Czajkowski » Skynet

Libre Office Talk in the University of Limerick

Laura Czajkowski — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 10:24:15 +0000

As I’ve mentioned before I’m a member of Skynet our college society and we like to run talks. We try to get speakers in with different topics to engage people with and also a chance for students to meet speaker they may not have the chance to meet.

This month we will be hosting a talk “LibreOffice, a fresh start” given by Caolán McNamara of the Document Foundation, starting at 6:30 Tuesday the 26th of October. Why not come along and learn more about Libre Office and how well the fork of Open Office has been received by Oracle. After the talk stay around for some refreshments and meet fellow members of Skynet.

Caolan is one of the founding members of Skynet. He attended theUniversity of Limerick studying Computer Engineering and was one of the first skynet/ compsoc members. During his years, he wrote several apps, one of his most renowned being: mswordview/libwv a converter/import library for MSWord documents, as used by e.g Abiword.

In 2000, he joined Sun Hamburg to work on StarOffice just before OpenOffice.org was announced, working as a Microsoft Word import/export and related formats engineer. Caolan then transferred to Sun Dublin in 2001, and continued as a StarOffice/OpenOffice.org engineer.

He joined Red Hat Inc, in 2004 as Desktop Engineer in charge of OpenOffice.org and related technologies. He is a member of the Steering Committee for the Document Foundation and has over 10 years of experience developing for OpenOffice.org

You can find more Information on Libre Office on http://www.documentfoundation.org/

See you there Tuesday 26th October 6:30pm in the Students’ Union Room 3 everyone is welcome, so bring along a friend ! You don’t have to be a member of Skynet or a student in UL to attend.

Ubuntu Ireland talks in Limerick

Laura Czajkowski — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 13:12:25 +0000

I had a pretty amazing weekend down home last weekend. I was asked back to give a talk as part of a weekend of talks that took place at my old University. It was a great honour and rather amusing at the same time. Years ago I had set up the Skynet talks, where you’d invite a Skynet member back and members of the Industry.

Friday night kicked off in the stables, a flash back from my college days. We have two pubs on campus and a small bar. Walking into the Stables bar it was a flash back to the 90′s music. All of the cheesy head wrecking songs that you know once your heard them the lyrics were going to be in your head for the night.

Clearly my age showed as I couldn’t hear myself and moved out to the courtyard to have conversations, albeit it was a bit chilly I could hear the music and have a conversations so worked out better.

Saturday morning, I was up in time to go into the Market for breakfast and collected Matt Zimmerman who kindly agreed to come over and take part in the days talks. After a cup of tea in the what looked to be someones kitchen and listening to a Trad Session at 11am we were fed and set up for the day headed to UL for the talks.

“Talk 1″ - Paul O’Connor
“Google Summer of Code” - Jimmy O’Regan
“So you want to build a Hackerspace” - Jeffrey Roe
“Ubuntu Inside Out” - Matt Zimmerman
“To Ubuntu and Beyond – Where individual participation can take you” - Laura Czajkowski
“An introduction to CouchDB” - David Coallier

This time I was a little less nervous talking, but not by much! I gave a similar talk to the one last month but this time was a bit slower and updated slides as I knew the target audience had a clue about Ubuntu and Open Source.

Matt gave his talk with such ease and clarity and it was very enjoyable. All of the talks during the day were interesting and nice to bring people together. they covered a range of topics so there was something there for most people. Students came from Cork, Dublin and Galway so that was great that it wasn’t just one college having these talks. It was a nice way to spend an afternoon. David and his entertaining ways gave his talk on CouchDB, and very nicely obliged to get us to the pub for the last half of the Ireland V England Rugby game.

It was great to be back again and I had a lovely weekend. glad I gave the talk, and I believe it was recorded and will be up at some point. Here are the slides at least.

Ubuntu Ireland and Skynet Talks

Laura Czajkowski — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 12:57:43 +0000

Many many moons ago when I was in college and involved in Skynet, I set up the Skynet talks. The idea behind them was Limerick was not Dublin. Dublin had all these big companies and developers up here and we should meet these people and hear what they are doing, also we should invite back past members of Skynet and see what they are up to.

This year I’m being invited back. I’m going to do the same titled talk I gave to the MSc students in DIT- To Ubuntu and Beyond where Individual participation can take you, but with different content, so I need to work on that this week. Also Mat Zimmerman has been asked over so looking forward to hearing him talk. Skynet have also nicely asked a few other speakers to come along and make an afternoon of it.

Everyone is welcome to come along and we’ve created a wiki page for the event.

Catch up, chat up and keep up

Laura Czajkowski — Fri, 16 May 2008 13:15:10 +0000

That’s what I am at this weekend. Heading to Limerick to the SKynet awards. Should be fun to see some old mates there. Each year skynet runs a internal award system for best society person and best admin within the society for work done for Skynet. This in turn leads to an award night with some nibbles, drinks and this time some talks.

In 2006 Alan Cox came over, presented a talk and then Daniel Nagle and John Madden were presented with their awards for Best society person and best admin. Fun night was had with sitting outside Moll Darbys (flash site) till all hours and then onto Dolans. Oh and I won last year, we just didn’t get to go on the beer!

This year the following is the time table of the event.

Starts off at 2pm in the Students Union, Room 3 (Upstairs, beside the common room) Mel Gorman will be giving a talk on: “Maintaining
Performance of Software with a Basic Awareness of Hardware”.

After that (at 3:00pm) Christian van den Bosch (m1, composer of one of the Skynet Game clue’s) will be giving his talk on Retro cryptography.

Next (3:40pm) Sean Blanchfield (DemonWare) will be giving a talk on: A technical history of DemonWare.

4:30pm Quiz in the Students Union Common room.

6:00pm Award ceremony for Quiz winners, Society Person and Admin of the year.

6:30pm Then into Java’s (formerly the Scholars)

Photos Online – pix.ie

Laura Czajkowski — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 20:44:07 +0000

So I first tried out pix.ie months ago and at the time there were a few glitches but they are all sorted now and it’s nice to use ( Kudos Marcus ). I used to use my Skynet account and still do for photos I need to share privately, but for ones that anyone wants to have a gander at, and share out to my mates who like things in a nice pretty easy to view format with folders so they can copy and leave comments and also they can log into so that they can see actually what actually happens on my strange but exciting nights out! Trust me! I need a camera to actually prove things happened, and also cringe at!

So now all my photos are going to be on pix.ie