[YLUG] Social Tue 18th, Terrier

[Philip Morrell]

Hi all, the next social will be:

Tuesday 18th October
19:00-21:00

Yorkshire Terrier
YO1 8AS

There are also several of us intending to go to York Geek Club
tomorrow night, 8pm at The Habit, Goodramgate. I hope to see you
there. Installfest will be on the 19th/20th November.

tl;dr: Last night was very informative, with six geeks discussing a
wide range of fun stuff.

Stanford University are running three new online CS courses[1]
starting Monday, finishing Christmas: Databases (popular at YLUG),
Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. This seems to be along
the same lines as OpenCourseWare and follows on from their Stanford
Engineering Everywhere.

Contactless payments[2] on debit/credit cards were generally agreed to
be A Good Thing(TM), but people didn't care so much for it on their
phone. Contactless is designed for high volume, low value (<£15), fast
payments like bus tickets and fast food (think Oyster card). Most new
cards are coming with contactless.

Good luck to Haegin on hearing back about his phone interview for
Google. He mentioned "codility" as one of the things he used to brush
up for the interview.

One of the highlights of the night was Charlie showing off a
collection of his gadgets: $300 "trim slice" (pocket-sized desktop);
kindle DS for pdfs; chromebook with "cloud9" for coding; £100 "smart
pen" for notation. Coding licenses were discussed, with MIT preferred
over BSD for extra-free code due to readability. If bug-fix
contributions preferred, then the GPL (LGPL for library linking).

Charlie also told us of how he's managed to digitise a hoard of
information using a "snapscan" auto-fed scanner for documents, the
vortexbox distro for media ripping (in process) with MusicBrainz for
metadata. We imagined using a 3D printer to produce the little bits
and bobs for those of us who keep them "just in case" they're useful.
--
Philip Morrell

[1] http://db-class.org http://ml-class.org http://ai-class.org
[2] http://www.contactless.info
http://www.visa.co.uk/en/products/contactless.aspx
http://www.paypass.com/