New BCS Open Source Specialist Group

Adrian Walmsley attended the launch meeting of the new Open Source Specialists Group on Monday March 14 in the BCS London Office in Southampton Street.

If you want to get involved with the OSSG, sign up on the nice collaborative website they have set up using Zope and Plone

Linux on the PlayStation 2

About 80 people turned out to hear Sarah Ewen from Sony Computer Entertainment Europe talk about

1. the architecture of the PlayStation2,
2. Sony's extensive use of Open Souce for internal development and for customer support sites, and 
3. the Linux package available for the PlayStation 2.

Sarah ended her talk with a demonstration of games and graphic demos running under Linux on the PS2.

SG Business

After the talk and refreshments, a business session was held to establish a formal basis for the SG.
Key points:

1. The interim committee was elected to serve for a further six months after which formal elections for officers would be held.
2. The SG intends to hold meetings in different geographic locations around the country. Your scribe told the meeting that the Open Source debate which Oxfordshire branch had hosted had been our best attended meeting for ages. On that basis I suggested that should the OSSG want to hold any meetings in Oxford, our committee would be interested in exploring the possibility of a joint event with them.

Photos of the opening talk

Conrad Taylor, secretary of the Electronic Publishing Specialist Group, and a key contributor to the recent BCS Streaming Media Working Party chaired by Neill Lawson-Smith, made a video of the lecture as a candidate for the BCS streaming media pilot which the Working Party's report had recommended.
Here are some still photos which I took as Sarah gave her talk.