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

Our March meeting took place on our new meeting night, the second Thursday of the month. We are really starting to get into a groove with the new meeting night and location!Tonight we had 15 people in attendance. The meeting was divided into four presentation segments:  

• Arduino Basics (part 1) -  Brad Coxhead started his first in a series of many lectures on using the Open Hardware platform, Arduino. Brad described the basic tools and techniques used to work with the Arduino as well as provide an idea of what is come in his future lectures. The topics were  well received with many members expressing a serious interest.
• Tmux (part 1) – Sam Williams provided an introduction to the use of the terminal multiplexer known as tmux. Sam presented many ways in which the tool could be used for practical workflows in a terminal based development or administrative environment. Sam will finish this topic next month with more configuration and details on leveraging the tool in a serious  production or development environment.
• Ubuntu 12.04 beta 1 – Sam Williams provided a brief demonstration of the new beta of Precise Pangolin (Ubuntu 12.04). There are some very significant improvements, particularly in the area of Unity and the newly added HUD. Ubuntu 12.04 is still on schedule for a release on April 26th, 2012.
• Linux News - Sam Williams also led the group with a brief discussion of a couple of major Linux news items.

The meeting went really well. Nice to see the momentum starting to build again!