Last Night's Meeting

[Christopher Schmidt]

Had fun with all the MerriLUG folks last night. I also got to experience
driving out of the Boston area during rush hour last night for the first
time, which was significantly less fun.

Some things which were discussed:

 * Results of the recent quarterly meeting, and location of the next one
 * General questions on Linux: 
   * Why won't my screen turn off when the computer goes into standby?
   * How can I do load testing of MySQL and network traffic?
 * Raffling off of books from Ken
 * How Vendor/Client relationships are like teenage sex: They're hormone
   driven and have no basis whatsoever in reality.

I also brought up my current employer: Ning, Inc., a web startup that's
offering a playground for open code and open data to be shared between
people. The reason I brought it up was in part because it is following
the model of the open source world so much more closely than many other
services out there: 
 
 * Ning provides a "hosted" PHP framework
 * All code, by default, is "open source" -- can be viewed by anyone
   with an account.
 * Users can "clone" applications: take the current application and
   customize it to their own liking from the same code
 * Data is stored in a universal content store, and data is (by default)
   accessible to all applications across the server. So, my application
   "gnhlugbookshelf" can also read from the "restaurantreviewswithmaps"
   application
 * Income comes in via advertisements sold on the sidebar of the
   applications, as well as premium services (more space, removal of
   view source links, and the like)

Most of the time when this is described, it's described as an
"experiment" - can a company make money solely off ads to run their
servers? Can premium services pay for all this? My experience with
LiveJournal says yes: LiveJournal makes all its money off premium
services (no ads), and they gross several million a year. However, their
employees are paid much less than Ning's are, so who knows ;)

If people are interest in PHP, I think this is a great thing to play
with. If you're not interested in PHP, but want to see what's possible
with it, you can take a glance at:

  http://bookshelf.ning.com/

Then, look at 
  
  http://gnhlugbookshelf.ning.com/

I'd love to see people adding the books they think are absolutely
essential for any LUG member to own to the bookshelf. The comment
feature lets discussion happen, and the books can be rated and tagged
for later organization.

All in all, a fun evening for me, and hopefuloly for others as well.

-- 
Christopher Schmidt
Ning Developer
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