I plan to attend the Hacklab's Homebrewhosting meeting. Bob, from Queen & Dufferin to Dundas & Bay... that's quite a walk. :-) -- William On Tue, Apr 19, 2016 at 5:51 PM, Bob Jonkman <bjonkman@sobac.com> wrote:

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I'll be going to Homebrew Hosting, and possibly bringing some friends and relations.

After Homebrew Hosting winds down we're going to the Toronto Ubuntu Release Party. I hope you'll all join us. Happily, nobody checks your OS at the door, so everyone is welcome no matter what OS you're running. Michael Kaulbach, @genii on the Internets, is providing Death Wish coffee (really!) and cupcakes to decorate. The restaurant has surprisingly good pizza, too.

*What*: Toronto Xenial Xerus Release Party *When*: Thursday, 21 April 2016 from 8:00pm to 11:45pm *Where*: Alio Lounge, 108 Dundas Street West, Toronto, Ontario *Map*: http://osm.org/go/ZX6BtMD0--?m=&node=1113718580 *LoCo Event*: http://loco.ubuntu.com/events/ubuntu-ca/3330/detail/

There's another Ubuntu Release Party in Kitchener-Waterloo on Saturday:

*What*: KW Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus Release Party *When*: Saturday, 23 April 2016 from 4:30pm to 7:30pm *Where*: Beertown (Waterloo Public Square, 75 King St. S.) *Map*: http://osm.org/go/ZXnbonIU-?m= *LoCo Event*: http://loco.ubuntu.com/events/ubuntu-ca/3361/detail/

The location is still up for discussion; stay tuned to the Ubuntu Waterloo Region mailing list for the latest details. You can read the archives and join the team to subscribe to the list at https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-waterloo-region

- --Bob.

- -- Bob Jonkman <bjonkman@sobac.com> Phone: +1-519-635-9413 SOBAC Microcomputer Services http://sobac.com/sobac/ Software --- Office & Business Automation --- Consulting GnuPG Fngrprnt:04F7 742B 8F54 C40A E115 26C2 B912 89B0 D2CC E5EA

On 2016-04-19 02:51 PM, Myles Braithwaite wrote:

...

We're having our second ever Homebrew Hosting Club on this Thursday at 7pm at the HackLab.TO. If you are interested in self hosting you should definitely come out.

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Myles Braithwaite <me@mylesbraithwaite.com> Date: Tue, Apr 19, 2016 at 2:49 PM Subject: Toronto Homebrew Hosting Club on Thursday at 7:00pm To: homebrewhostingclub@gtalug.org

# Toronto Homebrew Hosting Club on Thursday, 21st April at HackLab

<https://homebrewhosting.club/>

Are you building your own website? Setup and running your own calendar/contacts server? Developing your own publishing web app? Hosting a Gnu-based-social-network? Running your own Wiki? Hosting your own email server? Did you buy a $35 VPS and looking to replace Google Apps with your a self hosted solution? Or some other digital magic-cloud service?

If so, we are a meetup of people in the Greater Toronto Area passionate about self hosting, in the same structure as the [Homebrew Computer Club][1] meetings in Silicon Valley (and the [Homebrew Website Club][2]). It will be a gathering of like-minded people to swap ideas, talk shop, and general awesomeness about hosting your own infrastructure.

Our second meetup will be on Thursday 21st April 2016 at 7:00 p.m. at the Toronto [HackLab][3] (near the corner of [Queen Street West and Dufferin Street][4]).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homebrew_Computer_Club [2]: https://indiewebcamp.com/Homebrew_Website_Club [3]: https://hacklab.to/ [4]: http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/3522641496 --- Talk Mailing List talk@gtalug.org https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk

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| From: William Park <whp.park@gmail.com> | Bob, from Queen & Dufferin to Dundas & Bay... that's quite a walk. :-) Much of Ontario is laid out in a grid of "concession roads", each 1.25 miles (2 km) apart (not Kitchener Waterloo!). <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concession_road> Jane, Keele, Dufferin, Bathurst, Yonge, and Bayview are concession roads. So are Queen, Bloor, St. Clair, Eglinton, Lawrence, York Mills, Sheppard, and Steeles. So it is easy to tell that this walk is about 4 km without consulting google. I would guess that few city dwellers know this but it is pretty evident out in the country (wherever that is these days).

On 04/20/2016 08:25 AM, Stewart C. Russell wrote:

...

I would guess that few city dwellers know this but it is pretty evident out in the country (wherever that is these days). As a concession* to being remotely on topic, an early example of system incompatibility can be found along Victoria Park Avenue. Vic Park is where the two survey teams met — one from the east, the other from the west — and they didn't quite join up. That's why almost every major (or

On 2016-04-20 03:34 AM, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote: older) east-west road has a little wiggle at Vic Park.

And on the other side, in Peel, the roads are on a different alignment, I suppose to better line up with the lake in that area.

On 2016-04-20 09:06 AM, phiscock@ee.ryerson.ca wrote:

… a remarkably strong case can be made for the weird units of measurements used in the past - rods and chains, for example.

Yeah, spent a bit too much time around plans and surveys. The basis of most land measurement is Gunter's Chain <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunter's_chain>, a 17th century invention that made it easy to measure out distances and acreages. One chain is 66 feet, and there are 4 rods (or poles, or pikes) to the chain. There are 100 links to the chain, so it's vaguely base-10 too. The original reason for the 16th and 17th century English mania for survey was the valuation of lands seized from the Catholic church by Henry VIII. It also helped with land valuation for Enclosure, and the end of the Commons. Many land surveys are done in metes and bounds, which are a series of vector measurements from a point (usually a defined survey point; if you ever stumble over a low square metal peg half-buried, it's likely a survey marker) to define a land area. Annoyingly, in the US, most of these measurements use US Survey Feet, which very slightly different to the 12 × 25.4 mm feet that we might know. Tiny aside: My wife's great-great-grandfather surveyed the Santa Fe trail for the carters, who felt that the US government was underpaying them for the distance. Somewhere in the family vaults is the chain that Martin O. Jones and his team dragged from Independence, MO to Santa Fe, and proved the carters right. units(1) has many interesting asides on measurements. cheers, Stewart

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There is also the "smoot," a length of 5 foot 7 inches based on the gentleman at MIT possessing the same last name ...

That's Oliver Smoot. When his cousin, George Smoot, won the Nobel prize in physics in 2006 for cosmic microwave background radiation, every single interview I heard with George about the Nobel prize eventually descended to asking about his more famous brother and his unit of measure (Quirks & Quarks, Science Friday, As It Happens, The Guardian's Science Weekly, maybe more). Obviously, units of measure are more important than the rest of the universe. - --Bob. On 2016-04-20 10:55 AM, Giles Orr wrote:

On 20 April 2016 at 09:37, Stewart C. Russell <scruss@gmail.com> wrote:

...

Yeah, spent a bit too much time around plans and surveys.

The basis of most land measurement is Gunter's Chain <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunter's_chain>, a 17th century invention that made it easy to measure out distances and acreages. One chain is 66 feet, and there are 4 rods (or poles, or pikes) to the chain. There are 100 links to the chain, so it's vaguely base-10 too.

The original reason for the 16th and 17th century English mania for survey was the valuation of lands seized from the Catholic church by Henry VIII. It also helped with land valuation for Enclosure, and the end of the Commons.

Many land surveys are done in metes and bounds, which are a series of vector measurements from a point (usually a defined survey point; if you ever stumble over a low square metal peg half-buried, it's likely a survey marker) to define a land area. Annoyingly, in the US, most of these measurements use US Survey Feet, which very slightly different to the 12 × 25.4 mm feet that we might know.

Tiny aside: My wife's great-great-grandfather surveyed the Santa Fe trail for the carters, who felt that the US government was underpaying them for the distance. Somewhere in the family vaults is the chain that Martin O. Jones and his team dragged from Independence, MO to Santa Fe, and proved the carters right.

units(1) has many interesting asides on measurements.

While I'm about to go wildly Off-Topic, I think most people on the list will enjoy the diversion - and I apologize to the rest. Or perhaps I should apologize to everybody. If this isn't enough indication, I've found the discussion of concession roads and survey measurements fascinating.

One of my favourite units of measure is the "Warhol." A moment's thought will probably bring you to what that is: 15 minutes of fame. A megawarhol is about 28.5 years (I think of Brad Pitt).

And this brings me to one of my favourite things: Wikipedia's lists of obscure and ludicrous units of measure.

"Beauty: Helen"

"Helen of Troy (from the Iliad) is widely known as 'the face that launched a thousand ships.' Thus, 1 millihelen is the amount of beauty needed to launch a single ship."

"According to 'The Rebel Angels,' a novel by Robertson Davies, this system was invented by Cambridge mathematician W.A.H. Rushton. However, the term was possibly first suggested by Isaac Asimov. The obvious reference is Marlowe's line from the play The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, 'Was this the face that launched a thousand ships...?'"

"Negative values have also been observed—these, of course, are measured by the number of ships sunk or the number of clocks stopped. An alternative interpretation of 1 negative Helen is the amount of negative beauty (i.e. ugliness) that can launch one thousand ships the other way."

There are also some highly bizarre but legitimate units of measure, my favourite being the microfortnight (about 1.2 seconds), the gillette (a measure of laser power), and the Big Mac Index (purchasing power).

"The Wheaton is a measurement of Twitter followers relative to celebrity Wil Wheaton. The measurement was standardized when Wil Wheaton achieved half a million Twitter followers, with the effect that Wil Wheaton now has 3.4 Wheatons himself. As few Twitter users have millions of followers, the milliwheaton (500 followers) is more commonly used."

There is also the "smoot," a length of 5 foot 7 inches based on the gentleman at MIT possessing the same last name ... who later went on to be the head of the International Organization for Standardization. I would highly recommend reading the Wikipedia article below on the "smoot": proof positive that truth is stranger than fiction. It's also damn funny and shows the incredible durability of pranks (especially in the city of Boston).

References: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unusual_units_of_measurement http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_humorous_units_of_measurement

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On 2016-04-20 06:59 PM, James Knott wrote:

...

One chain is 66 feet,

Or 20 metres.

… if you're not fussy about 117 mm difference. Surveyors tend to be. The only unit of measurement I know of that was deliberately designed to be friendly for both metric and not-metric* is the HP-GL unit. It's 1/40 mm, or exactly 1/1016 inch. Stewart *: there are so many variants that there isn't one brief useful term for it.

On Thu, Apr 21, 2016 at 12:55 PM, Lennart Sorensen <lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> wrote: snip

Clearly the unit was designed to be convinient for metric only.

Metric is confusing only if you want it to be IMO.

And it only works out at all cleanly because the inch was redefined to be 25.4 mm at some point in time. It used to be slightly different (the US and UK versions being slightly on either side of 25.4 mm).

Would really like to know where this information comes from - - do you have any references? Regards Dee

On Fri, Apr 22, 2016 at 11:02 AM, Lennart Sorensen <lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:

On Fri, Apr 22, 2016 at 10:31:32AM -0500, o1bigtenor wrote:

...

Would really like to know where this information comes from - - do you have any references?

As per wikipedia (with references to NIST):

The international yard and pound are two units of measurement that were the subject of an agreement between six nations signed on 1 July 1959. The six nations were the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. The agreement defined the yard as exactly 0.9144 meter and the pound as exactly 0.45359237 kilogram

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_yard_and_pound

Before this things had different values in different placs and changed sometimes.

The UK made the yard be 0.914399204m in 1897, which is rather close to 0.9144m that it is now.

The UK went to one inch = 25.4mm in 1930, the US in 1933, and many more countries in 1935 and the treaty in 1959 made the yard and inch officially 0.9144m and 25.4mm respectively in a number of countries.

Specific change in value (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inch): This resulted in the internationally accepted length of the imperial and US customary inch being exactly 25.4 millimetres. The international inch is 1.7 millionths of an inch longer than the old imperial inch, and 2 millionths of an inch shorter than the US inch.

OK - - - so these are part of the rule changes from the late 50's. Its also when it went from NC and NF to UNC and UNF and there are lots of companies AND people that still use the old designation. Rule changes this old shouldn't really be a problem for today's use though. Regards Dee

On Sun, Apr 24, 2016 at 10:08 PM, Howard Gibson <hgibson@eol.ca> wrote:

On Sun, 24 Apr 2016 21:07:23 -0500 o1bigtenor <o1bigtenor@gmail.com> wrote:

...

OK - - - so these are part of the rule changes from the late 50's. Its also when it went from NC and NF to UNC and UNF and there are lots of companies AND people that still use the old designation.

Rule changes this old shouldn't really be a problem for today's use though.

Regards

Dee

o1bigtenor,

I am a mechanical designer, and I have not seen the terms NC and NF in anything other than my French's drafting book from 1941. English screws are UNC, and UNF. The threads on the bottom of your cameras are supposed to be 1/4-20BSW.

There are still lots of machinists, industrial suppliers and individuals that refer to NC and NF threads (National Coarse and National Fine). The thread form is slightly different compared to the UNC and UNF but that too changed in the late 1950's. Just because it doesn't exist doesn't mean that they don't use it - - - grin!! Regards Dee