Posted in events, Skynet on 10/21/2010 10:24 am by Laura Czajkowski
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.
Posted in Personal on 10/19/2010 03:05 pm by Laura Czajkowski
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.
Posted in events, Personal, Skynet, Ubuntu on 02/22/2010 12:57 pm by Laura Czajkowski
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.
Posted in events, Personal, Skynet on 05/16/2008 01:15 pm by Laura Czajkowski
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)
Posted in events, Personal on 04/20/2008 08:12 pm by Laura Czajkowski
