Present: George, Marti, Ralph, and Terry.
The pub had a real ale event on! Some of the things talked about:
Dell to use Ubuntu on Linux PCs. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/business/6610901.stm
How man tries to apply logic to make events fit a model with hindsight when in reality unexpected but massively significant events defy prediction. These “unknown unknowns” are exemplified by the black swan. Until it was first observed, all swans had been white, therefore all swans were white. The Black Swan is a book by Nassim Taleb that warns against the hubris of prediction. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassim_Taleb
Mark Shuttleworth's company, Canonical, is registered on the Isle of Man which has a different tax regime to the UK. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Isle_of_Man
He made his money with Thwarte. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thawte
Charles Simonyi of Microsoft was the most recent space tourist. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Simonyi
The lmsensors project to show hardware stats, e.g. CPU temperature. Try the sensors(1) command. http://www.lm-sensors.org/
valgrind, a means of detecting invalid memory accesses and other coding faults. http://valgrind.org/
Three questions asked by Google in a technical phone call interview. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=232757&cid=18925745
How job interviews used to be. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_round
Capuchin monkeys observed engaging in prostitution. http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/20/0330232
Communism, whether it can work or not, and benevolent dictators. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_dictatorship
Kenya's leaders, Kenyatta and arap Moi. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jomo_Kenyatta http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_arap_Moi
The Computer History Museums new exhibit on Chess, including Claude Shannon and Alan Turing's involvement, and how Ken Thompson, creator of Unix, was involved with Belle. http://www.computerhistory.org/chess/index.php
A nice photo of Ken, that's Dennis Ritchie, creator of C, in the background on the right. http://www.computerhistory.org/chess/full_record.php?iid=stl-431e1a07c0d41
Robert Hyatt's Crafty chess program, and how 64 bit words allows an alternative method of storing board positions, e.g. white_pawns is 0x00ff_0000_0000_0000 at the start of a game. http://www.cis.uab.edu/hyatt/pubs.html
— Ralph Corderoy