Last night we had out May meeting and had 10 people in attendance. It was a good turn-out as we return to the normal second Thursday of the month meetings: We discussed the following topics:
- Presentation Topics Discussion –We had a thoughtful conversation designed to help define future presentation subject matter the members would like to see.
- Kickstart Your Future – Sam led a discussion on the use of crowdsourcing as a way of financing technical projects. He discussed the two contemporary sites, Kickstarter and IndieGoGo, as viable means to use when crowdsourcing. We also saw several projects such as the Pebble Watch or the Printrbot which have done extraordinarily well using this technique.
- Ubuntu 12.04 – the group began looking at several different features of both the Unity and Gnome-Shell desktop environments that accompany the new 12.04 release of Ubuntu. We had a strange problem getting Unity to work properly with a projector. Part of the Unity information used Unity-2D for discussion. We were also running out of meeting time when this problem occurred so we had to cut some parts of this short..
- Linux News – We had a discussion on recent Linux related news items such as the Apache Foundation release of OpenOffice 3.4, Rickard Stallman’s collapse at a conference in Barcelona, and New Hampshire’s bill HB418 which mandates the use of open Source and open file formats.
- General Discussion – we had a general group discussion around the sad reality that the Xinerama functionality in Xorg is becoming deprecated. Also had a very brief discussion on the use of Virtualbox for desktop virtualization.
We had a decent time and lots of discussion in spite of some of the challenges of the evening. Hope to see you all at the June meeting on 06/14.
Reference Notes:
During the course of the meeting Sam discussed a few useful books when studying C programming. I’ve referenced these books below:
- Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment 2nd Edition by W. Richard Stevens and Stephen A. Rago.
- Advanced Unix Programming 2nd. Edition by Marc Rochkind
- Code Reading The Open Source Perspective by Diomidis Spinnellis
- The Art of Debugging With GDB, DDD, and Eclipse by Normal Matloff
- Debugging: The 9 Indispensable Rules For Finding Even The Most Elusive Software and Hardware Problems by David J Agans