meetings

We meet at 6:30pm on the second Tuesday of each month at the Farmington Community Library.

Topics for the September 9th, 2014 meeting include:

Imagemagick

Ever needed to crop, resize, color-correct, or convert an image from one format to another? That’s a simple operation for something like The GIMP. But What about 10 images? 50 images? 5,000 images? That’s a lot of photos. Wouldn’t it be nice to script that up somehow? Imagemagick is a set of utilities to convert, identify, mogrify, composite, compare, stream, display, animate, import, or “conjure” your images. Jim McQuillan and Tony Bemus will talk about how they use Imagemagick to do their heavy-duty image processing. You’ll never look at your image processing the same way again.

VASSAL

Many of the early computer games were designed to emulate board games. Games like Chess, Go, and Reversi are popular board games that have computer opponents. But what about the latest renaissance in board gaming? What’s the best way to play games like Ascension, Through the Ages, Dominant Species, and more? The VASSAL Engine is not only an open source way to play board games locally or online, but it’s also a way to port games to be played on the computer. Craig Maloney will give a brief introduction to this innovative and fun engine for board gaming, and will introduce some games that you can have fun playing using VASSAL.

Plus we’ll have our usual features (Jobs Looking For People, People Looking for Jobs, news and events), and much much more. Hope to see you there!

We meet at 6:30pm on the second Tuesday of each month at the Farmington Community Library.

Topics for the August 12th, 2014 meeting include:

Sublime Text

Few topics spark more heated debate for developers than the choice of editor. (Witness the countless bloodshed in the on-going Emacs vs vi wars.) In the wake of these battles of editor preference Sublime Text emerges with the simple goal of becoming “…the editor you’ll fall in love with” Sublime Text is a cross-platform text editor, programmable in Python with many powerful built-in features and many more add-ons to smooth programming in all your favorite languages.  Wolf will show both built-in features and favorite add-ons so you know whether to give Sublime Text a try. Will love finally reign in the editor wars? Come and find out!

Wolf is a long-time software engineer and two-year user of Sublime Text. His list of projects include Mozilla and Sourceforge and is one of the few developers with his own IMDb page.

Commands-in-depth: Rsync

This month we launch a brand-new series looking into comands-in-depth. The first command we’ll detail is the workhorse command rsync. Rsync is quite simply the most efficient and fast way of ensuring large files are transferred safely between devices. Craig Maloney and JIm McQuillan will talk about basic functionality with rsync, when to use rsync (hint: more than you are now) and highlight some advanced usage. Come explore this powerful command and learn some new tricks along the way.

Plus we’ll have our usual features (Jobs Looking For People, People Looking for Jobs, news and events), and much much more. Hope to see you there!

(Learn more and register for the August 2014 meeting, or give us feedback about the meeting. Additional material for the meeting is available from the videos / notes page)