WC Time: second & fourth Friday at 7:00 PM. Meetings are informal and generally an hour in duration, depending on attendance. Drop-ins are encouraged. Sometimes we also interact with remote attendees through Interent Relay Chat.

this month Apr 12th & Apr 26th, 2024
next month May 10th & May 24th, 2024

WC Location: Caffe La Scala (Yelp link, Google Map) at 1655 N Main St (at Civic Drive), Walnut Creek, CA. It is primarily a coffee shop in downtown Walnut Creek. Free wifi. Good food (soup, pizza, sandwiches; vegetarian options) and drinks are available in a relaxing environment.

WC Parking & BART: Free parking is available at metered spaces after 6 PM. It can be tough to find a parking space close by so try to come a few minutes early. The closest paid lot is a block away at the Center for the Arts. Ask us for parking hints at a meeting. Walnut Creek BART is a few blocks away. Walking from BART takes about 10 minutes. There is also a “free ride” – the Route #4 Broadway Plaza bus/trolley that runs every 15 minutes. Look for the green “Free Ride” trolley. Get off the trolley when it turns right in front of the Center for the Arts, Civic @ Locust. Main St. is one block away.

Additional meetings would be great. We have held meetings at other locations in the past like Steeltown Coffee & Tea in Pittsburg. We support the efforts of individuals able and willing to host meetings in a spirit similar to Evan’s Bay Area Debian rules. Not much more is required than showing up on a regular basis. Good location criteria start with a welcoming environment that has wifi and power available.

Thanks to some perl code (thanks Michael Paoli and others in the thread) created for BerkeleyLUG.com we can calculate the upcoming meeting dates. We edit out the code for Sun (7) for our Fri (5) day of the week we find these dates.

 $ echo $(upcoming_meetings | sed -ne '/^2026/q;p' | sort) | fold -s -w 52
2024-03-08 2024-03-22 2024-04-12 2024-04-26
2024-05-10 2024-05-24 2024-06-14 2024-06-28
2024-07-12 2024-07-26 2024-08-09 2024-08-23
2024-09-13 2024-09-27 2024-10-11 2024-10-25
2024-11-08 2024-11-22 2024-12-13 2024-12-27
2025-01-10 2025-01-24 2025-02-14 2025-02-28
2025-03-14 2025-03-28 2025-04-11 2025-04-25
2025-05-09 2025-05-23 2025-06-13 2025-06-27
2025-07-11 2025-07-25 2025-08-08 2025-08-22
2025-09-12 2025-09-26 2025-10-10 2025-10-24
2025-11-14 2025-11-28 2025-12-12 2025-12-26

For convenience, here's the edited perl code adding a couple variables for legibility:

$ cat $HOME/bin/upcoming_meetings
#!/usr/bin/perl
$^W=1;
use strict;

# vi(1) :se tabstop=4

# 2nd and 4th $dow of the month from today going forward,
# ISO YYYY-MM-DD output, YYYY not to exceed $max

use Date::Calc qw(
    Today
    Nth_Weekday_of_Month_Year);

my ($year,$month,$day) = Today();

# 7th day of week is Sunday
# 5th day of week is Friday
my $dow = 5;

my $max = 2200;

my $day2=(Nth_Weekday_of_Month_Year($year,$month,$dow,2))[2];
printf( "%04d-%02d-%02d\n", ($year,$month,$day2)) if $day2 >= $day;
$day2=(Nth_Weekday_of_Month_Year($year,$month,$dow,4))[2];
printf( "%04d-%02d-%02d\n", ($year,$month,$day2)) if $day2 >= $day;
undef $day2;

while(1){
    ++$month;
    if($month>12){
        $month=1;
        exit(0) if ++$year > $max;
    };
    printf( "%04d-%02d-%02d\n", (Nth_Weekday_of_Month_Year($year,$month,$dow,2)));
    printf( "%04d-%02d-%02d\n", (Nth_Weekday_of_Month_Year($year,$month,$dow,4)));
};

When installing on a new machine I found I was missing perl dependencies. Installing perl dependencies can feel a bit tricky depending on your OS and perl install and how often you have done similar things before. You will need to have installed the gnu make and the gnu gcc c/c++ compiler during cpan download, compile and install. The best way to install perl dependencies is to use your native install/package management system: apt for Ubuntu, Debian and related, dnf Fedora, Red Hat and related, install-x86_64.exe for cygwin on Windows, etc. To fix my broken cygwin64 install of cpan I installed some dependencies first plus libnsl2 and libnsl-devel using the cygwin installer.

After you think something is installed confirm with $ type gcc to make sure it's ready. After installing all that can be installed with system installers there are ways to get additional local perl modules. People give different advice when it comes to cpan. App::Cpanminus may be recommended and a more memory efficient way to install perl modules than the (somewhat dated) default cpan tool but both should work ok for these dependencies.

I ended up running something similar to the following commands. You are looking for the "OK" at the end of each command to confim success. If not, read the (possibly lengthy) text and fix any errors.

$ sudo cpan local::lib 
// expect lots of output
$ sudo cpan Bit::Vector 
// expect lots of output
$ sudo cpan Date::Calc
// expect lots of output