20 May 2006 - Elephants Dream
Topics
Elephants Dream screening
Attendance
9
Presentation Resources
Meeting Announcement (txt)
Meeting Flyer (png)
Meeting Notes
It was a larger than usual turnout on Saturday for a meeting that was supposed to be on firewalling with iptables. I was somewhat surprised because we just had a presentation on iptables and firewalling in December. Nevertheless, several people remarked to me that this was something that they wanted (and needed) to know more about. Unfortunately, our presenter had a family emergency at the last minute and could not present. Given the interest and higher attendance (~20), we will probably schedule another meeting on this topic in the near future.
On the bright side, Abdul was lucky enough to procure a copy of the 425MB open source movie Elephants Dream before it was slashdotted. So, we got to have a screening of the first completely open source movie! With a run-time of only 10 minutes, it is quite an impressive demonstration of CGI animation and craftsmanship. We will definitely be showing this at future events for those who missed it.
Abdul made a valiant off-the-cuff effort to demo Blender, the open source tool used to create the movie. Maybe we'll be able to find an actual graphical artist to present on that some day... :-)
After that, we had a couple of questions from the audience, which quickly evolved into a general free-for-all of conversation and geek revelry.
I played around with the new Wizard's Kid-Safe liveCD distro on the projector. It's a pretty nice distro, based on the new 0.93 ME beta version of PCLinuxOS. Other than an obvious NTP bug, it's well configured for out-of-the-box use by my 5 year-old nephew.
Oh, and there was an impromptu swap-meet in the parking lot with two people getting rid of a bunch of old hardware. If you have old hardware, please never throw it in the trash. Computer parts are full of toxins and heavy metals that have to be disposed of properly. Lucas County now takes a lot of this stuff for a modest fee. Here are some links to a couple of recent articles on recycling in the Toledo area (and PDFs for after the links break):
Overall it turned out to be a pretty successful event.
