Yearly archives: 2011


Open Source, Open Minds: Using web technologies to rescue geospatial data from the back office – London 03/11/11 1

The Open Source Specialist Group (OSSG) and the Geospatial Specialist Group on Thursday 3rd November 2011 from 1700 hours at the BCS Central London Offices, First Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London WC2E 7HA will be holding an event on Open Source, Open Minds: Using web technologies to rescue geospatial data from the back office.

To register for this event please visit http://geospatial.bcs.org/web/?q=node/84. This bookable event is free and open to all with buffet and refreshments.

Blue Fox Technology designs and develops hosted web applications for mapping and provides a comprehensive range of cartographic and GIS services. The company was started in 1999 and its clients have included Experian, The National Trust, the RHS and various Local Authorities and Government Agencies. Opus is the company’s leading software product for publishing and managing interactive mapping and documents online. David is a Director of Blue Fox and is responsible for
converting business and sales opportunities into projects that pay the bills.

JDi Solutions designs and develops hosted web applications in support of e-Government priority outcomes for Local Government. Their e-Consultation system is used by 25 Local Authorities and was instrumental in helping South Cambridgeshire District Council complete its ambitious LDF programme, processing 33 consultation documents over 5 consultations stages in the space of 2 years. Tom is Technical Director at JDi Solutions and is responsible for turning technical ideas and functions into generic software packages that support a client’s business objectives.

Blue Fox and JDi Solutions are passionate about open source technologies and in producing software that is accessible, easy to use and rich in features and functions. The companies have come together to create a collaborative development team tasked with improving and extending its range of hosted software packages. These include a new Document System for authoring and managing documents for web and print-based publication and a Print on Demand system for web-based mapping that allows users to print maps at the scale, size and pagination they want.


Open Source knowledge/skills gaps across HM Government Part 3: Discuss the skills required to do open source Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) – London 31/10/11 1

This is the 3rd of several planned events being hosted by the Open Source Specialist Group (OSSG) that considers Open Source knowledge/skills gaps across HM Government with a Panel of Open Source Software suppliers. Part 3: Discuss the skills required to do open source enterprise resource planning (ERP) will be held at the BCS Central London Offices, First Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London WC2E 7HA (http://www.bcs.org/upload/pdf/london-office-guide.pdf) on Monday 31st October 2011, from 1800 to 2100 hours.

This bookable event is free and open to all with buffet and refreshments. To book a place to attend please contact Mark Elkins via mark_elkins@bcs.org

The format will be a question time, where the panel will be asked a question after which the audience will be invited to participate.

Rationale for this event

With many private and public startup companies emerging from public sector reorganisations, for instance in primary healthcare, there is a need to quickly automate administrative functions to keep costs to a minimum. Enterprise Resource Planning systems don’t just produce accounts, the provide agile front and back office processes required by most organisations. The panel will comprise platforms and partner companies from the open source ERP market invited companies support OpenERP, OpenBravo, OpenTAPS, Mamut, SQLLedger.

Panel

Chair Mark Elkins, OSSG

Michael Judd, Akuna Ltd

Alberto Lobrano, CEO of Integrating web srl. Partners of Opentaps for europe and middle east.

Eckhard Schwarzat, ValueDecision Ltd

Malcolm Newbury of Guildfoss will give an overview of the Questions (set out below) to be considered by a Panel of Open Source Software suppliers and the assembled audience.

Questions

1. Introduction : Who are you, company, platform, features?

2. Typical jobs: What does a typical sales, delivery, maintenance process look like?

3. Skills: What are the typical profiles of users/developers?

4. Sourcing/Training: What’s on offer, what is the market like?


Open Source Software Meets Open Source Hardware: OpenCores and the OpenRISC 1000 architecture – London 17/10/11 1

Jeremy Bennett of http://www.embecosm.com/ will give a presentation on Open Source Software Meets Open Source Hardware: OpenCores and the OpenRISC 1000 architecture for The BCS Open Source Specialist Group (OSSG) at the BCS Central London Offices, First Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London WC2E 7HA (http://www.bcs.org/upload/pdf/london-office-guide.pdf) on Monday 17th October 2011, from 1830 to 2100 hours.

This bookable event is free and open to all with buffet and refreshments. To book a place to attend please email Mark Elkins at mark_elkins@bcs.org

OpenRISC was conceived in 1999 as a project to specify a RISC processor architecture and hardware implementations that were entirely open source.

The OpenRISC 1200 was the first implementation of that architecture. It has been in use for around a decade and is powerful enough to run Linux. Now on its third revision, the processor is widely used in research projects, and has also been used in a number of commercial products.

The project has spawned a host of peripheral hardware components, so that several complete systems-on-chip are now available. All are open source and hosted on www.opencores.org.

Any modern chip relies heavily on software. Tools to design the chip, software tool chains for programs to run on the chip and operating system infrastructure. For OpenRISC, nearly all that has also been achieved using open source software.

This talk will introduce the OpenRISC 1000 project, focussing particularly on the role of open source software. Involving hardware leads to some interesting open source licensing problems, which will be addressed in the presentation.

The final part of the talk will be a practical demonstration of OpenRISC in action, using both hardware and the architectural simulator. All the software will be available on DVD and attendees with Linux laptops are invited to join in the practical part.

Timetable

18:30 Buffet and refreshments

19:00 Introduction to OpenRISC 1000

20:00 Break (Buffet and refreshments continued) and opportunity to install the OpenRISC simulator
and tool chain.

20:20 Demonstration of the OpenRISC 1000 in use.


UKUUG & O’Reilly: Intermediate Perl/Advanced Perl – London 21/02/12 to 24/02/12

UKUUG & O’Reilly presents:

Intermediate Perl – 21st & 22nd February 2012

Advanced Perl – 23rd & 24th February 2012

Imperial Hotel, Russell Square, London WC1B 5BB

2 day Intermediate Perl (including practical sessions)

NOTE: All delegates will need to bring a laptop with a recent version of Perl
installed.

Description: This course is aimed at people who have written a little Perl and
who want to add another dimension to their Perl knowledge. This will take you
from being “someone who uses Perl” to a “Perl programmer”.

Course Outline:
* Types of variable * Strict and warnings * References * Sorting
* Reusable code * Object orientation * Testing * Dates & times
* Templates * Databases * Further information

2 day Advanced Perl (including practical sessions)

NOTE: All delegates will need to bring a laptop with a recent version of Perl
installed.

Description: This course is aimed at people who have a lot of experience of
Perl but who might not have had the time to keep up to date with the latest
Perl techniques. This course teaches the latest techniques being used by the
world’s best Perl programmers. This is the knowledge that will enable you to
describe yourself as a “Perl expert”.

Course Outline:
* The latest versions of Perl * Advanced testing * DBIx::Class
* Handling exceptions * Profiling & benchmarking * Dancer and Catalyst
* Object Oriented programming with Moose * Web development with Plack

Tutor: Dave Cross is the owner of Magnum Solutions Ltd, an Open Source
consultancy company based in London. In 1998 he started london.pm which has
grown to be one of the largest Perl Mongers groups in the world. He nominally
led the group until September 2001. Between August 2002 and June 2006 he was
the Perl Mongers User Groups Co-ordinator for the Perl Foundation. Dave is a
regular speaker at Perl and Open Source conferences and is often invited to
present tutorials alongside the main conference. He is the author of “Data
Munging with Perl” (Manning, 2001) and a co-author of “Perl Template Toolkit”
(O’Reilly, 2003). Dave lives in SW London. The rumours about gold-plated cats
were never true.

Visit the UKUUG web site at: www.flossuk.org/perl2012 for delegate costs and
on-line booking

Places are limited – early booking is essential
Early-bird rates available until 6th January 2012


OSSG AGM 2011 – London 17/10/11

The Annual General Meeting (AGM) of the Open Source Specialist Group (OSSG) will be held on Monday 17th October 2011 from 1830 hours at the BCS Central London Offices, First Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London WC2E 7HA.

The procedure governing the AGM is set out in the OSSG Constitution at https://ossg.bcs.org/wp-content/uploads/2006/06/OpenSourceConstitutionFinal.pdf

An event on  Open Source Software Meets Open Source Hardware: OpenCores and the OpenRISC 1000 architecture is due to commence immediately after the business of the AGM has been concluded.

Free buffet and refreshments available.

For further information please contact Cornelia Boldyreff, OSSG Secretary via secretary@ossg.bcs.org


UKUUG & O’Reilly – ‘Intensive Introduction to Google App Engine with Python’ Tutorial / Training Day – London 12/04/12

Thursday 12th April 2012

Imperial Hotel, Russell Square, London WC1B 5BB

Intensive Introduction to Google App  Engine with Python’ Tutorial / Training Day

Prerequisites:

Course attendees should have prior experience with Python, Web Development (HTML, CSS, JavaScript), and RDBMS technologies.

Course Content:

Review of the Python you need for App Engine
Preparing your computer for App Engine development
Building a Real World App Engine webapp
Understanding the webapps requirements
Working with App Engine’s web application framework (webapp)
Defining your webapps data model
Building your webapps user interface with templates
Tying your webapp together with code
Deploying your webapp to the cloud
Updating your webapp with new features
Outgrowing webapp and scaling your app
A lightning review of the App Engine framework landscape
Advanced App Engine features
Wrap-up

Tutor biography: Paul Barry lectures at The Institute of Technology, Carlow in Ireland, where he has taught for 15 years on topics such as cloud computing, web development, network programming, scripting technologies, Linux and systems management.

Prior to joining the academic world, Paul spent a decade in industry in software development and IT management roles, both in Ireland and in Canada. Paul has an M.Sc. in Computing. He is author (or co-author) of four books: two on Perl (for Wiley) and two on Python (for O’Reilly).

Paul’s latest book, part of the popular Head First Series from O’Reilly Media, is Head First Python (published in November 2010). Paul has been writing for Linux journal since 2000 and has been a Contributing Editor with the magazine since 2005. Find out more about Paul at his website: http://paulbarry.itcarlow.ie

See http://www.ukuug.org/events/Googleapp/ for on-line booking form


Investigating Open Approaches to Education and Training in the Public Sector – London 30/06/11 1

The BCS Open Source Specialist Group (OSSG) and TDM Open Source Services Investigate Open Approaches to Education and Training in the Public Sector at the BCS Central London Offices, First Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London WC2E 7HA (http://www.bcs.org/upload/pdf/london-office-guide.pdf) on Thursday 30th June 2011, from 1730 to 2100 hours.

This bookable event is free and open to all with buffet and refreshments. To book a place to attend please email Mark Elkins at mark_elkins@bcs.org

Full details of this event are set out at the event website: http://www.opentothepublic.org.uk/programme

In the contexts of freedom of expression and democratic culture, and in the context of the UK Government ICT strategy, is it increasingly relevant for all public sector employees to investigate open source software and open data standards?

Many think it is – and that it is also increasingly important to collaboratively build Open Educational Resources and other Open Content Approaches.

Addressing the UK Parliament in Westminster Hall on 25th May 2011, President of the United States, Barack Obama said:

“In an era defined by the rapid flow of commerce and information, it is our free market tradition, our openness, fortified by our commitment to basic security for our citizens, that offers the best chance of prosperity that is both strong and shared.”

Open to the public is proudly brought to you by BCS Open Source Specialist Group and TDM Open Source Services in order to explore the concept that the openness valued by Obama must be applied to the ways we deal with – and exchange ideas and innovations between – software source code, data standards adoption and educational resources.

This event brings together leading thinkers and practitioners from the world of open educational software in the UK. We will discuss a range of open approaches: not just the source code and data formats, but also open approaches to educational content production and resource sharing.

Time Session Speaker
17.30 – 18.00 Arrival, drinks, buffet and networking
18.00 – 18.10 Welcome Address and Topic/Programme Overview Derrin Kent
TDM
18.10 – 18.40 Open Data Standards for Education and Training Simon Grant
JISC CETIS
18.40 – 19.10 Open Source Software for Education and Training Miles Berry
Roehampton University and Open Source Schools
19.10 – 19.30 Refreshments
19.30 – 20.00 Open Content Approaches for Education and Training Ian Lynch
The Learning Machine and INGOTs
20.00 – 20.30 Large Scale Implementation Case Study – Open Source Software for Education Roger Emery
Southampton Solent University
20.30 – 21.00 Round Table Question and Answer Discussion
21.00 Close and Networking