headers
MJ Ray | 5 Aug 2005 00:43
Gravatar

AFFS Conference and AGM, 13 Aug 2005, London

Quoted from LUG.org.uk list:
>                AFFS ANNUAL CONFERENCE AND GENERAL MEETING
>                ==========================================
>
> (Released 3rd August, 2005, London, UK): Conference to include talks on
> free software, topical issues and an all-day exhibition.
>
> The Association for Free Software is pleased to announce its forthcoming
> annual conference is open for registration. Taking place on the 13th
> August, the conference is being hosted by the Resource Centre located in
> north London:
[...]
>         <http://www.affs.org.uk/affsac.html>
Permalink | Reply | 0 comments |
headers
MJ Ray | 15 Aug 2005 21:32
Gravatar

AFFS conference 2005

The AFFS conference and AGM took place on Saturday just gone and was
quite an interesting day. A trip to north London for a change (the
last two have been in the west midlands) and a fairly large
exhibition hall and seminar room at the Resource Centre on Holloway
Road. The venue was pretty good and could have taken many more
people and a few more stands. Are so many people on summer hols?

Ciaran O'Riordan opened a bit later than announced by describing the
good work he's been doing with the FSF Europe in Brussels and
Strasbourg, including some mad antics around the software patent
directive voting. That's not the whole story though: IPRED is still
going on and there's probably going to be more in the next year, but
it's hard to predict exactly what.

Alex Hudson brought forward his talk on Hula to cover a no-show.
Hula is a modular agent-based mail/calendar/kitchen-sink server
which might be suitable for production some time next year. Alex
showed how quick it is to install and get running and the web
interface used for configuration.

After a break and talking to some friends old and new over
lunch (finger buffet of samosas, pizzas and sandwiches), Phil
Hands explained the plan for world domination by preseeding the
debian-installer. http://svn.hands.com/d-i/ sticks in the mind.
Tim Yamin gave an introduction to Gentoo Linux and with any luck,
I'll get the recording uploaded somewhere useful soon. Recording
was a bit difficult, with a noisy aircon (which only got noisier
the one time I flipped the switch to "off" - sorry all) and
strong light from the open windows behind.
(Continue reading)

Permalink | Reply | 1 comment |
headers
MJ Ray | 16 Aug 2005 11:41
Gravatar

Re: AFFS conference 2005

> Tim Yamin gave an introduction to Gentoo Linux and with any luck,
> I'll get the recording uploaded somewhere useful soon. [...]

Thanks to Tim's fast reply, it's with his slides on
http://dev.gentoo.org/~plasmaroo/talks as ogg audio and video.
Shame about the noise, but it all helps learn the recorder's limits.

--

-- 
MJ Ray (slef), K. Lynn, England, email see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/
Permalink | Reply | 0 comments |
headers
MJ Ray | 25 Aug 2005 16:07
Gravatar

Political party conferences

We're getting into party conference season, so it's an excellent
chance to get something rolling in your preferred political group,
or at least spot trouble long before it becomes really dangerous.

Anyone know what the parties are doing? I've had a tip-off.

The agenda for the Green Party of England and Wales conference is at
http://www.greenparty.org.uk/files/conference/2005/first_agenda_autumn_2005.htm
and includes two motions on our topics:
  D34        Intellectual Property Rights
  D35        Free/Open Source Software
What can we do to help this? I tried emailing the proposer to ask,
but no reply yet.

Plaid Cymru, SNP, Liberal Democrats and Conservatives don't
seem to have full enough agendas on their websites yet to
see what they're doing. I can't see any agenda at all on
Labour's, nor even if Respect have conferences...
Any party supporters got them yet?

--

-- 
MJ Ray (slef), K. Lynn, England, email see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/
Permalink | Reply | 7 comments |
headers
Graham Seaman | 26 Aug 2005 01:17

software freedom day

The UK software freedom day pages are looking a little thin:

http://maitri.ubuntu.com/softwarefreedomday/wiki/index.php/United_Kingdom

And ideas seem to be limited to 'hand out free cds'. Surely there must 
be something else we can do...

Cheers
Graham
Permalink | Reply | 0 comments |
headers
MJ Ray | 28 Aug 2005 18:27
Gravatar

WS Free Information Infrastructures, London: 1-2 October

Rufus Pollock <rufus.pollock <at> okfn.org> wrote:
> ~ For Redistribution Far and Wide ~
> 
> On the first weekend of October (1st and 2nd) the World Summit on Free 
> Information Infrastructures (http://www.wsfii.org/) is taking place in 
> London. This event will bring together individuals and groups from 
> across the world working on projects such as free wireless networking, 
> free of copyright mapping and open hardware. A provisional programme is 
> available here:
> 
>    http://www.wsfii.org/programme.html
> 
> The event is open to all but we encourage you to register because space 
> is limited. A small entrance fee of £10 is planned to help pay for costs 
> but concessions are available. You can register via:
>    http://www.wsfii.org/register.php
Permalink | Reply | 0 comments |
headers
MJ Ray | 29 Aug 2005 15:48
Gravatar

Custom cars, enabled by free software

Keeping on the green theme, a snippet from the BBC at
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4176126.stm --

  Mr Romeo insisted on using open source. Not only was it cheaper,
  he says, but it also allowed him to better customise his product.
  "With proprietary software, innovation comes from the people in
  marketing," he says. "But with open source, innovation comes from
  the guy who is really in the market. It comes from someone who
  knows the city."

What real-world environmental uses of free software have you seen
in the UK? Have any of you seen these cool cars in Cordoba, Spain?

Now back to the vuelta...
--

-- 
MJ Ray (slef), K. Lynn, England, email see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/
Permalink | Reply | 0 comments |
headers
Alex Hudson | 30 Aug 2005 14:24

UK Linux & Open Source Awards 2005


Hi everyone.

The awards in question are closing for nominations in a few days:

	http://www.linuxawards.co.uk/content/view/15/44/

Please take the time out to go vote in the reader section, and/or put
forward a nomination to the judging panel. There are many great free
software projects out there, and it would be great to see lots of
different nominations.

Also, feel free to forward this request to your local LUG/whoever if
you've not seen posts about these awards.

Thanks!

Alex.
Permalink | Reply | 0 comments |

Gmane