Live in southern Ontario? Attending dinner meetings is free.

PegaSoft's May Dinner Meeting

Date: May 19, 2005 at 7:00 pm
Location: Orwell's Pub
                                                                                
Attendance

Ken B, Mel W, William P


Meeting Business


Summer Programming Challenge

Each year PegaSoft has a summer programming challenge.  The entries are
posted on the PegaSoft web site.  Last year Ken won for his version of
Esmeralda the Gloomy Fortuneteller.

2005 challenge: create an application that listens to sound, either through
the microphone jack or from a file, and interprets the sound in some way.  For
example, drawing patterns in response to sounds.  The project is due at the
PegaSoft Summer Retreat.


PegaSoft Annual Summer Retreat

Each year PegaSoft holds a 3-day geek retreat at Ken's parent's home near
North Bay, Ontario.  Activities include one day of Linux hacking plus a BBQ,
the annual river boat cruise and all-you-can eat brunch.

This year the summer retreat will be held from August 26-28, the weekend
before Labour Day.


Meeting Location

It was agreed that Orwell's was too noisy to conduct meetings.  Mel W. will
investigate other possible meeting locations, including the Manny's Restaurant
at the Clarica Centre and the Canadiana Restaurant near the Kipling subway stop
which has meeting rooms.


Open Forum - Linux in the News


GCC 4.0.0 Released. [Slashdot]

GCC 4.0.0 uses an improved tree-based optimization framework, GCC Java has
many new packages (including AWT and SWING classes), GCC Ada implements some of
the new Ada 2005/6 packages (e.g. standard container classes and double-wide
international characters).


KDE and Apple fight over KDE source in Apple's Safari browser [UK Builder]

Safari was originally built using parts of KHTML rendering engine used by
KDE's Konqueror browser.  These parts were heavily modified by Apple into a
version called WebCore.  Apple wants to dump the remaining parts of KHTML in
part because updates are not occurring frequently enough.


Sony Playstation 3 announced for 2006. [Sony]

In 2003, Sony reported that the Playstation 3 would run on Linux.  The PS3
uses IBM's Cell processor and the Cell engineers are rumoured to be porting
Linux to the Cell processor but it is not clear if the PS3 runs on Linux or
not.  A full port of the kernel would not be necessary for Linux to act as the
PS3 O/S.  There has been no announcement of a Linux kit for Playstation 3 as
there was for the PS2.

LinuxWorld Canada

The Toronto Linux Users Group (aka TLUG or GTALUG) had a booth at the show.
Several people spoke with TLUG at the conference, including schools who are
interested in starting a Linux program.  William suggested that there are
current and former PegaSoft members who would be qualified to lead seminars,
provided they pay $20 to become official TLUG members.


PegaSoft Member Projects

 
Business Shell (BUSH) (Ken B)

Graphing module in progress.  BUSH can now open a window, draw rectangles,
ellipses, lines, pattern fills and load most graphic file formats.  Currently
working on pixmap operations: stretching, skews, greyscaling and image
enhancement functions.  Next up: MySQL support.


USB Linux Personal Thin Client (William P)

William contacted over 2000 businesses regarding this project.  U.S. businesses
have shown far more interest than Canadian businesses.  A municipal government
may be interested in using Linux in the future.


Lease and Rentals (Room Booking) Project

The facts regarding the client's cancellation of this project were reviewed.
The cancellation has nothing to do with the contractor's proposal.

There has been a significant interest in Linux in schools, particularly in the
UK.  The problem with bringing Linux into schools in Canada is that schools
here have established agendas, hierarchies and large budgets.  There needs to
be spending cuts to education in order to generate interest in Linux.  Schools
in the UK have smaller budgets making Linux more attractive.

 
Discussion: PegaSoft Projects

Instead of the regular tutorial discussion, the problem of PegaSoft membership
was discussed.  PegaSoft provides a support group, networking, knowledge
sharing and technical tutorials.

PegaSoft doesn't seem to be as popular as other Linux groups in the Toronto
area.  Possible reasons include:

  (1) most Linux enthusiasts are hobbyists, not developers, contractors or
      other Linux professionals--the people who would come are too few, too
      thinly scattered across the city, or are too busy with commitments;
  (2) computer professionals are notoriously anti-social, ego-centric and
      competitive: they are too afraid or too proud to share and work together;
  (3) contractors who are interested in PegaSoft are looking for services that
      bring in RFP's;
  (4) people looking for Linux jobs are looking for a way to bring in clients
      or larger number of people to network with;
  (5) many of the people who would be interested are not the kind of people who
      read user group mailing lists.

Ken asked if the postings to user groups were of any value but Mel believed
that if there are 10 professionals in a mailing list of 400 hobbyists, the posts
should be considered successful if those 10 are reached.

Mel suggested that PegaSoft needed some kind of project that would excite
people to become members.  Ken pointed out that there are several open source
projects on the web site and most of the web activity is generated by these
projects.  Ken is already committing significant time and money to PegaSoft but
he needs more support from other people.

A number of possible projects were suggested including:

  (a) scrapbook software
  (b) genealogy software
  (c) document management and tracking software
  (d) anti-spam software
  (e) resurrecting the MPEG logger project

Ken said that finding good projects was easy--getting people to commit their
time was hard.  William was concerned about how to market and sell these
project.

Ken pointed out we're in a "Catch-22" situation.  Most PegaSoft members are
full-time employees and have limited time to commit to a project.  Without a
project to showcase, it's hard for people to take PegaSoft seriously and
excite new potential members.  At a certain point, any project is better than
no project because the current tactics are not effective.

The situation would be discussed further on the mailing lists.