- Bring-A-Box: 11th September 2010(Bring-A-Box Meeting)(7 days)
- Bring-A-Box: 9th October 2010(Bring-A-Box Meeting)(35 days)
- Bring-A-Box: 13th November 2010(Bring-A-Box Meeting)(70 days)
Surrey LUG Planet
The following are the blogs added by our members. If you have a blog that would be of interest to other Surrey LUG members, please add it below.
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1 hour 33 min ago
At Young Rewired State 2010, I branched away from the original idea of UniSearch and worked on GovSpark, a website that compares energy usage across government departments.
I came up with the idea because the government had just released some live and historical energy consumption data, but it was all held on the respective department websites and not central anywhere. GovSpark aims to be the central website for people to go so that they can see what the energy consumption of a certain department is at that time. The government also have targets to reduce usage by 80% by 2050, so I thought it would be a good tool to show how well one department is doing compared to another department.
The “fleshing out ideas” stage started on Tuesday, then I had a lot of help from...
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1 hour 33 min ago
From Monday 2nd August to Friday 6th August, I attended Young Rewired State 2010, an event run by Rewired State for 15-18 year old coders. The format was a bit different this year as it ran for a week and was in different places all around the country, as opposed to last year where it was for a weekend in London only.
There were centres in London, Brighton, Norwich and Manchester and two people worked remotely, one from Reading and one from Dundee. I spent the week in London at Osmosoft, the open source arm of BT. It was a bit strange to start with as no-one really knew each other. The group was: Me, Daniel, Harry, David, Dylan, Marcus and Sufian.
The London projects were:
Live London Leisure Locator by Dylan
CycleHubs by Daniel
Un-Named by Sufian...
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1 hour 33 min ago
Today saw the first Ubuntu-UK LoCo “geeknic” and in my opinion it was a great success. Around 20 people turned up to enjoy fun, food and chat in Hyde Park in London, UK and stayed for about 4 hours.
The event was co-organised by Joe O’Dell and Isabell Long and was discussed at multiple UK LoCo IRC meetings in the weeks leading up to the event. The idea behind it was for people to get together in a social setting rather than the usual geek meets which happen in stuffy rooms with everyone on a laptop and nobody actually talking to...
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33 min 58 sec ago
Seriously… Who decided how to price eBooks?
A friend at work recently recommended I read Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon. The Kindle app on android allowed me to find it quickly and download the first 3 chapters free to read – I loved it and decided I wanted to read the rest of it… However when checking the prices I was left the feeling that eBooks are just too expensive for what they are
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1 hour 34 min ago
A member of staff asked how he could open a personal XPS file, created in Windows 7. Now XPS is the Microsoft replacement for PDF and it is apparently installed as a printer by default in Vista and Windows 7, which means increasingly people are going to start sending XPS files whether we like it or not. Fortunately it seems XPS is supported in Okular under KDE4 (which we don't have yet), and can also be readily converted to PDF using the Ghostscript "gxps" tool. This has to be built from source, but proved relatively simple. As our users do not have access to the command line, I also had to also create a Konqueror service menu, to enable right-click Action "Convert XPS to PDF"....
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1 hour 34 min ago
Oh dear, it seems I failed to update my blog after the last work I did on my HTPC. Well the good news is that the programme guide is now working, it was a bit of a pain, in that you have to use the command line to create a channel listing that is then read my the guide updating process. But given that you only have to do this when your channel line-up changes, this isn't a big deal. I have updated my notes on the following page:
* http://bootpolish.net/hauppaugehvr2200
* http://bootpolish.net/hauppaugehvr2200
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1 hour 33 min ago
Tony Whitmore (@tonywhitmore) blogged about The Quest for Originality which got me thinking about the podcast that we make with @ciemon, @daviey and @lauracowen.
Over the weekend at OrgCon there was some discussion of originality. The subject was brought up when talking about the creative business, with original works being “worth” something,...
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33 min 58 sec ago
Saw this recently on the Google blog:
App Inventor is a new tool in Google Labs that makes it easy for anyone—programmers and non-programmers, professionals and students—to create mobile applications for Android-powered devices. And today, we’re extending invitations to the general public.
via Official Google Blog: App Inventor for Android.
It looks really cool, and allows really quick generation of apps via a gui interface which is powered by MIT’s Open Blocks framework which sounds like a really cool way to get children and students into programming
I can’t wait to get my invite to try it out!
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33 min 58 sec ago
Since buying an Android phone I have been starting to think about using it to read books. The screen isn’t bad, and it turns out that there is some good software out there
Aldiko is a fantastic program for reading free ePub books, so I am working my way through a few H. G. Wells books as they are now public domain and available directly through the program (along with many other free books). The software has good options for font styling, line spacing, page turning, black on white vs. white on black as well as quick shortcuts for changing the brightness.
One thing I have yet to figure out though, is buying eBooks.
Sure, there are loads of places out there that sell them, many including their own software (available for...
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33 min 58 sec ago
Finally – All that hard work has paid off and the release is available!
Fix Pack 7.0.0.1 (V7.0 Fix Pack 1) for WebSphere Message Broker v7.0 is now available.
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?&uid=swg24027267
You can see what is new in 7.0.0.1 by looking in the Information Center
- Simplicity and productivity
- User-defined patterns
- Solar Pattern Authoring sample
- Service Access from WebSphere MQ: one-way pattern
- Using a subflow as a user-defined node
- ...
