---------- Forwarded Message ----------
Subject: Some Notes from the Meeting
Date: Thursday 22 Apr 2010, 16:43:18
From: Shlomi Fish <[email protected]>
To: Telux <[email protected]>
Here are some notes from the meeting yesterday in no particular order. They
are not exactly a report, but may be better than nothing.
#. About 20-30 people came in my approximation, some of them a little late, so
it was pretty successful. So hopefully it was a good decision to find a venue
which can afford starting at a later hour. We'll see if the trend of
successful presentations can continue.
I think I recognised most of the attendees, but there were some new faces,
which is good.
#. Sawyer gave a very good presentation in my opinion, and I've learnt some
new stuff about git there. There was some good involvement from the audience.
Next time, I'll try to pass the baton to a different lecturer, because I think
Sawyer has been giving too many presentations lately, and we need to see some
fresh blood.
At the moment we only have one proposed presentation for June (by cool-RR /
Ram Rachum ) and he still may cancel. I've been considering to prepare a
presentation/demo about jQuery and also proposed to give a "Bottom Up
Subversion" presentation/tutorial. I'm not a good speaker so I'd prefer if
someone can give it instead. We can also have a session of short, volunteered
presentations on the spot (lightning talks or somewhat longer.).
Nevertheless, it would be preferable if someone will volunteer to give a
presentation.
#. Some logistics about the room - there is a keyboard and a projector, but no
screen. One can connect a laptop. The computer runs Windows , and we're not
sure if it has Windows. There's an Ethernet connection and also some Wifi
networks.
#. Sawyer mentioned the fact that he believed that creating a branch in
Subversion (using svn copy) was time-consuming for him ("I went to prepare
coffee"). This sounds strange to me, because branching and tagging in
Subversion are reportedly cheap, constant-time O(1) operations, and I've
studied the Subversion architecture to verify it. I often branched the
Freecell Solver's trunk which is 26M in size and it didn't take more than a
few seconds. svn.kde.org has many branches and each of them keeps the entire
KDE source code and is positively huge with 100s of mega-bytes of files.
#. I mentioned the mini-repository Subversion pattern - each with its own
trunk, tags and branches which can be seen in action here:
http://svn.berlios.de/svnroot/repos/web-cpan/
This is a single subversion repository with several mini repositories - one
for each project. It can be done in git too by keeping each project in its own
sub-directory, out of the top-level sub-directory.
#. We discussed the Simple Simon solitaire -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Simon_%28solitaire%29 , which I've
introduced Ido (ik) to and to which he became addicted lately. I've ranted a
bit about how "Solitaire" (or what the British call "Patience games") are
actually a generic name for single-player card games, and that what Windows
calls "Solitaire" is actually just some variants of Klondike Solitaire.
We compared and contrasted both PySolFC ( http://pysolfc.sourceforge.net/ )
and KDE 4's KPatience.
#. About 5 of us went to eat at Spaghetim after the meeting. Besides me, there
were two Perl programmers ( http://szabgab.com/ and Sawyer, who was the
presenter) and two Python programmers and I was appointed as the referee. We
were able to explain some stuff from both languages to the other party.
#. Szabgab mentioned that when he asked some people he gave training to if
they know Perl, they said "No, I can only read it", which to him seemed to
imply that maybe Perl's reputation as a write-only language was unfounded.
#. When we discussed Ram's Garlicsim ( http://garlicsim.org/ ) he mentioned
that he is mostly a web contractor, but that he would prefer to be hired for
writing simulations. Then Sawyer mentioned that often an invention brings a
necessity, which reminded us of this book:
http://www.shlomifish.org/philosophy/books-recommends/#guns_germs_and_steel
Very recommended. Then we discussed some other books by the same author and I
ended up saying that I've also read this book, which I enjoyed and found of a
similar interest to "Guns, Germs and Steel" because of its philosophy of
taking a bird eye's view of human history:
http://www.shlomifish.org/philosophy/books-recommends/#bicameral_mind
--------------------
So I enjoyed it.
Regards,
Shlomi Fish
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