Tag Archives: UL

Oct21

Libre Office Talk in the University of Limerick

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Libre Office Talk in the University of Limerick
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.

Oct19

Hobby to Career how you get there doesn’t really matter

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Hobby to Career how you get there doesn’t really matter

I recently gave a presentation to final year students at UL and prior to me talking their lecturer had asked them for comments on topics they’d like to hear from people.  This one line stood out to me and I added it to the presentation as it really hit home for me how I’ve gotten a job from being involved in open source and something that I love.

I’ve been very fortunate in the jobs that I’ve done they’ve been enjoyable and paid well so I’ve been able to attend and participate at events in other countries which is great.  It’s opened a world that I could not have known about had I not gotten involved in open source and not gotten the bug about wanting to know more and get involved.  I know many people who work 9-5 and don’t enjoy their work or would love to be doing something else but haven’t yet found the opportunity.  Don’t lose faith or sight that it is possible to get your dream job but do realise it may not be the first or the second or any time soon after you finish college.  It is better to be working in a job and meeting people and learning about new technologies or taking part in workshops it will also benefit you in the long run.

For me being involved in Clubs and Societies in UL was one of the best things I got from college.  I made some fantastic friends and got involved on committees and councils and in many ways gave me a good heads up on things were done in the real world. From being involved in Skynet, to being on the Clubs and societies exec to being societies officer and also community officer I learnt a lot about dealing with people and how things were run. It also showed me being just a student in my class wasn’t enough for me and not if I wanted to learn about things that weren’t on the syllabus.

I just thought I’d share this with people, just because you are currently studying one area doesn’t mean you won’t end up in a completely other area.

Feb22

Ubuntu Ireland and Skynet Talks

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Ubuntu Ireland and Skynet Talks

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.