Copyright © 1995-2004 UKUUG Ltd

UKUUG

Newsletter Section 1

UKUUG News

Editor's Column

I have received a number of offers to review books following my plea in the last issue. Thank you to those who volunteered, I will be calling upon your services and Jane Morrison will be posting packages to you shortly. In the meantime, thank you to the Council and other members for the reviews in this issue.

By the time you read this the EurOpen Governing Board will have met in London to decide what its future might be. Mick Farmer will be there as an observer and will report fully in the next newsletter.

At a recent Council meeting it was agreed to change the publication dates of this newsletter to quarterly, rather than bi- monthly. The suggested publication dates wuld be March, June, September and December.

The next issue will therefore be in September 1997, with the theme of Databases. Copy deadline is 19 August 1997.

The December issue will be a special 21st birthday issue (the anniversary of the founding of the User Group) and a Retrospective. We will be seeking contributions from past members, as well as current members of the Group. I would be delighted to receive any reminiscences you have of early meetings, landmark events etc.

Report from the Chair

It certainly looks as if our membership of CUGA is paying dividends. As you can read below, we are currently working on a joint event with a number of other User Groups which we hope will take place this autumn. This means we now have two prospective events this year!

Just a gentle reminder that this year's AGM takes place on Thursday 26 June 1997 at the Institute of Education, Bedford Way London, WC1 starting at 1830hrs. Refreshments are available beforehand and there will be a London LUG meeting following it. Please come, if you can!

SANS Network Security Digest

While investigating new services for our members, this was brought to my attention. It is published by the SANS (Systems Administration, Networking and Security) Institute approximately eight times a year and is distributed by e-mail. I've looked at a couple of sample issues and I'm sure it will be of interest to any of you concerned with the topics in the title. What's more, it's free if you subscribe before the end of June!

Subscribe now and you will receive the digest until the end of 1998. After that, it will cost $80 per year, although I'm currently negotiating with them about a discount for our members.

To subscribe, send e-mail to sans@clark.net with the following information in the body of the message: your name, your job title, your organisation, your surface mail address, and your preferred e-mail address.

London LUG

The last meeting of this LUG was not on the traditional last Thursday in May, but earlier, on 20 May, so that we could fit into Tim O'Reilly's busy schedule. The well-known author and publisher was in Europe giving presentations at a number of trade shows, and he agreed to give a short talk (or to let Josette sell lots of O'Reilly books, depending on your point of view :-) to our LUG.

His thesis was that we're undergoing a revolution in the way software is being developed, and he used the WWW to illustrate his points. Although he accepted the premise that Java would bring “proper” programming back to the Web, his main interest was what he called “infoware” – small pieces of software containing information or processing capabilities that can be put together to build new applications. In a way, this is like a return to the traditional UNIX philosophy, namely having small, simple tools that each did one job well, that could be combined in novel ways to create larger applications.

The next meeting of the LUG will take place on 26 June, immediately after the UKUUG AGM which starts at 6.00pm in the Institute of Education, Bedford Way, London, WC1.

CUGA Events

At the May meeting of CUGA (see the April issue for details concerning CUGA) we decided to investigate whether there was interest from our groups' members for three possible events to be held in the Autumn. These were:

.     NCs vs PCs: the battle for the desktop
.     UNIX vs NT: the battle for the (mid- range) servers
.     Business on the Internet

The one of most interest to our members was the second of these and I volunteered to see if there is indeed interest for such an event. So far, the only other user groups that have expressed an interest are DECUS, HP User Group, PC User Group, Sun User Forum and the Unisys User Group. If you, or your organisation, would be interested in such an event, then please let me know by e-mail.

The PC User Group has negotiated a substantial discount on training courses run by N+S training! and their phone number is 0171-222 3944 (quote CUGA).