February 20th, 2007
I reached La Bande Passante about a quarter of an hour after 7pm and was greeted at the door by Robin Millette. I knew Robin virtually from the MLUG mailing list and it was good to see him in person. There were already about 10 members of the MLUG around the table, almost all of them with their laptops connected to the net.
People were going around introducing themselves to the group, and Robin graciously handed me a chair and I then took a seat in between Denny, who has recently joined the mailing list, and Luis.
Robin hopped into a kind of dentist an optometrist’s chair (I should have noticed – it’s not a reclining seat), which was quite fun, and we spoke about the MLUG, FACIL, and the Montreal Tech League. We had an interesting conversation about information-sharing, news aggregation, microformats and Firefox 3, which will be an information broker.
I mentioned to him how our content online now is getting more and more cluttered with icons, and that these should really be meta information and thus be captured and treated by the browser.
I told him about Operator, a Firefox extension which helps work with microformats where they are available.
Denny works in Finance for Desjardins Securities and so I spoke to him about my interests about Finance, and why I was plotting charts at different resolutions as mentioned in the previous post namely to test two things, one of which is the Elliott wave theory. The other one has to do with Nicolas Darvas.
Denny also had PC Linux OS 2007 running on his laptop, and he learned about Beryl on the spot with a little help from Jeremy and Luis, as PCLinux OS comes pre-configured with it and with additional GUI goodies.
Luis and I also spoke about where he’s currently working, CN. They have a huge IT department. Luis was very knowledgeable about Linux and was occasionally helping out a member on his right.
The introductions were interspersed with impromptu chats about Linux, of course, and thus we took longer than one could imagine. In the meantime, more people were coming in. I believe we were about 15 attendants.
For my introduction, I talked about my professional background, open-source involvement history and where I come from.
Leslie, whom I advised to try Ruby on Rails on the mailing list, was present too and it was nice to meet him in person. We talked about our respective professional backgrounds. Leslie was involved in some big projects with ERPs, namely Baan.
I asked Jeremy about his choice of Drupal for the new MLUG website, which is now online.
We were treated to a demo of Linutop by Martin-Eric Racine who came in from Finland to demo his product on the projection screen. He’s a contributor to both Debian and Ubuntu.
I asked Robin to tell me more about Koumbit, and he pointed me to a brochure on the table. Since I had already visited their website before by following a link through Robin’s web presence, it was better to discuss it some more with Robin and Marco.
And so we headed downstairs, and the three of us had a great conversation about Koumbit, its purpose, and its ‘Open Business Model’. The Koumbit team are doing great things and they specialize on Drupal and the open-source AlternC for multi-site management. Moreover, the Koumbit team contribute back to the open-source community by working on AlternC itself. That is to be commended.
They also help out whenever they can by working with non-profits, so if you need effective full-blown content-management systems or website with additional features, make sure you check them out. Your investment will also help fund non-profit organizations.
Marco sent me a document made by someone who studied the Koumbit model for a year with a sociological perspective. This was another incidence of synchronicity, as the very same day, I was looking at sociological perspectives on the Silicon Valley phenomenon.
Marco told me to try and attend a Koumbit meeting and I probably will soon. Marco and I talked a little about the current Montreal Tech Scene and collaborative projects. He mentioned RoCoCoCamp and expressed his wish that anglophone and francophone people in the local tech scene work more together, something to which I can only agree as it has been on my mind for the past two weeks. Robin said that we would probably do other MLUG meetings soon.
Just before I left, I noticed that there were still a group of members upstairs although we were way past the ending time for the meeting. I conducted a surprise poll and about 80% of the users – an overwhelming majority – were using Canonical’s Ubuntu or some variant thereof. Some used Gentoo, and some mentioned Debian (Ubuntu is based on Debian) and Leslie was trying Fedora.
I made my exit into the Montreal night and headed to metro Crémazie to go back home.
It was a pleasure to meet some of the members in person and to learn about PCLinux OS, Koumbit, Drupal and see the absolutely amazing Beryl in live action.
