Workshop mentioned in the Irish Times

It’s always nice to get retweeted on Twitter, we get a strange thrill from seeing the stats from the website, and we absolutely love chatting to people in IRC. But nothing really beats getting mentioned in the national press.

A couple of days ago we were mentioned in an article by John Holden, of the Irish Times, as part of his review of events on offer for Science Week. You can read it here. It was our Building It event that caught his attention. A day-long workshop taking you right through from designing, to building an electronic device. The workshop will run twice, Saturday 13th, and Sunday 21st. See the event listing for more details and to sign up! (Also, check out the other events being run as part of Science Week and Innovation Dublin.)

Inside a PC

This talk will outline the basics of what’s inside a PC.

We will go through each of the components and demonstrate how they work together. Some of those computer parts (such as the hard drive) will be further taken apart to show you how they look and work on the inside.
You will furthermore get the opportunity to take apart the pieces yourself, as well as to put them back together again.

An Introduction to Biodiesel

This talk will cover all important aspects of Biodiesel.

From its use as an alternative fuel, its effects on the environment, its legal status in Ireland, to its future production. A piece will be on the chemical process involved, as well as a run-down on how to make a small amount yourself. If time permits, an actual example will be done to show the process. Finally: A look into the pros and cons of its use.

This will not be an overly technical talk, and most will be in general layman’s terms.

LDAP – Its Mysteries and Example Use

Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) is a well known and tempered method for storing information in a directory based hierarchy.

This talk will discuss the core concepts of LDAP and you will be shown how to use LDAP to represent user accounts in an LDAP data store with the hopes of using this single store as the primary data source for applications, wiki, blogs, e-mail accounts, etc.
Suitable for home users, businesses and complete beginners to LDAP.

Open Source : A philosophy for Life talk & Open Social Night

On Saturday 6th of November, we are delighted to have John Looney from Google give a passionate talk about Open Source : A philosophy for Life. This talk also coincides with our normal lively Open Social nights. These nights are a great chance to come and meet the members of TOG and have a bit of fun. BYOB. The night kicks off at 7pm. All welcome.

John Looney
After many years working in Google, John Looney realised that there were strong correlations between the way Google works internally, and the way the Open Source community works. It’s allow Google to stay reasonably flexible, despite growing it’s engineering teams past 10,000. In this talk, John examines various aspects of Open Source culture and how they can be mapped to a large organisation. This talk would be interesting to anyone who is curious how open source has managed to deliver such a stunning array of impactful projects and how large organisations can function efficiently. There will also be some discussion on how such culture that is certainly not unique to Google Engineering.