No updates since March, so I guess I'm a little overdue.
In April I was re-elected to the OCLUG board of directors, and am now acting as President. It feels as if OCLUG is stagnating a little, and perhaps we are losing some people because of the wide knowledge gap in our audience (we are almost evenly divided between complete newbies and very advanced developers). Some have been suggesting splitting the meetings in two in order to cater to both groups. The problem is that we already tried this in the past with mixed results (granted, that was many years ago). However, I would like to examine this possibility once more to see if:
- it will be financially feasible (my guess is "yes");
- it will generate a higher turnout and (hopefully) increase the membership;
- we can find two sets of speakers each month (even finding one set of speakers each month can be a challenge at times).
Despite my fears of the group stagnating, there have been some notable meetings in the previous months. OCLUG held it's annual Linux in the Wild BBQ in July, which was a success. Many kernel hackers, in town to attend the Linux Symposium, were welcomed by our local group. In June, Nathan Sidwell gave an excellent talk about GCC 3.4 and future directions for GCC.
Meanwhile, I was away in various parts of Europe during the month of August, so I'm still catching up on everything that I missed here at home. Today, my body finally moved away from Continental Europe Time (CET) and moved directly to Mountain Time (a bit of an overcorrection as I reside in the Eastern time zone). The trip was great and I managed to not touch a computer for the entire month. Of course, this had an effect not unlike compressing a coil, which has resulted in almost constant computer use since my return (barring sleep, the rare meal eaten at the dinner table and some reading time - about computer architecture, of course).
Before my trip, I had attended the Linux Symposium, and managed to win an AMD64-FX processor. It looks like I'll actually build a system with it as soon as I find a source of income to fund the purchase of a motherboard, memory and other necessities not included. People at the conference were joking that it's a wonderful -500$ prize. It will also mean that I will have fourth architecture in my home (x86, x86-64, PowerPC and ARM, when I get my messed up NetWinder to work).