Table of Contents
FIRST Robotics Competition
May Meeting: FIRST Robotics Competition
Date: May 7, 2015 at 6:30 p.m.
Location: Rosemount Branch, Ottawa Public Library
We will be having a short talk on regular expressions by Ian Gorman, followed by the main talk on the FIRST Robotics Competition and the local team, the Ashbury College Coltenoids' use of open source software.
Pre-meeting:
There will be a one hour pre-meeting item from 17:30 to 18:30 for people who are new to Linux, have general questions, or wish to help out with people who are just getting started.
After Meeting Social:
After the meeting, there will be a social event at one of the nearby pubs or restaurants. A short discussion and vote as to location will be taken then.
GPG Keysigning:
After the main talk and possibly the BoF, there will be the opportunity for a GPG key signing. This is a monthly offering, just look for Scott after the talk and we can go from there. Bring some kind of photo ID and some keyslips if you expect people to sign your key.If you need some method of creating pages of keyslips, there is an online slip generator available.
Regular Expressions 101
Speaker: Ian Gorman
Regular expressions allow you to find words (or other strings) particular kind instead of requiring you to look for individual words.
Instead of looking for “Tom”, “Dick” and “Harry”, you can look for all the words that start with a capital letter and where all the other letters are lowercase. Or all the strings in a program that are 'legal' C identifiers.
You don't need a book for this (although a good one is available) - you can do a lot with a few simple tricks. If you know those tricks, you can pick up the other tricks when you need them.
About the Speaker
Ian has a lot of experience at applying experience outside of its original box.
He has solved problems in Economics, Math, Computer Science, logic based controllers, bicycles, and human relations, generally mixing in information from at least one other discipline or computer language to make it work, or work better. His experience with computers includes Linux, Mac, and several server OSes from IBM, Sun, and others. He has worked with drivers, parsers, API design, business rules, Java garbage collectors, and some less exotic code that just needed to work.
FIRST Robotics Competition
Speaker: Aaron Wilcox
Aaron will be talking about the FIRST Robotics Competition and the Ashbury College Coltenoids' use of open-source software for this competition.