Group:LibrePlanet Ontario/Meeting Notes/2017-04-24

Monday, 24 April 2017, 9:00pm EDT

Location: Mumble

Agenda

• Planning Free Software Advocacy: Group:LibrePlanet_Ontario/Street Team Outreach
• Free/Libre Canadian Tax Preparation Software Project
• Contributing a podcast episode to Hacker Public Radio

If there's something else you want to discuss, add it to the this agenda!

Upcoming Events

• Document Freedom Day, the sequel: Wednesday, 26 April 2017
• Culture Freedom Day: Saturday, 20 May 2017 (Wikipedia:Culture Freedom Day)
• The 18th annual DebConf will take place in Montreal, Canada from August 6 to August 12, 2017. It will be preceded by DebCamp, July 31st to August 4th, and Open Day, August 5th.
• Software Freedom Day: Saturday, 16 September 2017

Minutes

Participants: Greg Knittl, Bob Jonkman, and Logan Streondj (greenmonk) and Daniel Villarreal in the text channel.

Audio Recording: http://podcasts.libreplanet.ca/libreplanetontario-2017-04-24.ogg (Size: 37.74 MBytes - Duration: 40m57s)

• FreeLibre Canadian Tax Preparation Software Project
  • Discussion on LibrePlanet mailing list
  • Forms vs. Spreadsheet vs. Accounting software
  • Problems in other countries
  • Maintenance of tax applications is critical
  • There is no "tax form processing software" for the whole world
• Group:LibrePlanet_Ontario/Street Team Outreach
  • Have outreach on Digital Freedom Foundation dates, eg. Document Freedom Day?
  • Open Data Day, or the Open Data Book Club
  • Open Data format for tax data? Government promises to have Open Data
• KWVoIP and ERK (Egg Roll King Restaurant)
• Integrating XMPP and SMS with JMP.chat
  • OssGuy (Denver Gingrich) and Singpolyma (Stepen Paul Weber)
  • WLSG (Waterloo Libre Software Group and WSIC (Waterloo Students for the Information Commons), student groups at University of Waterloo for Free Software and Free Culture curriculum materials
• HPR (Hacker Public Radio) episode on Tax Software?
• We discuss human language parsing programs
• What GNU+Linux distributions are people using?
  • Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, System Rescue CD
• General Intelligence Programming Challenge
  • Using AI for tax software?
  • Licensing terms by CRA limit our ability to create Free Software tax software
  • Discussion on SPAL/SPEL (PDF, 160 kBytes)
• Other words for Free Software: Libre, Freeware, FAIF software
• Other programming languages

Text Channel

 
[8:12 PM] Welcome to Mumble.
[8:12 PM] Connecting to server libreplanetbr.org.
[8:12 PM] Connected.
[8:12 PM] Welcome message:
Welcome to this server running Murmur.
Enjoy your stay!
[8:56 PM] gknittl@sympatico.ca connected.
[8:59 PM] Recording started
[9:02 PM] BobJonkman: The agenda: https://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:LibrePlanet_Ontario#Next_Meeting
[9:05 PM] DanielVillarreal connected.
[9:05 PM] greenmonk connected.
[9:06 PM] BobJonkman: https://lists.libreplanet.org/archive/html/libreplanet-discuss/2017-03/msg00066.html
[9:10 PM] DanielVillarreal: Hi all!
[9:10 PM] DanielVillarreal: I can hear ...
[9:11 PM] DanielVillarreal: :-)
[9:14 PM] DanielVillarreal: Like using awk ?
[9:19 PM] greenmonk: well, I'm working on Pyash, a programming language based on human grammar.
[9:21 PM] DanielVillarreal: yes.
[9:22 PM] DanielVillarreal: Hoping to make it out to ERK someday.
[9:23 PM] DanielVillarreal: ditto that
[9:26 PM] DanielVillarreal: Thanks!
[9:30 PM] greenmonk: hey, just wanted to mention in relation to the language for tax/government software. the human grammar programming language I'm working on
[9:31 PM] greenmonk: oops, sorry g2g, I'll probably have to do the mailing list thing
[9:32 PM] greenmonk: okay, back baby is restless
[9:32 PM] greenmonk: the youngest is 6 months, older one will be 4 soon
[9:33 PM] greenmonk: yep, today I woke up really early, like 5:30 to do some programming before my son woke up around 7
[9:34 PM] greenmonk: so the programming language is generic, but it could be used for taxes and such because it has a vocabulary of around 8,000 words which are easily translated into 30+ human langauges
[9:34 PM] DanielVillarreal: I like to discuss human languages.
[9:35 PM] greenmonk: well, I have basic C being output right now, still have to add a few more cosntructs to support ANSI C.
[9:35 PM] DanielVillarreal: I've been polishing up my scripts for using exiftool, using perl
[9:36 PM] DanielVillarreal: lol
[9:36 PM] greenmonk: it compiles to OpenCL C as well.
[9:36 PM] greenmonk: hmm, I might be able to get the microphone working hold on
[9:37 PM] DanielVillarreal: Trying to get my son to using Linux. I need to set up a system for my little girl. She's almost four. She just got some cowgirl boots.
[9:38 PM] greenmonk: @daniel I found pocketchip, is a full linux system but portable like a game console
[9:38 PM] DanielVillarreal: thanks
[9:39 PM] DanielVillarreal: Fedora
[9:39 PM] greenmonk: I'm downloading ubuntu 17.04 right now
[9:40 PM] greenmonk: I'm hoping on using my programming language to participate in the General Intelligence programming challenge. Don't know if anyone else here is interested in AI.
[9:41 PM] DanielVillarreal: I'm a big fan of SystemRescueCD for my toolkit. Had issues w/ latest version of Tinycore.
[9:42 PM] DanielVillarreal: I'm interested in AI... I'm looking to the future applications.
[9:42 PM] greenmonk: http://general-ai-challenge.org/
[9:42 PM] DanielVillarreal: Thanks
[9:43 PM] greenmonk: it is by a millionaire game developer from Prague, Chezh republic, rewards for first round is 12 thousand dollars or thereabouts
[9:43 PM] greenmonk: 50 thousand total, the winner gets 12
[9:44 PM] greenmonk: american dollars i beive
[9:44 PM] greenmonk: believe*
[9:44 PM] greenmonk: Well tax accountants are one of those jobs that has the highest likelyhood of being automated.
[9:45 PM] greenmonk: there is already a lot of tax software, much of it free that can help file your taxes for you.
[9:46 PM] greenmonk: one of the issues to be overcome with open source linux tax software is cost of certification.
[9:48 PM] greenmonk: yeah, I use libre for libre
[9:49 PM] greenmonk: in my programming langauge, there actually isn't words for "free" and "libre", but there is liberty and freeware
[9:50 PM] greenmonk: I can't add words, it was scripted, by translating a set of 39,000 english words into 30+ of the most popular human langauges. Then I had it take out overly ambigious words as well as homonyms.
[9:50 PM] greenmonk: at that point was left with 8,000 words
[9:51 PM] DanielVillarreal: Is Klingon one of the most popular languages ? ;-)
[9:52 PM] greenmonk: https://gitlab.com/liberit/pyac is the current version, earlier one can be downloaded at sourceforge
[9:53 PM] greenmonk: https://sourceforge.net/projects/spel/
[9:54 PM] greenmonk: Klingon is specifically designed to be difficult for humans, using the least common word order and consonant clusters
[9:55 PM] greenmonk: here is a PDF about spal https://gitlab.com/liberit/pyac/blob/master/documentation/spal.pdf
[9:56 PM] greenmonk: Pyash (SPAL/SPEL) is specifically designed to be easy for humans and computers..
[9:57 PM] greenmonk: it uses the most common word orders and letters, and consonant clusters, also is easily parseable even without spaces (for streams of speech).
[9:57 PM] greenmonk: also it is easy to translate between different langauges, so people don't have to learn the Pyash vocabulary, but can simply use their native vocabulary in a more regularized manner.
[9:58 PM] greenmonk: that sounds great, hopefully can get the microphone working by then
[9:58 PM] DanielVillarreal: well, this could be a very interesting discussion in a local pub...
[9:59 PM] greenmonk: I don't drink (Buddhist), but other public places good
[9:59 PM] DanielVillarreal: We could have kombucha tea
[10:00 PM] DanielVillarreal: Thanks!
[10:00 PM] greenmonk: good talk thanks :-)
[10:00 PM] greenmonk: good night
[10:00 PM] DanielVillarreal: Good night
[10:00 PM] Recording stopped