Ipswich Meeting Notes
All Ipswich Social Meetings were held at The Milestone Beer House, unless otherwise stated.
Next Social Meeting: 20:00 Monday 21 July 2008
Meet #17: 20:00 Mon 16 June 2008
Samwise, PeteT, Adam, Dave and newcomer Chris Yarker aka skeletor
Confusion reigned again tonight. Sam arrived early enough to bag one of the large tables, but the poker lot turned up and he couldn't really justify holding on to it on it's own. Result - the ALUG attendees were split on two sides of the pub, blissfully unaware of the presence of each other. Enough's enough! We'll debate on the list about moving venues (changing nights probably isn't going to work - as well as possibly clashing with people's other commitments, The Milestone has live music for a good proportion of the rest of the week).
Meet #16: 20:00 Mon 19 May 2008
Samwise, Venura, Adam and newcomers Gary & Dave
Early newcomer Gary claimed the roomiest table left - near the pool table - for us, which was handy as the Ipswich Pub Poker noisome group were once again settled in. We didn't have anything prepared for this month, so we just chatted away and welcomed in our newest attendees.
Gary revealed he's a new user, experimenting with Sabayon Linux, from a magazine cover DVD. We sympathised when we heard he was currently restricted to 56K dial-up, and pointed him in the direction of the Linux Emporium, which might be a more reliable supplier of download CDs/DVDs. Gary made Sam's night when he asked about 3D desktops, which gave the latter the chance to fire up the ALUG Ipswich favourite demo ever, for the first time in months - Compiz Fusion. Amazingly, despite numerous kernel upgrades, it all still worked flawlessly! Well, except we couldn't remember half the hot-keys ... 
Our other newcomer Dave, revealed he was getting back into programming and scripting, as he's found he has some more spare time on his hands of late. We discovered he was a Perl person, but was planning on taking a look at Python, which everyone agreed seemed like a good language to be picking up at the moment, given it's current popularity and apparent capability. A conversation with Dave resulted in Sam pulling out his other pet demo - the seamless windows feature of VirtualBox OSE, which allows you to run Linux and Windows apps side-by-side. Dave has also used the closed-source PEUL version of VirtualBox, but couldn't get the USB feature to work with an iPod. Sam wasn't much use, as the USB functionality isn't in the OSE release. Instead, he just pointed Dave to gtkpod, which is what he uses to manage his iPod from Linux.
Adam returned, now officially classed as a regular, even if Sam still fails to remember his name immediately. Hellloooo ... he's been here since November!!! Adam didn't start well, when he booted up his XP laptop, but we forgave him when he pointed out it was dual-boot, but last night's upgrade to Ubuntu had apparently killed it's boot-up sequence. More work to be done there! Adam also keenly noticed that Sam was running the Web Developer extension for Firefox, though it took him slightly longer to get Sam to realise he wasn't talking about his collection of search engine plugins. When the message finally dawned, Adam pointed Sam to Firebug, a similar extension which he reckoned was much more powerful.
Venura jumped in when Dave turned the discussion towards DVRs and MythTV, in particular. He reckoned Mythbuntu was a good place to start and bemoaned how his own MythTV front-end installation hadn't been updated in a very long-time, due to the real pain and hassle such an upgrade usually entails. For that reason, his front-end still works, but is many months out of date.
We covered numerous geeky topics through the evening, incl. the ridiculously cheap cost of large memory sticks these days. Adam linked us to DealExtreme which he thought was a great place to get cheap gadgets. Sam then evangelised about moneysavingexpert.com, a site by TV Journalist Martin Lewis which is solely designed to help the consumer get the best deal for everything from credit cards and insurance to broadband prices, mobile phone contracts and shopping deals etc. These were the guys that popularised the recent fight against bank charges. Sam recommended everyone sign up to the weekly email which had this week pointed him at a £9 deal for a 4GB USB stick, delivered. Ridiculous!
Microsoft Research's recently publicised Worldwide Telescope has been tested by a few of us, although it doesn't work natively on Linux, sadly. Not that Linux isn't well-served in the world of astronomy software - we touched on both Stellarium and Celestia as great Unix alternatives.
Meet #15: 20:00 Mon 21 April 2008
Samwise, PeteT, PhilA, long-time lurker RichardN and newcomers John Herd, John & Dave
Download the OpenDocument presentation for this month's SwitchedOn talk by RichardN
The Ipswich Pub Poker crowd remain in force, edging us out to a small booth, initially. Luckily, as everyone arrived some of the regulars moved on which enabled us to move to some of the smaller tables near the pool table. We'll keep it under a close eye - if we can regularly keep these tables, we're probably OK, but - if not - we'll have to consider changing the meeting time or venue.
Tonight saw the welcome return of Phil with his OpenMoko phone, who originally debuted it at January's meet. Despite a couple of no-shows from a few ALUGers who had hoped to attend, we had a good turn-out with an influx of new members. After initial introductions and the pleasantries were out of the way, Richard took the floor and gave us an OOo Impress presentation on the work he's doing for a charity called SwitchedOn. Richard has recently left his career at BT, and will be shortly moving to India with his wife and new-born son, in an effort to bring low-cost computing, the internet and - most importantly - training to parts of the developing world. Richard gave us an overview of what he hopes to achieve, and where, as well as attempting to answer some of the myriad of questions we threw at him about how he was going to implement various open source technologies, given the environment. In conclusion, Richard extended an invite to anyone who would like to get involved to visit the website (ASP? Bleugh! that was out-sourced!), where he'll be publishing details of how to get involved - a mailing list to help with the hands-on experience or cash / equipment donations.
We'd spent most of our allotted time on SwitchedOn, so Sam held off on most of the little bits he'd brought along, and just announced that he had paid a visit to the most recent meeting of the local technology arts group, the Curiosity Collective. He described a few of the works they had been putting together for their exhibit which runs all this week at St. Mary's on the Quay Church, Key Street in Ipswich town centre. He recommended that if anyone had any free time during the week, it would be well worth checking out - last day is Saturday the 26th. See the Curiosity Collective site for more information.
Meet #14: 20:00 Mon 17 March 2008
Samwise, VenuraM, KeithJ and students Will Loggie & Matt
Annoyingly, we discovered tonight that a regular meet of Ipswich Pub Poker has started every Monday night at 19:30, which meant we got relegated to the tables near the pool table where most of the errr ... "friendly?" locals gather. Hmm .. we'll keep an eye on it and talk about alternative venues/nights/times, if we need to.
Tonight saw the return of Will, dragging along his CompSci classmate, Matt. Will pulled out a Gentoo laptop, whilst Matt brought along a MacBook, but we let him get away with it when we saw it was held together with gaffer tape! Will impressed us all with his early build of KDE 4.0 - it looks really swish. Like Vista but good!
As far as stuff to show off was concerned Sam brought along a copy of Halting State by Charles Stross - "a thriller set in the software houses that write multiplayer games". The blurb contains personal recommendations from Bruce Scheiner and id Software's John Romero! Sam also had a DIFRwear RFID-proof wallet - one for the tinhat brigade, perhaps. It contains a metal lining which stops your RFID cards being read remotely, until you take them out of the wallet. In celebration of the recent gathering of the machine's inventors in London, Sam's final demo-piece was a freeware bit of Windows software, running under WINE, for use with the BBC Micro. BBC Micro Image Converter is an image tool will convert PC image formats into a screen which can be loaded directly into a BBC Micro. Very cool - Sam showed us what Street Fighter II would have looked like, if it had been released ten years earlier! It's an early beta, though, and some images - like GIFs don't work well under WINE.
Sam also revealed plans to attend the next Curiosity Collective meeting to see what Linux-related projects they get up to.
After that we spent the rest of the evening shooting the breeze, and shouting loudly about BT's latest broadband blunder - the evils of BT Webwise. Bleugh. Oh, and our new student friends had never heard of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy computer game. Shame on them!
Meet #13: 20:00 Mon 18 February 2008
Samwise and PeteT
An awful night. The weather outside was terrible - we could hardly see our hands in front of our face. Combined with Sam forgetting to send the reminder email out until this afternoon, we ended up with the worst turn out ever. Sam showed off PrBoom - a free source port of the engine for the legendary DOOM, running Ultimate DOOM, Final DOOM, DOOM II and Freedoom (2003 - first beta release), a free IWAD file containing re-implemented game data. Turning on the MIDI music crashes X, but otherwise it works pretty well. Freedoom is pretty darn ugly, though. Judging from their forums, it appears like it might never be completed. Other than that we had a couple of beers and retreated to alternate quarters on campus to dry off and play a bit of Indiana Jones and The Fate of Atlantis with ScummVM to get us in the mood for the upcoming movie sequel.
Meet #12: 20:00 Mon 21 January 2008
Samwise, VenuraM, GregT, Mephi, Adam and Special Invited Guest Phil Ashby.
Well, a year later and we're back after the holiday break! And even better, the wi-fi router at The Milestone has been re-situated so we can now reconnect again.
Tonight was a fairly quiet pub meet. We postponed the astronomy-related session because Mephi hadn't got round to pulling all the materials together. He did whet our appetite with the moon picture below which he's stitched together from photos taken by digital camera through a telescope. Hopefully we'll have more news on that next month.
We had two great gadgets to play with this month. Venura brought along his new, white Asus Eee PC that he'd picked up from Toys 'R' Us. It's a cheap, light-weight, subnotebook computer that runs a derivative of Xandros and features an entirely solid-state drive. A very neat piece of kit.
The second linux-based gadget was Phil's FIC Neo1973 Phase 1 (GTA01Bv4) phone running OpenMoko. The linux equivalent of the iPhone, the OpenMoko software stack has been slowly developing since the phone was released in the latter half of last year. We were all stunned, Phil included, when we managed to get the phone to receive a call and send an SMS! Sadly, despite being notified that a new SMS had arrived when we replied, it looks like the GUI's not quite there to allow you to actually read incoming messages. Still lots of work to be done ... but very cool, anyway.
Phil also told us that he'd recently got his Cahoot Webcard to work from a browser under Linux. Very impressive, given it's Flash-based with a customer wrapper and only supported on IE under Windows. Phil's secret weapon was Greasemonkey, which he used to add an embed tag, allowing Firefox to render it. There was a lot of interest in both the mod and also the Webcard product. We discussed alternatives, including pre-pay credit cards but decided the Webcard appears to be well worth investigating.
Sam added Unreal Tournament to the list of Linux games he's managed to get running on laptop, although it suffers from a bizarre random speed issue. If the sound is fiddled with, the game engine can run far too fast, making the game unplayable. Sam suspects this might be an OpenGL issue related to the UT engine sometimes not recognising the multi-core processors. Either way, it works most of the time. Also making their debut were a truck-load of new adventures for ScummVM, which had been hanging around at Sam's parents and had been added over Christmas.
The conversation moved to security and Greg pointed us to a paper, Reflections on Trusting Trust by Ken Thompson, which discusses the old adage, you can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself and shows how a compiler can be modified to deliberately compile code with a backdoor. Scary!
Mephi brought up one of his pet favourite languages again, Brainfuck. Sam saw this and raised Mephi with Whitespace. The general consensus was that whilst you'd have to be mad to try Mephi's recommendation, Sam's suggestion is mind-blowing ... programming with nothing but tabs, spaces and other whitespace. Gah! No print-outs, there, then!
Then we segued into alternative OSs. Phil brought up ReactOS and BeOS. Sam pointed out that it was no wonder Phil couldn't get BeOS up and running, as it is somewhat dated now and thought getting Haiku, the open-source BeOS clone might prove easier.
Sam also described Ian Murdock's latest role, heading up Project Indiana which is intended to be a desktop version of OpenSolaris, in the same way that PC-BSD and Desktop BSD are desktop versions of FreeBSD. Apparently, Ian has annoyed may people by wanting to use the OpenSolaris moniker as the release name for the distribution, which has caused a furore on certain mailing lists. Whilst on the subject of OSs, we touched on the sheer scale of what it would be like building your own modern OS. Sam pointed at MikeOS, which started as a pet project developed entirely by one guy. Now used mainly as a way to learn about x86 assembler and OS development.
Mephi then introduced us to Inventgeek.com which has some very cool hacks to look over.
After that we all got sucked into a bit of a flame war about linux packages. Sam and Mephi agreed that having a separate repository for every distribution, as it is today, is a waste of effort and that if we had one common distro-independent repository, one example being Linspire's Click and Run (CNR) software delivery service, everyone could pool their efforts. This would mean instead of three distro-specific packages porting Perl three times, we'd have one independent Perl packager and two guys freed up to package other software, like the niche releases which never make it into distro repositories until they became popular. Phil didn't buy-in to that completely and pointed out that the resulting Perl package would need more testing to ensure it worked on multiple distributions, instead of just the one. Sam and Mephi pointed out that this sort of testing could be done as new releases of distributions are created and any problems fed back up to the maintainer. Even if there were two guys working on the Perl package with one dedicated to testing, that still frees up one or more guys to port new software. Sam and Mephi were convinced the bugs could be ironed out and the resultant standard archive would be well worth it, if the distributions could be convinced to stop using their own individual repositories - which is the biggest stumbling block. Not sure they convinced Phil in the end, tho. 
Finally, Sam showed off VirtualBox OSE's seamless Windows mode as the best option to being able to connect to a Microsoft Live Communications Server for IM & presence after Phil had been bemoaning the lack of viable linux clients. Sam pointed to the attempts being made by the users of IM client, Pidgin but they're still a ways off.
