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
----------------------------------------------------------


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