and actually do it!

My first talk was on the usage of the Wiimote within Linux, The Wiimote are very simple Bluetooth devices that can be accessed over the standard APIs with an additional library called CWiid. This allows the device to be used as a input device or as a general I/O device.

It’s quite hard to explain it in just text alone, So i’ve put my presentation on the LivLUG wiki everyone to have a look at. I recommend you grab it and give it a try yourself.

EDIT: Yes, It’s on the wiki now, but heres the direct link.

As part of our location scouting for Liverpool LUG, Jo made a visit to Mello Mello to ask them if we could use some space in their building for hosting the LUG. The result was quite interesting.

Greg from The Art Organisation (current managers of Mello Mello) has asked if we can setup a open source computer cluster that will hopefully be open to the public and artists alike. We jumped at the chance and we’re going to be visiting tomorrow morning to do some initial scouting and investigation. One of the key requirements that Greg had was to make this completely open source and free as in beer, The TAO have little to no money.

I’ll be able to post a few more details and some photos after tomorrow’s visit.

I posted a few days ago about the creation of a adminstration list for all those who are interested in putting a helping hand into the LUG. The idea seems to have gone down well so I’ve took the next step and setup the list on our new hosting server; Ringo.

If your interested in helping out, signup for the mailing list. It’s currently on moderated signup as I want to keep an eye on who signs up, as that way I’ll know who they are and be able to prod them if they go idle. Please remember, the admin list is for LUG administration only, the banter will still remain on the main LUG list.

On a side note, I just want to bring people up to speed with what we’re able to offer as a LUG, we can offer some personal hosting, @livlug.org.uk email address and shell access. If your interested just drop a mail to sysadmin@livlug.org.uk.

As part of a new year resolution (of a sort), I’ve decided to become more involved in the Linux community and one of the big stepping stones is the local LUGs. While ManLUG is active and quite easy to attend and keep up to speed with, some of the smaller local ones have fell into decline over the last few years. I guess a major issue is that we have such a well respected LUG within a few miles, Manchester LUG has been formed since 1994 and theres people in that group who have helped with major milestones in Linux (such as the MCC Interim releases). So today, I posted on the Liverpool LUG mailing list in a attempt to stirr up some action. Hopefully in the next few days we can get something organised, even if its just a pub meet it’ll be better than nothing.