• James Rutherford — “Flash - Saviour of the Universe” 
  James is the principle at Creative Nucleus, a Newcastle based design agency. 
• Paul Calaghan — “A taste of Haskell” 
  O’Reilly has recently published a book called “Real World Haskell”. What’s the fuss about?  I’ll give a quick introduction to the key ideas of Haskell, then present some (I hope) tempting examples. 
• Danni Matzk — “Lessons learnt while running Linux on your laptop.” 
• Craig Rothwell — “Building a computer was easier in the 80’s” 
  Craig is from Newcastle and is known for his involvement in the GP32, GP2X and openPandora projects. 

The event is in the Beehive at Newcastle University and starts at 18:00. You can express your interest in attending here: 
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/1474759

Alex spoke about the various free or open source applications that companies can use in replace of some of the more recignisable business applications. You can download Alex’s slides here:

• Alex Kavanaghs F/OSS Presentation

• Ross Cooney’s CloudFront Presentation (this draws creativity from Mike Richwalskys presentation at HighEdWebTech.)

The next event was Super Mondays event was set for 26th January. As always, we are very grateful that Newcastle University have given us acess to their excellent facilities.

This month we have acces to two lecture theatres and the reception area. The space will be available for the first hour for the various user groups to meet up and run general user group meetings. Please check the message group to find out more about the various user groups.

At 7:00 we will start a group discussion where we will discuss a topic…which has not been agreed yet. If you have an opinion or topic you would like to discuss please contribute!

Please register your interest here: 
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/1321335/ 
Capacity on the night is limited to 100. 

We are looking for a sponsor to cover the cost of coffee and finger food…anybody want to put their hand in their pocket? If so please email me offlist and I will give you more information.

Excellent Networking

Our second meeting held on Monday 25th October went very well, we had over 50 attendees from various demographics (start-ups, programmers, students, academics and enthusiasts).

The event kicked off with a 45 minute networking session where copious amounts of tea and coffee were served courtesy of Paul Watson from Newcastle University. At such an early stage in the ‘Super Mondays’ concept it is important for the various attendees to get together and discuss their common interests.

Over 50 atendees!

After the pleasantries were finished we got down to the business of the evening, Language Wars. This was an opportunity for four local developers to advocate their favourite development language and discuss their relative values. The lineup was:

Mike: PHP
Lee: Ruby
Brian: TCL
Alex: Python

In his speech Mike disussed how a large community and low barriers to adoption were a major advantage of PHP. He felt that language benefits from its lack of structure and that every task can be completed in many-many different ways using a myriad of different functions and modules. Interestingly, it is this proliferation that is also a major negative as due to having no firm coding convention means that it is often hard to support other peoples code.

Lee on Ruby

Lee gave a great introduction to Ruby, its Japanese roots, early adoption in the East and migration to Western countries. Lee felt that Ruby had advantage over PHP because its code structure is very structured, leading to easily maintainable code. The advent of the Rails framework has helped to drive adoption of Ruby and it is gaining interest from mature PHP developers and perl developers. In the general discussion it was felt that while Ruby was rather processor intensive (perhaps in comparison to perl, PHP etc) it was agred that the cost benefit of rapid development and easily maintainable code was a major advantage.

Brian gave an excellent introduction to Tcl (”Tool Command Language”,  pronounced as “tickle”). Starting in 1998, the language was born out of frustration with programmers devising their own (poor quality) languages intended to be embedded into applications. It quickly gained wide acceptance on its own and is generally thought to be easy to learn  but powerful in competent hands. It is most commonly used for rapid prototyping, scripted applications, GUIs and testing.

Alex spoke on behalf of Python, a general-purpose, high-level programming language. Its design philosophy emphasizes programmer productivity and code readability. The language has an extensive use of whitespace as block delimiters which leads to programmers producing code that is often generally easy to ready and subsequently easy to maintain.

Unfortunately, the event was very friendly and cordial! Each speaker advocated the adoption of a language as a function of the needs and skills of the project…not the technology. The general consensus was that languages need to have a large community adoption for them to grow and continually evolve.

The event was closed off at around 8:00 with a quick disussion around future events and how participation on the message board is essential to help build a strong and long living community. A special thank you to Shuoling for taking photos and publishing them.

After some networking / unstructured discussion, we will convene at 6:45 for the evenings entertainment….Language Wars. The line up is: 

Mike: PHP 
Sarat: Java 
Lee: Ruby 
Alex: Python 
Tim: C# 
Brian: TCL 
Mark: JavaScript 

Each person will have five minutes to introduce their chosen language. After which we will have plenty of time to ask questions, then flame and gloat! 

Please register your interest here: 
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/1120643 
Capacity on the night is limited to 100. 

We are looking for a sponsor to cover the cost of coffee and finger food…anybody want to put their hand in their pocket? If so please email me offlist and I will give you more information.

Last night we had our first meeting at the Newcastle University Beehive Centre.

Even with the short notice we had around 20 people from the various user groups as well as some PHD students from the university in attendance. Groups represented were:

• ncl.rb Ruby
  
• Tyneside Linux Users Group 
• Amazon Web Services Group
• Refresh Newcastle
• Open Source Network
• As well as PHD students studying Distributed Computing and Security at the Uni.

( Hope I have not missed anyone out ! )

The facilities that the University are offering us are excellent (and free of charge) with 3 lecture rooms plus some communal areas for more informal sessions. The only slight downside is that there is no Internet access so we will have to rely on 3G dongles etc.

We are going to try to grow the group and see how things develop over the next few months. The target for next month is to get 40 people attending so everyone who attended needs to bring a friend :).

The consensus from last night was we want to keep the meetings informal, lightly structured with “Birds of a Feather” talks / Lightning talks and general discussions followed by a trip to the pub for the all important chat over a pint.