Where: Queen’s Grad Club (Google Map), second floor.
When: Tuesday February 14, 7:00 PM.

For reference, here is our Group Calendar.

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..

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.