ALUG 2nd Thursday Pub Meet Report.

Thursday 8th June, 2006

Present were: Paul [paul_c], Richard [ironChicken], Jonathan [Noodles], Simon [sionide], Dave [Paperface], Becca, Mike, Martijn [mak] and John Henson, who is new.

The first meeting of the warm weather saw most members in the geek uniform of t-shirts (there may even have been some legs on show) and drinking the colder varieties of beverages.

John is new to the LUG and is playing around with SUSE 10 on a laptop which he brought with him. This, of course, solicited much discussion about the relative merits of, and LUGers' personal preferences for, user-friendly distros which continued on and off all evening. A consensus of opinion seem to fall around Ubuntu.

Martijn was showing off his very desirable Hiptop which, although not running Linux, does have a nice little QWERTY keyboard and good connectivity.

Richard babbled incoherently at Jonathan for a time about his current project to write a clone of Apache Cocoon using Python. Sorry, Noodles.

Paul lent a book to Dave on Pthreads (which I'm sure was a gripping read) so that he could learn about semaphores as he'd had a problem with them during that day and didn't know what they were.

Martijn and Dave discussed Django vs. Rails vs. Java for building web applications.

Later on there was discussion of copyright, DRM and music copying in which Jonathan impressed us all with the fact that, apparently, Amstrad were the first company to ship a twin-decked audio cassette recorder and were sued over it by the record companies. This discussion moved on to TV programs and cartoons LUGers are currently watching and to PVRs and the merits of the EyeTV one for the Mac.

A pleasent evening all round with a small, but select, group of ALUG members. We look forward to seeing you next time!

Cheers, Richard