A.M. Kuchling's
Home Page
Date: 2005-01-16 06:42:05.837335
Chapter Name: dchs
Meeting: dchs 2005-01-15
Body: I arrived in the area early, but at venue late... hard to park in
Bethesda. Note: Sat night in Bethesda != good time / place to meet.
We talked about gathering more people for the meetings, and decided to
leave the meeting schedule tentative until we can see who is coming
and from where. We also talked about having more than one group since
this is such a big area. We will contact other user groups, after we
get an email set up, asking people to tell us what nights would be
best for them (week day vs week end), where they are from, how far
they are willing to go, etc.
Two people (Angelo Bertolli, A.M. Kuchling) present.
Locations: Where to meet?
* Mr B. is in Gaithersburg MD; Mr K. is in Vienna VA
* Various locations in DC have free hotspots
* Several Fairfax libraries have meeting rooms available.
+ Public transport in Fairfax is very bad, though.
* Arlington Library is near Ballston
+ Do you need to be an Arlington resident to use their space?
* We probably can't decide on a location until there are more
members and we know where everyone lives/works.
* Could do meetings online via IRC or some other mechanism.
Finding members
* Local user groups
* University CS department (B. can go to U. of MD; K. can go to GMU
and GWU)
Ideas for things to do:
* Experimentation
+ B. would like to play with the Amoeba OS. (Some discussion of
Amoeba, Python, & MOSIX ensued.)
* Programming
+ B.'s project of a Pascal wrapper for SDL
* Discussion group
+ Read books, articles, or papers.
+ Watch MIT's CS lectures
* Learning languages
+ K. is interested in Lisp or OCaML.
+ e.g. we might read a chapter per month and do the exercises
+ Perhaps some members will already have projects in a language
of interest.
Actions
* Record minutes and post them. (Done.)
* Set up introductory web page for group
* Too early to bother setting up a mailing list -- wait until we
have more members
* Send notice of group to local Linux lists, & anywhere else we
think of