Web Centric Newsletter - January 2008

The February Web Centric Meetup will be on Wednesday, February 13th on the third floor of the Fiddler's Green Tavern on Wellesley Street in Toronto. What's up for February, you ask?

The organizer and co-organizers, in a secret mojitos-laced meeting at the Pickle Barrel recently, decided to move the Mingle & Network portion of the meetup to the beginning. So the Meetup itself will begin at 7:30pm (that's *real* time, folks) but we will be open for business at 7pm to exchange business cards and chat.

- Mingle & network
- Introductions
- New Faces - quick introductions
- No "News You Can Use" with John Ross this month, since he'll be out of town. Instead, we bring you an inside look at Bill Gates' devious plans for the future
- Guest speaker Chris Dryburgh will explain (somewhat less deviously) how to make a favicon
- Show Off Your Stuff - Wireless Internet Access onsite

This Month's Round Table Guest Speaker
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Chris Dryburgh - Everything you always wanted to know about Favicons but were afraid to ask...

An icon is an image that symbolizes a program. An infamous icon for web people is the blue 'e' associated with IE. A favicon is an icon associated with a web site. Web browsers use them for bookmarks, minimized windows, and beside the location/address box. A favicon adds an extra visual experience to a web site that makes it look that much more professional.

A photoshop plug-in will be installed so that it can handle the ico file format. A simple favicon will then be created in the ico format and the png format. The created images will then be tested in a html page then placed on a live web site. A pre-created animated icon will also be demonstrated.

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INDUSTRY BOOKS
In order for us to continue providing a venue, speakers and more, we need to continue to raise money. So we've set up an affiliate program with Site Point to provide you with some of the best books out there. Site Point covers all our topics of discussion and all our group themes in a way that can profit your business by increasing your knowledge. Please visit the Site Point book store through the link below and don't forget to use your affiliate link before buying any of their books. Here's the link: http://www.sitepoint....
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If you would like to be a guest speaker, let Co-Organizer Paul Sobocinski know - it helps if you can give him a rough outline of what you'd like to speak about.

We also request that you give a small donation (passed around in a beer pitcher at every meeting) to help defray the costs of running on Meetup. This helps Paul Rochford pay the monthly fee to use the site, and anything left over at the end of the year goes toward our big Christmas party blowout.

Wired Magazine has an interesting article in their February issue about Toronto computer scientist Joe Stam (one of the few programmers to have won an Oscar) and his work on trying to create the next generation of movie special F/X including digital aquatic and fire effects. Such creations take an inordinate amount of time because they all need to be endlessly manually tweaked by programmers. Stam is working on software that will take into account *all* the laws of physics when creating, say, a wave breaking over a deck or a raging fire. http://www.wired.com/...

A reminder: The 30-year countdown has already begun (January 19, 2008) for the dreaded UNIX Y2K38 bug - http://it.slashdot.or... Update your computer now or when the time comes, planes will fall out of the sky, nukes will launch, your Netflix bill will be all screwed up and a technical Armageddon will commence...And it will be all your fault!

See you on the 13th!

Frenchy
Co-Organizer