MonadLUG meeting 11/10

Ted Roche tedroche at tedroche.com
Fri Nov 11 10:25:01 EST 2005


Great meeting last night!

We opened with a discussion of what's going on in GNHLUG. The  
MonadLUG chapter has planned their next couple of meetings. On  
December 8th, Tim Lund will present some anti-spam solutions. On  
January 12, Ken D'Ambrosio will reprise his great presentation on  
OpenVPN.

Bill Sconce announced that the Python SIG has secured some space at a  
computer lab at SNHU to do some workshops. Details coming soon.

Tim Lund announced progress with locating donors and recipients of  
machines his team will rehab into Linux boxes.We had a good  
discussion of issues that might come up and concerns the group had.

We passed around a sign-up sheet. This is a great way to get a count  
of attendees (there were ten last night) and to give the chapter  
coordinators contact information should they need to follow up or  
help another member make contact.

Bill Freeman presented emacs. Bill took a refreshing angle on the  
presentation: it's really not as bad as everyone says. "You just  
type." Bill showed how emacs works within the GUI and there are menus  
and toolbars and simple ways to access much of the power of emacs.  
Yes, lurking underneath is all of the power of emacs, and the Meta- 
key sequences still work (well, mostly) the way they always worked.  
 From a simple text document, Bill went on to show some of the  
delightful add-ons, such as the abc music system for producing  
beautiful musics scores in PostScript from a text markup file, to  
editing C programs with color-context editing , brace matching and  
interaction with the compiler and error-code source linking. Muse  
allows for simple outline markup with multiple font effect support in  
emacs and output to pdf or HTML. TText can be used for much more  
advanced text output. Emacs has a wiki mode. Support for a vast  
number of languages and add-ons can be found on the net. Bill  
recommended Google as his primary source for add-ons and support, and  
a wiki whose URL I missing - anyone?

Bill wrapped up with the required Towers of Hanoi demo. Pretty cool!

Thanks, Bill, for a great presentation! And thanks to Guy for another  
great meeting, Ken for providing the space (and scrambling to cobble  
together a space due to problems at the school) and to all the  
attendees for making it an entertaining night!

Ted Roche
Ted Roche & Associates, LLC
http://www.tedroche.com





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