I attended my second meeting of the Grand Rapids Linux Users Group – the last meeting I attended was about a year ago. The meeting was held in Casey DuBois’ garage, which is a giant warehouse with offices, bathrooms, and even a kitchen. It’s quite an awesome place to have meetings.
Matt Michielsen gave a demo on Mercurial, an open source version control system written in Python. I don’t currently use any version control beyond keeping a copy of the last version, so I was interested in seeing some VC in action. Mercurial seemed easy to use, and had some nice GUI apps. I’ll probably look into a couple of other systems to see how they differ before I decide on one to use.
Michael Mol then gave us a tour of his Rosetta Code web site. It’s a wiki where people have demonstrated how to solve various programming problems in many (many) different languages. It seems like a good resource when learning a new language. You can compare how something was done in a language you know to how it is handled in a language you’re learning.
Michael also recorded the meeting and is hopefully going to distribute the video online. We tried to share it during the meeting, but it would’ve taken about 8 hours to download over the wireless network.
Ron Lauzon showed off a couple of cool gadgets before the meeting. He was using a System76 Starling Netbook running Ubuntu. It was a good looking netbook that can get around 7 hours of battery life. Wow! I didn’t get to play with it much, partly because I knew I’d want one too bad if I touched it. He also brought an e-Ink eBook reader (I forget which one). The clarity of the text on the screen is unbelievable until you see it. It really does look like printed text, and not pixely printed text like a newspaper.
I brought up the possibility of a Grand Rapids Python Users Group, and there were a few people that expressed an interest, so I think I’m going to go for it.
