Well, not quite. Our meeting got shifted by one week, because the fourth Saturday of February was marked by the Carnival celebrations in Panjim. And traffic gets badly disrupted during this event!
So we assembled on Saturday, March 4, 2006 at the Goa Science Centre for an interesting meeting. Some of the issues we discussed or mentioned were: * Knapsack-type bags for carrying a laptop (costing Rs 800 in Panjim, and less than half that in Bangalore). Just a warm-up offtopic issue. * ILUG-Goa's completion of six years since its launch in Feb 1999. * Attempt to set up an RSS feed aggregator of news from across the Free/Libre and Open Source Software world in India. Check this out http://feeds.goa-india.org Recommend more RSS-available feeds. * Posts available via the interesting http://planet.foss.in * What can be done to get more people contribute code, from Goa. * Why writing documentation could be a good way to start... * CivicSpace demo (see http://www.goa-india.org ) as a tool for promoting not-for-profit village and NPO (non-profit organisation) sites in Goa. * Fritz Fletcher D'Souza's plans of encouraging young people to move into programming in PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby on Rails. Fritz is a youngster himself. * Possibility of students picking up feasible projects on Ruby, since this allows for creating projects in 3-4 months itself. * Idea of holding a mini-DevCon (developers' conference) in Goa. Subject to availability of suitable partners, such as GCCI, etc. * Need for government and others to support the 'incubation centre' model for encouraging talent to grow in Goa. * Shortage of made-in-Goa and made-for-Goa content being developed. This was followed by a brief show of a South African film, in which Welsh kernel developer Alan Cox was interviewed. A great chance for those who missed FOSS.in 2005, and didn't see the man in person! Meanwhile, these DVDs from the Shuttleworth Foundation and team are doing the rounds in Goa. Bijon Shaha has seen and appreciated the same. Now the DVDs are with Edgar. It might be a good idea for other LUGs to show these DVDs widely; these contain a lot of interesting themes, intelligent talk and presentable presenters. Have already broached the idea about sharing these DVDs around in India with the South Africans who were involved in creating them, and they are open to the idea. This was followed by a brief but insightful and useful talk by DP on using wget to download sites or files from the net. Finally, just before finishing the meet, Bijon Shaha (director of the ETDC, GoI, Goa) phoned to say he had just flown in from Mumbai, back home. We called him over; he did, and apart from the snacks at the beach, he also earns the title of the most-committed LUGger! And there was no discussion on this one decision. Unfortunately, our friend from New Zeland, Don Jones <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> could not make it for this meeting. Don had exchanged a number of emails, during his three-month visit to India, and it would have been really interesting to meet up. He had said earlier: In New Zealand I am a Network Engineer/System Administrator for an ISP, we are entirely Linux based for our servers which all run Debian (besides a few older Red Hat and FreeBSD boxes). I am resopnsible for looking after our servers like DNS, Radius, FTP, HTTP databeses and the like, I also do some development and scripting with perl, php mysql and postgres. I run Ubuntu on my desktop machines and also have a MacOS X laptop which dual boots ubuntu and Tiger. I also have my own server back in New Zealand which host my blog, where I am blogging about my trip ( http://www.gamma.net.nz ). On another occasion, he had mentioned: Sounds like you would like me to do a lightning talk, I am of course totally unprepared but could talk a bit about the state of FOSS in New Zealand (from my perspective) and/or the state of the Internet in New Zealand (we have some intresting and fairly unique peering points in New Zealand). I could also talk a bit about the DNS. Then, he also commented: I have read some of your stories on Techtonic and your Mark Shuttleworth interview and enjoyed them very much. I actually grew up in Cape Town and am 33 and lived next door to the school mark went to but I dont know him, he is a real inspiration. Also in my home town in New Zealand at the moment is the linux.conf.au which has some very good speakers, its a pity I'm missing it! ( http://linux.conf.au/program.php ) But, life is what happens when you're making other plans, they say. This is the note I got just before the meet: Many apologies, I will not be able to make it, I left Goa this morning and am now in London so unfortunately will not make it to the Goa LUG. Its a pity I never did make it, The first one I didnt hear about soon enough, the second I was in Kerala and the third got posponed and I left ;( Maybe we shall meet sometime in the future, Don! FN PS: Full discussion and detailed info about ILUG-Goa's online discussions through the month are available at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ilug-goa And if you want to keep track of what geeks and techies across India are discussing: http://feeds.goa-india.org (Thanks, Derek!) -- ---------------------------------------------------------- Frederick 'FN' Noronha | Yahoomessenger: fredericknoronha http://fn.goa-india.org | [EMAIL PROTECTED] Independent Journalist | +91(832)2409490 Cell 9822122436 ----------------------------------------------------------
