Written by Where: Queen’s Grad Club (Google Map), second floor.
When: Tuesday February 14, 7:00 PM.
For reference, here is our Group Calendar.
Announcing the Twelfth Meeting
Announcing the Eleventh Meeting
We would like to invite everyone to our first meeting of 2012.
Where: Queen’s Grad Club (Google Map), second floor.
When: Tuesday January 10, 7:00 PM.
For reference, here is our Group Calendar.
Tenth Meeting Summary
This was our tenth and last meeting of 2011. Ten meetings in our first (half) year. I am glad we made it this far. Though I wish there were more of us to share the joy!
This one was more of a casual meeting in the Grad Club. We had a good time, and discussed various issues.
One issue was whether we should set a topic of technical discussion for each meeting, as it may scare beginners off the meetings, especially at this (somewhat long) early stage of the group’s life cycle. We also, favorably, considered a proposal to participate in a program for the Kingston community youth that involves introducing youngsters to computer hardware and using Linux to make hardware useful!
As this year wraps up, we look forward to meeting more people interested in Linux and other open-source technologies in the Kingston area in the next year.
Happy holidays, everyone..
Announcing the Tenth Meeting
The. Tenth. Meeting.
We are still here!
Where: Queen’s Grad Club (Google Map), second floor.
When: Wednesday December 14, 7:00 PM.
For reference, here is our Group Calendar.
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Written by Ahmad was kind enough to present on the topic of RAID storage technology.
RAID, an acronym for Redundant Array of Independent Disks. It is an approach to implement replication and data storage across multiple physical drives. The implementation can be done via software or hardware. There are range of schemes, we discussed RAID 0-5. The implications for efficiency and redundancy. For computationally intensive raid modes (for example raid 5), software implementation will have significant overhead as compared to hardware implementation.
There was a discussion of the redundancy built into RAID 1 using Hamming code parity check and this moved to a discussion of hash functions and the purpose of checksum and md5sum as tools to confirm the reliability copied data. This allows for the total failure of one drive or repair of corrupted data using the parity check. In addition RAID 10 (1+0 and 0+1) and the features of each for dealing with redundancy were looked at.
There were brief asides on the emacs undo-tree package and using top to find virtual memory culprits.
Announcing the Ninth Meeting
Our Ninth Meeting is coming up next Wednesday. Everyone is most welcome to join in. Bring your friends along.
Where: Douglas Library, Room 405.
When: Wednesday November 9, 7:00 PM.
Topic: Software Raid.
Speaker: Ahmad Khayyat
For reference, here is our Group Calendar.
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Written by This month’s meeting featured a wide ranging discussion of recent and upcoming events. The passing of Steve Jobs prompted a discussion of the importance of aesthetics of form versus utility and functionality of interfaces. Naturally the meeting’s proximity to the release of Ubuntu 11.10 led to a somewhat onesided appraisal of the merits (or otherwise) of Unity. The distributions dabbled with recently were discussed, including Bodhi, Lubuntu and the Openbox window manager. Different calendar and ‘to do list’ software was discussed, and circuit diagrams of single electrode voltage clamp equipment (a biophysical technique of some repute) were presented. Some interesting intricacies of getting complex written languages like Chinese from a Roman-charactered keyboard were discussed, along with facets of LaTeX and the functional properties and uses of a re-configurable class of smart chips.
Eighth Meeting Announcement
Our Eighth Meeting is upcoming next Wednesday. Everyone is most welcome to show up and join the conversation. Bring your friends along.
Where: Douglas Library, Room 405.
When: Wednesday October 12, 7:00 PM.
Topic: Casual conversation.
Speaker: Everyone!
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This was our first meeting in a busy campus, and the Grad Club was actually being used as a grad club. So, we had to move our meeting elsewhere. We ended up in a group room in the Queen’s Engineering Library, which turned out OK.
We had two new members in this meeting. While we expected more, it seems September got everyone busy adapting to a new year’s schedule.
We discussed Emacs Org-Mode, which is a lot of things; but as the Org-Mode website put it:
Org-mode is for keeping notes, maintaining ToDo lists, doing project planning, and authoring with a fast and effective plain-text system.
Personally, Org-Mode is where I ended up after trying all sorts of desktop and online applications, so I thought I’d share my experience and hope someone else find it useful. The only thing you need to keep in mind while exploring Org-Mode is that, despite how comprehensive and far-reaching it may look, you can only use the subset of features ((or even the single one) that does what you want. Incremental, on-demand learning is your friend.
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Our 6th meeting was our first multimedia jury-rigging of the Grad Club TV to show a presentation, which worked surprisingly well.
Ian made a presentation of his Windows photographic workflow, and its nearest equivalent in Linux. Although the particular idiosyncratic style from the Windows routine was (not surprisingly) tricky to reproduce, the Linux programs acquitted themselves well at doing their jobs, and would allow a Linux-based photographer to work with their photos to their heart’s content.
A list of photographic tools for Linux worth looking at are:
Raw Therapee – RAW converter (makes JPGs or other bitmap files from RAW). Very useful if you want to try to rescue burned highlights and so on.
Qtpfsgui – High Dynamic Range processor. Takes three different exposures (3 separate shots, or 3 differently exposed developments from the same RAW file) and re-tonemaps the HDR into a tone curve for the human eye. Lots of hugely over the top effects, lots of normal looking effects (But good luck getting something subtle in between the two!).
Image J – Scientific image processor. Good for performing mathematical functions on your images, or measuring them in various ways. Who knows, maybe one day you’ll need to ‘convolve’ your image 
Fotoxx – SO much better than I realised earlier. It can develop RAW (although with default settings only), does some really clever arty filters including warping or converting to line art, can do HDR and also panoramics. The way it iteratively produces the panoramas and HDRs before yer very eyes is both intuitive and kind of entertaining. With a simple and really nicely-thought-out user interface, a very intuitive ‘hands on’ click-and-drag approach to various histograms for user input and a good ‘hit rate’ of useable outputs from its various functions, this little program is a great one-stop shop for a Linux photographer looking for a simple and effective tool. Check out their website, this is a nice little program!: http://kornelix.squarespace.com/fotoxx/
GIMP – As well as being the closest thing to Photoshop in Linux, GIMP can do RAW too via plugins such as UFRaw. C2G in GEGL is a great function for creating line art. Use the layers with different modes and opacities to try some different ‘look’s for a photo.
Hugin Panorama Creator – Gives many more projection and alignment options than Fotoxx, (although the latter does a similarly good job of the compositing of panoramas, and is much easier!)
Of course, as ever, many other programs are available in many of the categories here, especially RAW developers and general editors, so have fun and give them a try.
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