Final LALUG Meeting of 2012

Thanks to all who joined for our meeting two weeks ago at Gaanderij. Great food, great conversation, but a little pricey for what I’ve been trying to do with this group.

My thought for the final meeting of 2012 is to gather at Quartier Latin, a lovely looking little wine bar directly across Nieuwstraat from Gaanderij. It was not busy last week and my hope is that it isn’t (yet!) taking a huge leap in popularity.

I’ll be there from 7 or so on Thursday evening 13 December, 2012.

Hope to see you there!

Good meeting last night

Seven folks showed up (Marie, David, George, Terry, Sytze, Chris, and yours truly) to the slightly posher-than-I-expected Gaanderij restaurant for discussions of various and sundry things. David has been having some adventures with migrating a client’s very large web site to Amazon S3.

Sytze shared his new Galaxy Tab which is very sweet.

While I had done a little playing with Haiku before we met, the venue wasn’t such that I was comfortable firing up the laptop to show it off.

We were also quite amused by the description of the venue’s crème brûlée as it contained tonka beans. While many of us enjoy cooking, none of us knew what tonka beans were. Tasty and banned as a foodstuff in the US.

Meeting place tonight changed

De Branderij was booked out, so we’ll be meeting at their sister restaurant around the corner:

De Gaanderij
nieuwstraat 32
1312 KC Leiden
071-5142158

The reservation is in my name and the time is 7:30 as usual.

If you’ve used the Raspberry Pi and have tips or tricks, bring them along.

Cheers!

~Joe

And we’re doing it again…

I’ve been rather busy of late, but we restarted the Leiden Anglophone Linux Group a few weeks ago with quite a successful meeting. A new member with GRUB issues on Ubuntu found us via the Leiden Expats Facebook page and David was able to diagnose and fix them without a problem.

Last week’s meeting was a little smaller and the other three participants had all worked together. We didn’t end up discussing Linux much.

My plan is to have two more meetings before the end of the year. The next one will be Thursday 29 November. Steven recommended a place near Hooglandsekerk that looked quite hospitable.

De Branderij
Middelweg 7-9
2312 KE Leiden
071-5133728

Has anyone tried the Haiku OS of late? Techmonks has posted instructions for installing the latest version to a disk partition here. I’ve not tried it yet, but am going to try it in a VM this weekend. I like the idea of a non-Linux open source operating system almost as much as I like Linux.

Pi!

I pretty much missed out both on Pi day (3/14 in US reckoning). I did, however, enjoy a very nice apricot crumble at Bennies in Leiden.

I’ve also, so far, missed out on the Raspberry Pi. I haven’t tried very hard to get one, and figure once all the hoo-ha dies down a bit, they’ll be easier to come by.

That said, there is a very cool set of pix over on Flickr including one of the Raspberry Pi running an Atari emulator.

FOSDEM participant

At last night’s LALUG gathering, Finne Boonen spoke about her presentation at this year’s FOSDEM. Her research examines open source projects that have contributions from both paid staff and volunteers.

Alas, I’ve not had a chance to watch, but you can see her presentation here:
http://mirror.geeksoc.org/fosdem/2012/maintracks/k.1.105/Caret_and_Stick.webm

Leiden start-up looking for expertise

Nick Hogan has posted the following to the LxP (Leiden Expats) Yahoo group and it might be of interest:

Launching a tech start-up based in Leiden and looking for technical personnel and/or networks of engineers and data scientists. If you have any experience in the following areas or know others who do, please drop me a line.

- Ruby and RoR
- Pentaho
- Big Data BI
- MySQL & PostgreSQL DBA
- Linode, AWS and Rackspace hosting and API programming

Nick’s email address is: nickATnickhoganDOTcom