Attendees clockwise: Victor, jr*, Ralph, Natalie*, Mark Elkins, David ???, David Wilkinson, Tim Waugh. *first timers.
Firstly, a plug. Anyone working at home that would like the odd bit of conversation may want to try the #dorset IRC channel. You can leave your IRC client or browser sitting there and ignore it when you're working, and just peep in when you fancy a break. We share interesting URLs, ask questions, etc. And your hearing isn't at risk. http://dorset.lug.org.uk/wiki/doku.php?id=irc The location was OK, parking on site was easy. The Broadway's "snug" would seem pretty good for future meetings but the karaoke last night was too loud; the bar staff couldn't hear me shouting. There is a column of controls behind the bar, one of which is labelled "Snug", so it may be they can control the volume of their normal music on non-karaoke nights. The intention is to move Bournemouth meets from a Wednesday. Action: Victor to do further research at the pub, IATJBSGTDI, to find out if they've a "Sssssh! Domino players are thinking" night of the week. Also, could you find out if that is a control to mute the snug's speaker? Some of the things talked about... Acorn's Econet, early network hardware. http://acorn.chriswhy.co.uk/Network/Econet.html And how machines were added to the piece of string, either with a socket box, http://acorn.chriswhy.co.uk/Network/Pics/Acorn_Socket.html or a T-piece, http://acorn.chriswhy.co.uk/Network/Pics/Acorn_EconetCable.html Tim Waugh wrote some 6502 assembly on the BBC Micro that watched the "byte on the wire" memory location, which I've forgotten, creating something similar to tcpdump, and used it to obtain a master password file. http://mdfs.net/Docs/Comp/BBC/AllMem Philip Blundell's TCP over Econet ROM for the Beeb, including a TELNET client. http://www.tazenda.demon.co.uk/phil/iprom.S OSBYTE 200 could be used to clear the Beeb's memory on a Break. http://beebwiki.jonripley.com/OSBYTE_%26C8 StickOS BASIC is a non-FLOSS embedded BASIC for microcontrollers, including editor, debugger, and profiler. It interfaces over a serial port or similar. http://www.cpustick.com/ The demo scene has moved from the Amiga ones of yesterday to having one microcontroller doing all the work. http://www.linusakesson.net/scene/craft/ (Link has cropped up before on the list.) `gcc -O3' doesn't spot that assignments in a function's declarations may not be necessary depending on the later flow of execution, causing unnecessary execution of instructions and access of memory. LLVM will steal GCC's crown one day soonish. 2.8 is just released. http://llvm.org/releases/2.8/docs/ReleaseNotes.html An old way of getting a stack backtrace for a C program from the comp.unix.programmer FAQ. http://www.steve.org.uk/Reference/Unix/faq_7.html#SEC81 Red Hat has `abrt' to spot programs failing and grab pertinent info. https://fedorahosted.org/abrt/wiki "Reversible Debugging in GDB" is one of the FSF's high priority projects. http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/index_html/#reversegdb OpenStreetMap and bus routes. http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Bus_routes_in_Dorset How Bing gives easy access to Ordnance Survey maps at 1:25,000 and 1:50,000 scale, which Google doesn't provide. http://www.bing.com/maps/default.aspx?v=2&cp=50.72310364387752~-1.883324459195137&lvl=13&sty=s&eo=0 And how it has a bird's eye view too, arrr, which isn't overhead aerial. http://www.bing.com/maps/default.aspx?v=2&cp=sfkbtjgv99fq&scene=7697881&lvl=2&sty=b&eo=0 Android Scripting Environment for those not so keen on Java. http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2009/06/introducing-android-scripting.html Tim has an idea for an Android application he'd like to use on his phone. You'd point the camera at a feature, e.g. church spire and click. Repeat this in two or more further locations. Simple triangulation would then be able to tell you its location, ideally with some indication of accuracy based on number of sightings and their distance apart. An accusation flung by Boris at Paxo. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignoratio_elenchi Dasher, for an alternative way of entering text. http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/ _How an Economy Grows and Why It Crashes: Two Tales of the Economy_ by Peter and Andrew Schiff. A slim, easy-read, book that puts across the Austrian School of economics by the tale of three men living on an island, catching and consuming fish. http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/047052670X/trofforg-21 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_in_the_Weimar_Republic Places to eat decent food at a decent price around Bournemouth. Getting access to the file descriptor of Xlib's connection to the server for use with a single select(2)-like loop. ConnectionNumber(3), XAddConnectionWatch(3). Split keyboards, those that angle the left and right-hand keys. And how they annoy if "keys" is typed R1 L3 L1 L3 instead of R2 L2 R1 L3 where L0 is the left thumb. F-Spot's replacement by Shotwell has pleased those rabid Mono-haters amongst us. http://yorba.org/shotwell/ Those with F-Spot photo collections that took much time to create are hoping for a seamless transfer of their data. Shotwell is written in Vala, a new language with C#-like syntax that uses GObject for the underlying object model, making it easy to use libraries like Glib and Gtk+. It "compiles" to C which is then compiled as normal. http://live.gnome.org/Vala Genie is in a similar vein to Vala but with a more Pythonesque syntax. http://live.gnome.org/Genie Cheers, Ralph. -- Next meeting: Crown Hotel, Blandford Forum, Tuesday 2010-11-02 20:00 Meets, Mailing list, IRC, LinkedIn, ... http://dorset.lug.org.uk/ How to Report Bugs Effectively: http://goo.gl/4Xue
