[PLUG] minutes of today's monthly meet

[shirish]

Hi all,
 Had gone to the PLUG meet after a long haitus, almost 3 months or
more. Few people showed up and got the meeting underway.

There was just one thing on the agenda, talking and sharing about the
GNUnify.in meetup happening at symbiosis on 13th and 14th.

Basically it seems something like 4-5 tracks would be there (damn!)
the good point though is openoffice.org and mozilla.org both seem to
have 3-4 sessions so it would be interesting what they come up with.
Mozilla seems to be sponsoring some of the event and that can only be
a good thing. The rest of the things are under a wrap and would be
unveiled (after finalization) on Monday 09/02/2009.

The other thing which happened is that Ramky (always forget his full
name, sorry) from Redhat showed us a demo of frets on fire. I had
heard of this game but had never run due to its 2 GB RAM system
requirements. http://fretsonfire.sourceforge.net/

It was yesterday's nightly build and the demo was good enough for us.
(There's a bit of humor in the demo which is cool)

What would be more interesting is to know if there have been any
attempts to use sheet music or notations alongwith the game. There are
some softwares to write notations and stuff in GNU/Linux.

Of course the copyright laws for sheet music suck but that's a matter
for a different day.

Ramky then also shared about some resources for programming (as in
e-books as well as real books to read/refer) . He was of the opinion
that one should read code to actually know how things are done.

He also shared that most of the time when proprietary companies start
opening their code its so horribly written/documented that people just
cannot make sense.

He recounted the story of when Netscape (one fine day) opened up their
code. Apparently, there was a lot of code that nobody how it fit with
other stuff .

(Couldn't help wondering the difference with ATi now opening up some
of their specs and stuff but that's a different topic altogether)

Anyways, the discussion then veered towards Ubuntu spoiling things.

The argument being put forth were :-

a. They make things too damn easy. While people may still have to
configure stuff, most of the things become pretty much built-in so a
newbie/amateur programmer/developer who wants to play with the
internals doesn't need to know.

b. Because the software is on a CD, all the tools are not there due to
which one has to have good net connectivity to download anything.
While the need is similar for other distros. as well but its usually
something off-beat.

While can't comment about a. as not a developer/programmer but as the
other point is concerned do accept some part of that argument.

Lastly, the discussion veered into still issues of hardware support
specifically with scanners and printers who are below the 5k range.
Some of the models were of HP, while some of Humax and others.

What would have been also interesting to also point out would have
been this resource

http://foo2zjs.rkkda.com/

I actually wanted to get reactions from the free software community
about this line given on the project main page.

"*** DON'T USE the foo2zjs package from:
         Ubuntu, SUSE, Mandrake/Manrivia, Debian, RedHat, Fedora,
Gentoo, Xandros, EEE PC, Linpus, MacOSX, or BSD!
*** Download it here and follow the directions below. "

I had written a slightly wrongly worded mail with my concerns to the
developer of the project and haven't got an answer since.

All in all, a fruitful meet
-- 
          Regards,
          Shirish Agarwal
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