Shi and Kriss demonstrated the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset with a number of brave souls taking up the challenge; their recording of the session is at copy.com.

We had a general discussion around installing UEFI secure boot and then looked at a couple of April Fool RFCs: RFC 1149 and RFC 1925.

We had an impromptu Show and Tell this month. Alice explained how the classical approach to scaling websites was no longer appropriate for websites serving many pages. The time taken to generate material from a database, render it and despatch it was typically 6-800ms. You could reduce the load where many of the requests were for the same data by adding a cache or squid proxy. But this could create further problems keeping the cache or proxy up-to-date.

David S introduced memtest86+ which can diagnose faulty RAM which may cause random crashes, the storage of faulty data, incorrect checksums and a range of inconsistent errors.

Kriss and Shi introduced the co-operative Spies vs Ghosts game they had devised for the Raspberry PiRaspberry Pi Hack Day.

David C gave us a photographic tour of Airedale Fab Lab and suggested that we should organise a trip there one Saturday.

Andy kicked us off with a look at GIMP 2.8 and some of the new features. We also got a demo on using the GIMP to produce simple web graphics and for photo enhancement. There was some interesting discussion about how this versions allows GIMP to look and feel more like Photoshop, but also about how the integration of Photoshop into the Adobe suite of tools means that, while GIMP can easily create print ready artwork, hard core Photoshopers are still not likely ot make the switch.

Gimp 2.8 is not available in some distros, so the PPA for Ubuntu 12.04 (also works on Mint 13 (Maya) is:
http://www.ubuntugeek.com/how-to-install-gimp-2-8-2-in-ubuntu-12-04-precise.html

David gave us the 4th instalment in his series on the introduction to the command line. Alice pre-empted much of his talk as becoming customary, and as usual, ‘we all learned something’

Downloads:

•  Command Line (4) Slides (.odp 0.5MB)
• GIMP 2.8 Introduction (.odp 0.6MB)

Alice showed us how to use Selenium to record actions on a webpage and turn them into tests.
These are the links you need:

• http://seleniumhq.org/projects/ide/
• https://saucelabs.com/

Some talk about Cuttlefish: https://apps.ubuntu.com/cat/applications/cuttlefish/  – which will adapt your environment to your changing circumstances.

Dave continued his command line talk which was NOT called the Human Centipede, but had a lot to do with pipes. A link to the presentation is coming.

Also it was our Birthday. Thanks to Richard for the Cake (it was not a lie!).

David pointed out that in Unix everything is either an operation or something being operated on.
The things being operated on are files in the filesystem which he pointed out resembles the humble potato.

The first instalment of David’s introdution to the command line and the latest adventures with Raspberry-Pi followed by a look at Ada Lovelace’s contribution to computing are among items on the agenda.