[PLUG] Meet-up at PLUG on 6th July 2008

[shirish]

Hi all,
  This month's meet-up didn't have any agenda so didn't know how it would go.

So people started trickling in and we had stuff happening by 16:30

Amit had bought a Samsung FP700 sans a power cable so we couldn't see
it in action.
Zoyd also bought a similar gadget and karunakar or somebody made Wi-Fi
work on it.

[rant]
Frankly speaking I feel very disappointed when I see devices like
that. Keyboard are way way smaller than my fingers and dunno about
touch-screen typing or stuff like that. Also very over-priced,
both of them within the 20k range. I for one wouldn't go for these
ultraportables at that price point.
They completely miss the bus. I would rather have had the OLPC which
is a remarkable machine if I had that kinda cash and it would be very
worthwhile for me atleast.
[/rant]

Anyways, getting back to the meet, Amit had a bad bad day. He came up
with two ideas and wanted to throw it to the community which we all
tore apart to shreds with various perspectives.

a. The first suggestion/idea of Amit was to have a "Live CD" for
students so they could learn programming using it and what tools
should go in this one.  We had huge arguments as to the merits and why
he wants to do it and who's it aimed for and how practical the whole
thing is.

b.  The second suggestion/idea which Amit came up with is having
pre-built binaries like what xampp.org provides with the idea it could
be "LAPJ" Linux+Apache+Python+Java or LAPR (using Ruby therein) and
provide it as a package.

While again the idea is cool, right from issues of hosting (as to
where would u host it?) to how would the maintainable the whole thing
be for all of these are very huge and complex projects . There have
been many initiatives taken similar to xampp.org

For e.g.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMP_Packages

and seeing the kind of stuff there is, Amit said the others don't come
to the level of XAMPP
in his understanding.

The second was who the audience was, if its web-development then that
wouldn't stand.
Dexter (who's into web-development professionally) gave couple of
life-experiences which tell
it wouldn't stand in the professional field. If its for students to
just try out what the experience of the whole bundle is ok . But again
how to maintain is going to be an issue with various distros and
various places people keep or do stuff.  Also in web-servers there are
quite a few alternatives which could have taken place, so number of
forks could be created but all of it needs time, money and efforts.

There was another person who was from BSNL who came in his capacity as
an individual. And he raised a query when a customer asks for support
from BSNL for his internal modem or broadband modem or whatever it is
how do should could they support it? Or what forum or which way can
they be helped. We tried giving various solutions but all of them are
short-term solutions. The long-term solution is that they would need
to train maybe 3-4 engineers who understand the tools and some
mechanics behind it and can trouble-shoot the process.

All in all a very engaging meet I would say, learnt and shared a lot,
had a roaring time. Till when we meet next.

Lightsaber down ;)
-- 
 Regards,
 Shirish Agarwal
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