I alluded in the previous post to enhancing or augmenting an IRC channel by running a bot that has useful services. I’ll get to that in the next post. Unfortunately the power supply of my ShivaPlug died so I need to get a new one and get my super python bot or supybot back online. I look forward to speaking with people about grantbow.com/irc.html intended to help people get started. Your feedback here or via email would be most appreciated.

The BerkeleyLUG meets from noon to three on the second and fourth Sunday of each month at Bobby G’s Pizzeria. Our May 26th meeting is going on now.

It’s so important a tool I have started writing a web page on my website to help people get started. Your feedback here or via email would be most appreciated.

The BerkeleyLUG meets on the second and fourth Sunday of each month at Bobby G’s Pizzeria. Our May 12th meeting is in about an hour. I look forward to seeing people there. Happy Mother’s Day!

• Commons

Commons have been around for thousands of years. Digital commons were made possible when digital media, the Internet and free software. Due to popular misunderstandings some people proposed the use of open source though this has not been universally adopted and this term only properly refers to source code. Many related social movements have sprung up as described by the wikipedia Category:Open_methodologies. It is a corruption of the ideas to say that the opposite of private is always "big government."

example: public transportation – We discussed transportation at the meeting today quite a bit. We lamented the proliferation of traffic and automobiles in the SF Bay Area at the expense of public transportation like AC Transit, BART, ferries, the SF cable cars and the older East Bay Key System. The parallels of the National City Lines doing away with the Key System and reminds me of the legal use of patents and legislation in the US to take away one’s right to root their own mobile phone if purchased after January 26, 2013 and change the bootloaders of general computing devices using UEFI locking. Just because you are a conspiracy theorist doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you, right? Time will tell.

• Science

"Scientific inquiry is generally intended to be as objective as possible in order to reduce biased interpretations of results. Another basic expectation is to document, archive and share all data and methodology so they are available for careful scrutiny by other scientists, giving them the opportunity to verify results by attempting to reproduce them." (wikipedia) The common practice of politicizing science seems to be in direct contrast to these aims.

example: Higgs Boson – For those familiar with the Fedora community and Scientific Linux , CERN’s announcement a few months ago of essentially finding the Higgs Boson (what gives mass to all matter) is not only a historic finding in physics but a proud example of the efforts of free and open source software being put to good use. The scientific method itself requires transparency and validation (full disclosure) which is impossible in secrecy. Scientific communities all over the world using open source and sharing their findings are leading adopters of the increasingly common use of transparently developed and secure applications and operating systems on servers, phones and desktops. CERN’s announcement is the culmination of decades of experiments and fulfills one of the primary reasons the Large Hadron Collider at CERN was built. Finding the Higgs boson turns out to be a tremendous counter example to the sometimes unscientific claims made by proprietary software vendors.

example: Trusted Computing – Last year Cory Doctorow gave a talk on the coming-century-war-against-your-computer. While security can be used to lock people out of their own purchased hardware it can also be used to validate that you are running exactly what you think you are running on your own hardware. I had not heard of a TPM or the Trusted Computing Group before listening to his talk.

The stereotype of user groups is narrow discussion of technical topics irrelevant to most people. My experiences at groups such as ours has not confirmed this stereotype. The BerkeleyLUG meets on the second and fourth Sunday of each month at Bobby G’s Pizzeria. I hope to see you at the next meeting scheduled in May.

I am not sure which wifi drivers the FSF approves of these days but the list must be quite limited. Video drivers have gotten better lately but when traveling and connecting to a number of video projectors things need to just work. The move away from Fourth, proprietary Award and proprietary Phoenix BIOSes to locked down BIOSes and boot loaders implementations using UEFI – if implemented well, can actually help validate that the OS you wanted when setting up the machine is the OS you are actually running.

Sometimes there’s a gap in functionality between different solutions. All things are usually not equal when making these choices. A key reason that commercial and proprietary software solutions exist is to address problems people are having with their existing solutions. They can pay developers to focus on and solve people’s problems. The complexity

If I just want to run a web browser, how much does it matter how I run it? If running Firefox on Windows, am I more or less ethical than when I’m running Firefox on Linux? How about Firefox on FreeBSD vs. Darwin vs. Apple MacOS? How about Chrome (or Chromium) vs. Firefox vs. Midori? How about running Internet Explorer in virtualbox to access sites that require it? How about iOS vs. Android if carriers lock them down and it’s illegal to unlock them in the US anyway? How about a tablet running Windows 8 vs. a Raspberry Pi? What about trying to watch an HDCP protected Blue Ray? It might be necessary if DVDs become less common.

When I’m using relatively free hardware, operating system and browser to talk to facebook or using Google apps, does this invalidate all my other choices? What do you think?

One great resource for learning about the different flavors of Linux and their features is DistroWatch.com. It has a large index of the different Linux distributions, as well as reviews, summaries, and comparisons between versions to get you started. The beauty of open source software is that you can even use and modify the code from other distributions to make your own. If you’ve got some spare time, Why not try a new distro today?

We hope you join us for our meeting in Berkeley at Bobby G’s Pizzeria. We meet on the second and fourth Sundays of each month.

http://www.ted.com/talks/melissa_marshall_talk_nerdy_to_me.html

We hope you join us for our meeting in Berkeley today at Bobby G’s Pizzeria. We meet on the second and fourth Sundays of each month.

• Android OS for mobile devices. Android had 500 million devices activated in total.
• Unity is the Ubuntu default user interface for desktop, laptop, TV, Phone and Tablet form factors
• Chromium OS is designed for netbooks and sold bundled as Chromebooks. ZDnet’s SJVN is quite bullish about them.
• Firefox OS for phones.

Since I just voted with my wallet at Best Buy in purchasing a Samsung XE303 and enjoy using it I’m curious to hear what you think about this movement.

We hope you join us for our meeting in Berkeley Sunday at Bobby G’s Pizzeria. We meet on the second and fourth Sundays of each month.

We hope you join us for our meeting in Berkeley today at Bobby G’s Pizzeria. We meet on the second and fourth Sundays of each month.

Please join us today on the second Sunday of December at Bobby G’s Pizzeria in Berkeley from noon to three if you wish to celebrate this anniversary or just talk about anything related to Linux.

This 20th anniversary youtube story of Linux has some eye popping, validated claims. 75% of stock exchanges and 95% of supercomputers run Linux. Many TVs now use Linux internally. Every Android or iOS/Darwin phone or tablet is a unix computer.

Our berkeleylug.com group meets on the second and fourth Sundays from noon to three at Bobby G’s Pizzeria. Please join us for our meeting Sunday, Nov 25th to learn more. Happy Thanksgiving!