The Arduino is an open source hardware micro-controller. University professors saw how hard it was for their engineering students to learn electronics and designed a new platform. Now you don’t have to be an electrical engineer to get started in robotics or home automation. You have to learn a few technical issues but not all of them at once and not in the same depth. Using sample open source code I will demonstrate a simple web server. While a web server might not be the most practical use of an Arduino it makes for an interesting example. It is fairly easy and inexpensive to use equipment like this.

Meetup.com

This meeting will be the first HackGuelph managed on Meetup.com. I’ve paid for six months, which will hopefully be enough time to evaluate its value.

Please join the group and RSVP for the Arduino workshop!

Where and when

ThreeFortyNine
Thursday, March 15, 2012
7:00 p.m.

Meeting outline

Here’s the blurb that Brian sent me:

The Eclipse Application Platform, the underpinning of the Eclipse Java IDE, is now over 10 years old.  This year’s update will be based on the results from the E4 project, an initiative to revitalize the platform by simplifying and coalescing the many APIs and services developed over the years.  One new technology is use of CSS to provide styling and skinning support.  We’ll review some of the basics of CSS, demonstrate how CSS can be used, and describe some of the challenges involved.

This meeting will be structured as a presentation, not a workshop.

Where and when

ThreeFortyNine
Thursday, February 16, 2012
7:00 p.m.

What is PGP?

PGP is a technology that can be used for authenticated and encrypted communication without shared passwords.

Meeting outline

• A short history of PGP and the OpenPGP standard
• GnuPG, a standards-compliant cross-platform OpenPGP implementation
• Installing GnuPG and the importance of security while doing so
• Creating a keypair
• Signing keys and the web of trust
• Encrypting and decrypting data
• Signing data and verifying signatures
• Key servers
• OpenPGP plugins for your email

How can I prepare?

Bring a laptop running Linux, Windows, or OSX. (Disclaimer: I haven’t tested any of this on OSX, though it should work just fine.)

Hackdays are awesome gatherings of hackers/developers who work either in a team or alone to build applications with publicably available APIs. We started with HackTO in Toronto and had such a great time that we rolled out HackDays across Canada. Our first destination outside of Toronto was Montreal. hackMTL was a blast and the winners are enjoying their awesome prizes! We just wrapped HackOTT in Ottawa and HackWaterloo in Waterloo when Brydon Gillis who started Guelph’s first and only co-working space invited us to Guelph. So that’s where we are headed on Saturday February 18, 2012. So join us.

Developer tickets only cost $10 and include breakfast, lunch and snacks which is a pretty awesome deal.

If you want to go, please register on the Guestlist page.

Introduction

Ten surveys were filled out. I had hoped to get more data than this, but it might not matter because many of the responses seemed to support one another. Hopefully the data is representative. These responses will be used to direct the group this year, though we can also change course as we go so keep the feedback coming!

I didn’t do any statistical analysis, and I’m not sure which results are mathematically significant. Deal with it, Andrew .

Scheduling

Most people want to

• meet once or twice per month
• at ThreeFortyNine
• on Tuesdays or Thursdays
• a little bit later in the evening.

With that in mind, in 2012 we will be meeting at ThreeFortyNine on the third Thursday of each month at 7:00 p.m. starting on February 16. I hope that meeting once per month instead of twice per month will help me to keep on top of things a little bit better, although most respondents also said that short notice of topics wasn’t a big deal.

Look for a blog post about our February meeting shortly.

Content

Most respondents want to do some programming or lots of programming during meetings, and most people seem eager for work-along topics. There were also some comments asking for more technical content, and the words “hardcore” and “hack” came up once or twice. Expect to bring your laptop to meetings.

There is interest in guest speakers, but it seems clear that workshops from our members are also very popular. I welcome suggestions for guest speakers and volunteers to present, as well as topic requests. I do hope to announce topics a little bit more in advance, so please get in touch soon!

There is quite a lot of interest in working on a project together. This is interesting, and a little bit tricky because of our varied backgrounds. I’m not sure how to approach this, so please let me know what you suggest.

There is an even split of users who want to use HackGuelph time to work on their own projects and users who don’t. I think that we’ll shelve this idea for now, but it may come back later in the year.

Communication

The top three methods for keeping in touch with the group were the Twitter account, the mailing list and the old blog. These numbers were all quite close, though I hope that the blog-followers have all found their way here by now. I will keep all three of these things going.

There is also a small group of users who hang out in the Guelph Web Maker Meetup IRC channel (#gwmm on Freenode). Feel free to check that out as well.

Final thoughts

There were a few responses that suggested other directions for the group to take, and if you are disappointed with what you have read above I apologize. The support for these decisions was pretty clear, and I hope that everybody is still able to find some of what they want in our meetings.

See you in February!

Anybody interested in HackGuelph is encouraged to complete the survey, regardless of their past attendance.

Having said that, this site does support RSS autodiscovery. Many browsers will automatically find our RSS feeds and make them available via a small icon in the address bar. Or, that’s how it used to work.

Unfortunately, Chrome requires a browser extension for this. I’m not sure what their reasoning is for not including it by default, but I highly recommend installing that extension. It’s always the first thing I do after installing the browser.

Firefox 8 seems not to include the RSS icon in the address bar anymore. I was shocked to discover that it was moved to the bookmarks menu way back in Firefox 4! I really don’t understand this decision, and it would seem that many other people agree with me. In fact there are at least two extensions to bring the functionality back to users of Firefox 4+. (Edit: As Bob points out, in Firefox it is possible to add a “Subscribe” button without resorting to extensions. I would still prefer to see something like this in the default interface.)

And even though IE8 (and I think also IE7) had decent support for RSS autodiscovery, it looks like a default install of IE9 doesn’t. You need to enable the command bar or use a deeply hidden menu option. Neither is very appealing.

Sadly, Opera is the only major browser (yes, I consider it to be a major browser) that seems to ship with support for first-class RSS autodiscovery in its latest version. I’m not surprised that Opera does this right, but I am surprised that it stands alone.

I have a strong preference for autodiscovery. Things that the browser does well shouldn’t be repeated in HTML [see "RSS Is the Browser’s Responsibility" about halfway down]. But if people want to see a feed link within the page body itself, I’m happy to be overruled. What say you?

The HackGuelph User Survey is now available! Please take a few minutes to fill it out. The results collected in the survey will help to shape HackGuelph in the coming year. All questions are optional and the survey is anonymous.

You’ll have to forgive me for being so late on this. I had hoped to get the user survey out before Christmas, but I’ve clearly missed that by more than a week. Because of this, and because the results of the survey may lead to scheduling changes anyway, I’m not planning on scheduling any new HackGuelph meetings until February.

In the meantime there are a number of other great events coming up:

• The Guelph PHP Users Group is meeting on January 18. Their guest speaker this month will be Chris Hartjes.
• The second Guelph K-W Game Jam will be on January 21. Try your luck at making a complete game in 8 hours!
• DemoCampGuelph 19 is coming up on January 25. Get in touch with @ChrisUnfiltered or @Brydon if you want to demo. If you’d prefer to watch (and not demo) you can register on the website.
• The Guelph Web Maker Meetup will be starting up again soon, but no dates have been announced yet. Keep an eye on their Meetup page.

December is a crazy month for many of us, so we’ll only be having one meeting (on December 1). The regularly scheduled third-Thursday meeting is canceled.

Instead of a regular meeting on December 1 I’d like to celebrate what we’ve accomplished this year. I’m suggesting a potluck at 349. Please use the comments on this post to discuss what you are planning to bring.

I would also like to try a tech book exchange. Most of us probably have some books on our shelves that we no longer use but that still contain good information. Bring a book that you no longer want and trade it for something else! (Please don’t buy a book to exchange—the whole point is to recycle something that’s already on your bookshelf. I’ll bring an extra or two in case we need them.)

~Chris

This Thursday Jeremy will be doing an introduction to Zend, a comprehensive PHP framework, from the perspective of a new user. Jeremy has been very vocal about his satisfaction with the Zend libraries. Come on out and see if this is the framework that you’ve been searching for!

As usual we’ll get started around 6:30 and head over to the Wooly when we’re done talking tech.

~Chris