Items Discussed (Re: February meeting)

I kept a few notes during the meeting and I thought I should type them
out before I lose this little slip of paper ;)

* There was talk about having the meeting downtown next month... but
apparently the place will be closed, so no dice. The main reason for
the suggested change was because they have beer ;) But I have
volunteered the beer my parents left behind from the last time they
visited for the March meeting, consisting of:

4x Isenbeck Premium Dark (German beer) 330 ml @ 4.8% alcohol
1x Monty Python's Holy (Gr)ail 500 ml (novelty beer) @4.7% alcohol
1x 500 ml Slavutich (Ukranian beer) @ 5.3% alcohol

So I guess its going to be a BYOB night ;)

* Speaking of beer, this was mentioned at the meeting:
http://edition.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/americas/02/10/ultimate.beer/

"Samuel Adams' Utopias, at $100 a bottle not only the most expensive
beer on the planet, but at 25 percent alcohol by some distance the
strongest as well (it is listed as such in the Guinness Book of
Records.)"

* If you use Ubuntu and tried Kubuntu and are now stuck with the
Kubuntu splash screen during boot, see
http://ubuntu.wordpress.com/2006/02/20/restoring-the-ubuntu-usplash-after-a-kubuntu-install/
(apparently all you have to run is "sudo update-alternatives --config
usplash-artwork.so" though you might need to uninstall
kubuntu-artwork-usplash first)

* Does anyone have a working HP-UX system they'd be willing to part
with? It is apparently needed to run some older hardware...

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS-tan
"the OS-tan or simply OS Girls are the personification of several
operating systems (OSes), most famously Windows, by various amateur
Japanese artists."
"The concept is reported to have begun as a personification of the
common perception of Windows Me as unstable and prone to frequent
crashes. Discussions on Futaba Channel likened this to the stereotype
of a fickle, troublesome girl. The personification became expanded,
with the creation of Me-tan (dated to August 6, 2003) followed by the
other characters."

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laserdisc
"Like a CD, a laserdisc has pits and lands back-coated with a layer of
vaporised aluminum as the reflective substrate, but Laserdisc video
was stored in analog format. So whereas on an audio CD (or DVD) the
pits and lands will signify binary codes, on an LD the pits are
created using frequency modulation of an analog signal, with the
frequency carrier encoded using pulse-width modulation."

Would someone care to decipher that? Regardless, I will likely be
bringing my LD player to the next meeting (we can watch Pretty Sammy
vs Bill Gates if anyone wants to ;)

"To make matters worse, many early LDs were not manufactured properly;
sometimes a substandard adhesive was used to sandwich together the two
sides of the disc, causing it to delaminate slightly. This would allow
air in, which would cause the metallic part of the discs to oxidize.
This eventually destroyed the disc as the oxidized aluminum lost its
reflective property, a process known as "laser rot" among LD
enthusiasts. (Early CDs suffered similar problems, including a
notorious batch of defective discs manufactured by Philips-DuPont
Optical in Europe during the early 1990s.)"

* Where can one buy fresh horseradish here in Saskatoon?

* Don't forget, Jim needs that old USB thumb drive.

* In Synaptic (System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager)
to find out information about a package (e.g. that's showing a new
version available), click the package name (e.g.
linux-image-2.6.12-10-386) then from the menu select Package ->
Download Changelog. And like I said in the mettings, while upgrading
packages (including the kernel) isn't necessary, they wouldn't offer
it for download if it wasn't recommended ;)

* To look up distro information, see distrowatch.com (click on the
distro's name or use the pull-down menu), e.g. for Ubuntu, the linux
version used for the different releases was: warty - 2.6.8.1; hoary -
2.6.10; breezy - 2.6.12 (Scott mentioned breezy was causing problems
on some computers where hoary didn't)

And that about sums up my notes ;)

CK

On 2/21/06, Scott Walde <scott@waldetech.ca> wrote:
> Wow. This one really snuck up on me. Tomorrow, Wednesday February
> 22nd, 2006, is the last Wednesday of the month. So, as usual, the
> monthly SLG meeting will be held at my place (see the website for
> directions: http://www.slg.org/index.cgi?MonthlyMeetings ) at 7:30pm.
> Everyone is welcome. Coffee will be on.
Received on Sat Feb 25 06:34:57 2006