I spent a whole week with the night shift and the morning of Saturday 25^th, here I was like a zombie. Oh! But still I could not miss that MSSC meetup.

In fact, in the rush of not being late, I happened to reach Ebène Accelerator earlier, some time around 12h20. Before that I even got time for a quick lunch at the Ebène InterMart Food-court. Alright, back at the accelerator my first tweet fires up :

Reached Ebène Accelerator, with no soul in the vicinity, I’m enjoying a moment of loneliness. Lone… Lonely… Loner!

A while later Jochen showed up with the kids. While others, I could follow some of them through facebook. Nadim complained about the heavy rain at Triolet, saw Sun’s comment on my earlier status whether I’m still coming, Nirvan checked in at La Gare Victoria, Port-Louis … so, the geek army was on the way. Maybe slowed down a little due to rain.

I waited for the current meeting, about SME Networking, to be over and then I moved to the conference room. Jochen plugged in the projector etc & I made my myself comfortable with getting power & tapping into the accelerator’s wifi. Here’s a newcomer to the meetup, Andrew Ragaven, an HR person, recruiter to be precise, at Castille Resources. We had a quick introduction while others were on way.

Topics of the day were:

• Project offers by Ebène Accelerator – Poonum Thylam
• Preprocessors and some nifty tools for writing HTML – Sun RS
• Responsive Web Design – Mozammil Khodabacchas
• Upcoming events and plans – Jochen Kirstätter aka JoKi
• Networking and exchange

It was 13h30 and we were now kinda worried why not many showed up. We were less than 10 and even our main speakers hadn’t arrive. However, by 14h00 the conference room was filled up.

###Who made it?

Jochen Kirstätter, Pritvi Jheengut, Ibraahim Atchia, Nitin Mutkawoa, Kishan Bhugul, Ratna Chikhuri, Daniel Lang, Nadim Attari, Avinash Mayaram, Nirvan Pagooah, Ashley Babajee, Arshad Chummun, Kaleem Rossenally, Yunus Aumeeruddy, Jamal Ubeidullah, Sherven Chinamoothoo, Sruti Jughdharree, Sarju Dooly, Andrew Ragaven, Caroline Chung, Rikesh Ramlochund, Mozammil Khodabacchas, Dhiruj Rambaran, Vincent Pollet, Louis Oberlé, Sun RS, Yannick Labonne and Ish Sookun. Yeah, that’s a pretty long list.

Poonum couldn’t make it to the meetup, therefore, Jochen briefly told us about the opportunities that Poonum wanted to present. Ebène Accelerator is actully looking for companies that could join in & deliver the ~10K websites needed for SMEs in Mauritius. We do not have specific details yet, maybe during another meetup Poonam can provide the same or if any of you is interested, get in touch with Ebène Accelerator.

Then Sun stole the show with his awesome presentation on web development tools. While I’m not a developer, I do play along with HTML & some casual PHP when tinkering with my blog files. I knew none of the tools Sun talked about as my playground is a bare Shell; I would only tinker around with vi, sed, awk & get most of my jobs done. But if I were a developer, the tools mentioned by Sun would be a great asset. He did demos on Zen Coding, talked about Emmet, CSS preprocessors, SASS, Compass and LESS.js.

Next, Mozammil did a presentation on Responsive Web Design. He stressed on the importance & reasons why to make a responsive web page. To demo the same, he used his own website, Moz.im, and resized the browser to show up how the page adapts. It looked nice & sleek of course. He emphasized on the situation of growing number of mobile internet users. Certainly, with many more people today accessing Internet using mobile devices, tablets, it’s pleasant to see a website that adapts to the screen, and yes be less resource hungry (not eating up the web package).

During a question & answer time, I shared my concern or rather opinion about responsive web design though. I’d rather prefer having two versions of a website, one adapted for desktop screen and the other for mobile. When creating responsive pages, I believe quite some space is lost. This was backed by Dhiruj who has a similar opinion. Secondly if we cater for the page to be less resource hungry, say saving for mobile devices, we shouldn’t forget that the desktop user on the other hand has a much better bandwidth. Catering for mobiles could end up depriving desktop users from a richer experience. Personally, I tend to like pages that have tons of information on one-click rather than having to do several clicks to get pieces of information. Well, just my 2 cents here.

Jochen then gave an overview on the events scheduled for this year such as Code Challenge, Innovation Days, Boot Camps etc. On the question of will there be another Linuxfest this year, my answer was of course there will be. In fact, during the networking & exchange I explained a bit about the Corsair Hackers Reboot event we’re planning with LUGM. I called up for more volunteers to join in and self-assign pending tasks. Here’s a list of tasks I posted on LUGM mailing list earlier this month.

1. 24-ports LAN Switch => provided by Ajay / Someone could bring another switch as backup
2. Network Cables => Ajay & Ish
3. Hard Drive 1Tb, ISO repository => Ish
4. Hard Drive for backups => un-assigned
5. Type of backup? Proposed => Clonezilla
6. Order of installation, FIFO => Need a small team to register people when they come. UoM CC folks could take care of this.
7. Posters around Flacq, need District Council Approval => Ish will cater, letter should be signed by LUGM Secretary
8. NCB / AUF sponsorship => Ish
9. Kids’ Corner => Ajay, Kishan and Shamsher volunteer to plan activities (face painting etc)
10. PC Diagnostics => UoM CC team
11. Linux in Virtual Mode, using Virtual Box. Pritvi proposed use of OVA. I tested, seems a workable solution. Awaiting other proposals.
12. OSS on Windows => GIMP, LibreOffice, Firefox, VLC etc.
13. If we have an audience, FOSS Advocacy => Ish & Avinash Meetoo
14. Press coverage => un-assigned

To join the event discussion, you may as well sign up to LUGM’s mailing list.

####Photo highlights

Photos by Nirvan, Nadim & Jochen.