[Israel.pm] Report on Yesterday's Meeting

[Shlomi Fish]

Here is my report on yesterday's meeting:

We gathered in the second floor. When I arrived only Uri Bruck was there. We 
started discussing stuff, among it:

1. Whether Open Source and the Creative Commons were Socialistic, Communistic, 
pro-Capitalistic, non-Capitalistic, anti-Capitalistic, etc. Later on, we 
decided that it did not matter whether it was Socialistic or not, as long as 
we all agreed that Open Source was "good for the Jews".

2. We discussed the eBay's acquisition of shopping.com (formerly dealtime) for 
several hundred millions dollars (which I surprisingly did not hear about - 
can anyone give me a URL?). 

I probably have a lot to say about #1, but I'll leave it to another message. 
We helped Roman carry the Bourekas and Beverages, and then enjoyed eating 
them. Then Roman's presentation started.

Roman's presentation was about using Perl to construct and manage a Swiss 
Tournament. He covered a lot of the theory and then went on to cover the Perl 
implementation (without showing any code).

Then we had a break. A new guy (Something Perelmutter) showed up and we talked 
with him. He now studies Mechanical Engineering in Tel Aviv University, and 
is a Reserve Student (Atudai). He is heavily involved in the Bney-Yehuda 
Football group - started as their webmaster and now is involved with the 
children. We touched a bit about how it was relatively unusual for hackers 
(even male) to like spectator sports, and Offer asked him if he can get 
tickets to the game for his co-workers.

We also discusses tabs vs. spaces, whether political or philosophical 
discussions were boring or not, who convinces who in such discussions, etc. 
There also was an interesting insight about the fact that the Hamakor Bylaws 
caused many discussions to require the people who conveyed opinions to tell 
how much exactly did they contributed to open-source.

Then came Shlomo's presentation. The slides are available online (URL?) and 
the problem was very interesting, and there was a lot of involvement from the 
listeners. I suggested a solution to the problem which was different from 
Shlomo's solution, and also could be generalized. Shlomo's solution was 
considerably more complex, and some people wondered how he could think of it 
At the end of the presentation, we took out the screen, and I wrote the Perl 
code for my solution. We had 30 minutes to do the same for Shlomo's solution, 
but we decided against it.

Then Offer asked how many people wanted to go to the cafe, but only three or 
four people wanted to go, so he decided to skip it.

The meeting was attended by 8 or 9 people, which was relatively low, and even 
many regulars did not attend.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

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Shlomi Fish      shlomif at iglu.org.il
Homepage:        http://www.shlomifish.org/

Tcl is LISP on drugs. Using strings instead of S-expressions for closures
is Evil with one of those gigantic E's you can find at the beginning of 
paragraphs.