Our next meeting is coming up! We’ll be converging on Packard’s in Northampton at 7:00pm on Thursday May 3rd. We will be at the library room, it’s behind the dining area down that hallway towards the bathroom.

Our next meeting is scheduled for April 19th, we’ll be meeting up at Panera Bread at 7:00pm.

Paul suggested to the list that we have the meeting following that at Packard’s in Northampton, that would be the May 3rd meeting. I think it’s a great idea, it’ll be fun to meet somewere else for a change and I like beer. This wouldn’t be a permanent thing, it would just be the May 3rd meeting.

What do you think? Vote on it!

Jyte uses OpenID to make sure no one votes twice, you can sign up on their website.

Update: Our May 3rd meeting will be at Packard’s! Paul has booked us the library room, we’re all set.

We have another meeting coming up on Thursday, April 5th. We’ll be gathering at Panera Bread in Hadley for 7:00. Please feel free to join us for some coffee and tech chatter.

I mentioned that there are some super high resolution satelite maps in Google Maps. Here’s the one I was looking at, you can actually see people and cows. It looks like a plane did a fly-over and snapped the photos.

High Resolution Google Map of Africa

They use a simple hack on Google Maps to get the zoom to go past the normal maximum.

Super Mega Zoom Hack for Google Maps

Paul was talking about a website where people compete to implement an algorithm in the most compact code possible. They have a leader board and track your stats, it looks pretty neat.

Code Golf

He also brought up Distributed Version Control Systems, something I’ve been meaning to spend a little more time checking out. Similar to ther VCS systems, but there’s no checking in or out; everyone has their own working copy and they merge into the main repository. It’s an interesting idea: not only can you work online, but you have access to all of the version control repository features all of the time.

Paul was trying out Darcs

Sun is using Mercurial

Linus wrote his own for the Kernel, Git

Paul put some more notes up on his blog with more links to check out.

Our next meeting has been scheduled! 7:00pm on Thursday, Marth 8th; we’ll be meeting up at Panera Bread in Hadley.

I added AIM and MSN transports to the Jabber server (jabber.nervestaple.com). Sadly, most of the popular Jabber clients don’t support setting up Jabber services. I used Psi to login and set them up.

http://psi.affinix.com/

I also found a web-client you can use to do the same thing.

http://jwchat.org/

I’ll be testing it out, both of these seem to be decently mature project.

We have another meeting coming up this week on the 22nd. We’ll be meeting at our usual place, Panera Bread in Hadley at 7:00 pm. Stop by for some coffee or a sandwich and some IT chatter.

At the last developer meeting I mentioned my interest in returning to UMASS and getting a BS in Computer Science. Several people were also interested and so I’m posting what I’ve learned so far. UMASS is pretty big and their website covers a lot of material, but I think I have everything pretty well figured out. I went to the University Without Walls information session this afternoon and they answered some of my remaining questions. I’ll summarize the data I’ve gleaned below.

The most straightforward option is to enroll in the regular undergraduate Computer Science program as a part-time student. The Continuing Education program does not offer a Computer Science degree so regular day classes would be required anyway. The cost difference between regular day classes and these other programs appears to be negligible. Coursework from other colleges would be transferred over, if you’ve gone to another MA state school you are guaranteed to get credit for your courses. The Computer Science department appears to be willing to give you credit for work experience and private study. The regular undergraduate program requires a foreign language, the Continuing Education program does not.

The Continuing Education program only offers five undergraduate degrees, none of these is suitable for computer science coursework. They have two for hospitality and tourism, two for nursing, and one for “general studies.” For anything else, they refer you to the University Without Walls program.

Students enrolled in the University Without Walls program take courses through the Continuing Education program. What the UWW is offering is the ability to give you credit for life and work experience as well as various training and certificate programs. The Continuing Education program will not give you credit for these kinds of things. They will also let you create your own degree program. The regular undergraduate degree programs are not available through the UWW.

The UWW program is looking to give you credit so that you can scratch classes off your list and get a degree more quickly. In all likelihood you are currently working in the field you’d like to get a degree in, so the credit you’ll be getting will be for classes in your area of concentration. UWW probably won’t be able to give you credit for General Education requirements although they will try.

The BS that the UWW program will be giving you will not be the same BS in Computer Science that the undergraduate program provides. The UWW will let you pick and choose the classes that you want and they’ll give you a proper BS when you’ve completed your coursework. The UWW will assign a faculty advisor that will be responsible for helping you put together a sensible degree program and to ensure you take the important classes. When you finish the program you will have a BS from the UWW program at UMASS Amherst.

Personally, my feeling is that the BS in Computer Science can vary greatly in coursework from place to place. In terms of getting work, I suspect that there isn’t a great deal of difference between a BS through the UWW and the regular undergraduate Computer Science BS. All anyone will ever see on your resume is that you have a BS.

UWW graduates do well in graduate school, they have placed people all over (not only at UMASS). Some programs are a better fit than others, they specifically mention Engineering degrees from the UWW program not holding the same weight as the regular Engineering degree. They have been around since the beginning of the UWW movement in 1970 and are one of the longest running. Most UWW students graduate within 5 semesters.

In addition to regular coursework, the UWW program offers an Independent Study program that can be applied toward your degree program. They also will let you apply your regular work toward an “Internship” if you work in your field of study. With a part-time course load and an internship, you may find yourself earning the same credit toward your degree program as a full-time student.

A couple of interesting bits of software were mentioned at the last meeting. I have tracked a couple of them down.

• RapidWeaver - This is Macintosh package for creating websites. It’s pretty nice looking and has a lot of themes. Kind of like iWeb, but less crap.
• Mutt - It’s a very popular console-based mail reader. There are a lot of patches and plug-ins to get it to work in almost any enviroment, and it has nice IMAP support. It’s in Cygwin for Windows users and it’s also in MacPorts for easy set it up on your Mac.

There were many others, but these were the two that stuck with me.

Our next meeting has been scheduled for Thursday, February 8. We’ll be meeting up at Panera Bread for 7:00 pm. We hope to see you there!