Upcoming Meetings

Unless otherwise noted, our meetings are held on the first Tuesday and third Monday of each month, from 7:00pm to 9:00pm.

Next Meeting:

Tuesday, June 5, 2012
- "Social Gathering"
Location: Crepeville

An informal social gathering over food at Crepeville in downtown Davis. Free WiFi Internet access available. Note: Crepeville only takes cash or check (an ATM is available in the back).

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Future Meetings:

Monday, June 18, 2012
Trevor Parscal and Roan Kattouw, Wikimedia Foundation - "Wikimedia and Wikipedia"
Location: Davis Public Library, Blanchard Room

Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is the non-profit organization behind Wikipedia and several other online collaborative wiki projects. The foundation's goal is to develop and maintain open content, wiki-based projects and to provide the full contents of those projects to the public free of charge.

Wikimedia currently runs on dedicated clusters of Ubuntu Linux servers, with a pair of OpenSolaris machines for ZFS. There are 400 servers in Tampa, Florida, and 60 in Amsterdam, as well as 450 in Virginia that are still being built out. The operation of Wikimedia depends on MediaWiki, a custom-made, free and open source wiki software platform written in PHP and built upon the MySQL database. (Ref.: Wikipedia (of course!))

About the Speakers:
Trevor Parscal has been working at the Wikimedia Foundation since 2008, focusing his engineering and design efforts on the front-end of MediaWiki. Key projects he's worked on include redesigning the look and feel of Wikipedia and creating ResourceLoader which optimizes the way JavaScript, CSS and image resources are sent to the client. His most recent work has been building a visual editor for Wikipedia.

Roan Kattouw has been a MediaWiki developer since 2007 and has been working for the Wikimedia Foundation since 2009. Roan has worked on usability improvements for Wikipedia and on ResourceLoader, a front-end resource delivery system, and is now working on building the visual editor with Trevor. Roan also works on various small things, ranging from JavaScript code review to MediaWiki backend hacking to deploying code on the cluster.

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Tuesday, July 3, 2012
- "Social Gathering"
Location: Crepeville

Social gathering over food at Crepeville restaurant in downtown Davis.

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Monday, July 16, 2012
Speaker TBA, Suse - "openSUSE Linux (exact topic TBA)"
Location: Davis Public Library, Blanchard Room

A technical talk on openSUSE Linux, presented by someone from SUSE. (Exact topic TBA).

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Tuesday, August 7, 2012
- "Social Gathering"
Location: Crepeville

Social gathering over food at Crepeville restaurant in downtown Davis.

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Monday, August 20, 2012
Pete Ippel, Fabricatorz - "Open Clip Art Library (OCAL)"
Location: Davis Public Library, Blanchard Room

The Open Clip Art Library (OCAL) project aims to create an archive of clip art that can be used for free for any use. It is the largest collaboration community that creates, shares and remixes clip art. All clipart is released to the public domain and may be used in any project for free and with no restrictions.

Started in early 2004 by Inkscape developers to collect designs of flags from all around the world, it progressed very well and the project goals were extended to generic clipart. It currently incorporates 10s of 1000s of images from over 2400 artists. Images are stored in Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format, often with thumbnails in Portable Network Graphics (PNG) raster format.

OCAL is powered by the Aiki Framework, created to build OCAL 3.0 in 2011, is a flexible PHP + MySQL (LAMP) web application framework that allows designers and programmers to easily create and work with existing content management systems from the web. The goal of Aiki Framework is to make a fast system for developing heavily trafficked communities where developers are used to editing source code, but can not directly because of necessary security precautions in running a web server.

About the Speaker:
Pete Ippel is a developer at Fabricatorz and artist. He is involved in the Open Clip Art Library as well as the Open Font Library, Qi-Hardware (copyleft hardware), and the Sharism movement.

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Tuesday, September 4, 2012
- "Social Gathering"
Location: Crepeville

Social gathering over food at Crepeville restaurant in downtown Davis.

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Monday, September 17, 2012
Stephen Chin, Lead Developer, WidgetFX - ""WidgetFX" JavaFX-based widget platform"
Location: To Be Announced

WidgetFX is a desktop widget platform written in the JavaFX Script language. It can run widgets written in either JavaFX Script or Java and takes advantage of the latest features in Java SE 6.

Note: Since first scheduling this talk, JavaFX 2 has been released, which will require a rewrite. Stephen will discuss what has changed in JavaFX, and what's needed to get WidgetFX ported, and how others can help.
Stephen Chin is the lead developer of WidgetFX and JFXtras, utilities and add-ons for JavaFX. He is the co-author of the book Pro JavaFX Platform.

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Tuesday, October 2, 2012
- "Social Gathering"
Location: Crepeville

Social gathering over food at Crepeville restaurant in downtown Davis.

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Monday, October 15, 2012
Steve Inness - "Home CNC Machining with Linux"
Location: To Be Announced

CNC (Computer Numerical Control) mills and lathes can be built relatively inexpensively by hobbyists. These machines can machine aluminum, steel, brass, plastic, and other materials. They can engrave aluminum or plastic. They can route and "V-carve" wood. They can make printed-circuit boards by machining off the thin copper layer.

This meeting will demonstrate actual machining, describe the electronics, and show how to install and use free open-source software under Linux.

Attendees will get a chance to take home their own engraved/machined object.

About LinuxCNC:
LinuxCNC (previously "Enhanced Machine controller") is an open source software system to implement numerical control capability — the automation of machine tools (e.g., milling machines and lathes) that are operated by abstractly-programmed commands (as opposed to controlled manually via handwheels or levers, or mechanically-automated via cams alone) — using general purpose computers (PCs).

Originally developed by NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology) as a 'reference implementaton' of the industry standard language for numerical control of machining operations (RS-274D, aka G-code), the project demonstrated the feasibility of an advanced numerical control system using off-the-shelf PC hardware running FreeBSD or Linux.

LinuxCNC provides several graphical user interfaces including one for touch screens, a "G-code" interpreter, a realtime motion planning system, operation of low-level machine electronics (such as sensors and motor drives), an easy-to-use "breadboard" layer (for quickly creating unique configurations for your machine), a software PLC (programmable logic controller).

A variety of interfaces are supported, and up to 9 axes can be moved simultaneously. It can operate true servos or stepper motors. Motion control features include: cutter radius and length compensation, path deviation limited to a specified tolerance, lathe threading, synchronized axis motion, adaptive feedrate, operator feed override, and constant velocity control. Support for non-Cartesian motion systems is provided via custom kinematics modules. Available architectures include hexapods (Stewart platforms and similar concepts) and systems with rotary joints to provide motion such as PUMA or SCARA robots. (Refs: linuxcnc.org and Wikipedia)

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Upcoming Meetings

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