Minutes of BLUG meet, July 2003.

And what do we find? A pleasant surprise! With an attendance of 181, July BLUG surpasses the largest ever participation for any LUG meet! Kudos!! The joy (which was much more than evident in the organizer's face-flowers) definitely beats the pain in having to find a 'created' space to either sit or stand.

Without consuming any time, Kartik hands it all over to Sathyanand from Infosys, who begins the BLUG Topic of the Month with his Introduction to RT Linux. It walked us through RealTime OS, Issues in existing Linux to meet Real Time requirements and the beautiful detour taken by the RTLinux team to overcome the problem(s).

If the Introduction set the tempo for the evening, the presentation by Samyeer and Ramprasad on making Linux work on their Encore Simputer was cracker! With an introduction to the various features supported by the Simputer, Samyeer and Ramprasad went on to list how, from the initial StrongARM-on-an-Assabet stage, Encore went on making progress step by step, facing and removing hurdles big and small all the way.

Don't they put the icing on the cake at the end? Mrinal and Jnaneshwar of PESIT bring in their home-made collision avoiding robot exactly like that. The ultrasonic-vision (!) of the robot was enabled by the only non-indigenous component (a SONAR, it was) of their toy-car-mounted assembly. The 180 degree sweep, the obstacle information collected and the resultant safe-route choice made by their simple engine was a treat to the eyes - particularly shifting between the live-video showing how it would 'back-off' seeing (hearing?) a very-close obstacle and slowly turn away from a distant obstacle along side the GUI that displayed the echo-returns and the choices being made in real-time.

Kartik pre-announced the BLUG logo campaign (an official mail yet to be sent on this) and called for the linux-passionate artists to submit their many entries. He also declared open the next-most important thing of the evening - GRAB YOUR GRUB!!

Prabakar Venkatraman (Prabakar_V at infosys dot com)

FINAL ACCOUNTS