Spring 2012

Thursday, May 24th at 7:00PM in Dreese 369, Daniel Thau will be presenting Bedrock Linux. Bedrock Linux is a Linux distribution created by Daniel with the aim of making most of the (often seemingly mutually-exclusive) benefits of various other Linux distributions available simultaneously and transparently. For example, if one would like a rock-solid stable base (for example, from Debian or a RHEL clone) yet still have easy access to cutting-edge packages (from, say, Arch Linux), Bedrock will provide a means to achieve this.

Elections for the OSU Open Source Club officer positions are currently planned for May 17th, 2012. They will take place in the normal meeting room (Dreese 369) and at the normal time (7:00PM EDT).

If the date does not work for you and you are a voting club member (ie, you are a student and have attended at least one meeting prior to the vote), please contact the club offers as soon as possible and we will see what we can do.

The OSC will be hosting its second LAN of the academic year on May 12th, 2012.

Due to difficulties scheduling, it will start at 2:00PM and run until 11:30PM (ie, 9.5 hours) in the Ohio Union's Interfaith Prayer and Reflection room. Bring Your Own Computer.

This Thursday, will be a presentation on Python. This presentation will cover many of the basics and bring people up to speed of creating applications in the language. The crash course into Python's basics will be "follow along" and questions are encouraged. The later half of the presentation will be presenting clever and nifty ways to accomplish various tasks that can be done in Python that are easier than building in other languages.

Thursday, May 3rd at 7PM in Dreese 369, Brad Hollander will be presenting the Android operating system. Android is Google's open-source mobile operating system for smartphones and tablets, built on top of a customized Linux kernel. Applications are written in Java and are compiled to be run on the Dalvik virtual machine.

Thursday, April 26th at 7PM in Caldwell 369, Alex Lingo will be presenting an old club favorite known as "This Week in Slashdot". Slashdot (commonly abbreviated as /.) is a website located at http://slashdot.org that deals in news for the nerdy. Readers submit articles which are then accepted or rejected by editors and then published on the site. From there, the readers have huge discussions about every aspect of the article which can be very funny/interesting/insightful/etc and oft prove to be a very good read.

Thursday, April 19th at 7:00PM in Dreese 369, Alex Lingo will demonstrating the basic usage of the Blender 3D modeling/rendering program. Blender is an powerful open-source application that is as powerful as professional 3D modeling packages, and has been used to create commercial and open-source 3D films. Several of the Open Movie Project films will be shown during the presentation!

Please come prepared with a 3-button mouse and a keyboard with a number pad if you wish to follow along.

On Thursday the 12th, in Dreese Lab room 369, Daniel Thau will present the Sage mathematics program. Sage is intended to be an open source alternative to software such as Magma, Maple, Mathematica and Matlab. Based around Python, it is quite pleasant to script and surprising capable.

Thursday, April 5th 2012 at 7:00PM in Dreese Lab room 359, Daniel Thau will present on Portable Unix Shell Scripting. This presentation will partially depend on last quarter's Unix Utility talk, but if you missed it you should still be fine.

THIS WEEK IN OPEN SOURCE!:

Ryan Karason will be teaching on open source hardware. The purpose of the lecture is to discuss the basic principles of electricity as applied to circuitry and to introduce the open hardware prototyping platform created by Arduino. If you are interested in getting involved in making your own circuits or better understanding others' circuits so you can hack them, show up this Thursday; March 29, 1012 at 7PM in 266 Dreese Laboratory.