Monadnock Linux User Group - August 10th

Bill Sconce sconce at in-spec-inc.com
Fri Aug 11 13:34:01 EDT 2006


The August meeting of the Monadnock Linux User Group (MonadLUG) was held
last night, Thursday, August 10th, at the usual digs (SAU 1 Superintendent's
Office) in Peterborough.  Thanks, as always, to Ken for his (and the SAU's
hospitality) -- this is a great venue.

I counted about 12 souls, a good turnout.  And a profitable evening.
Mark Witham had an exposition on SugarCRM, a company and product who bill
themselves as "Commercial Open Source".  I hope I've got this right:
"CRM" == Customer Resource Management.  The package is built on a LAMP
stack, or more properly, XAMP:  Any OS / Apache / MySQL / PHP, and is
open source and to an interesting sense Free.  (The company makes a big
point that if the day comes when customers don't like their business
practices the customers will be free to fork the code.)  Mark's demos
were impressive - some of the management screens allow drag'n'drop in
the browser!   (Like Asterisk, where we saw it first.  Is this AJAX at
work?)  SugarCRM manages contact lists, etc, and workflow of sales leads,
orders, follow-ups, etc, and appears to kick into gear for organizations
which are large enough to have teams of people (sales, marketing, etc.)
to coordinate.)  Very nice, and thank you, Mark.

There was spirited discussion on a number of points, such as the coming
security problems with enhanced Javascript, Apple's open-sourcing of
iCal, graphing packages for Linux, and more.  Plus announcements of
upcoming events such as Software Freedom Day -- and of course tomorrow's
GNHLUG Master Summer Summit.

Ray Coté was on the agenda to give a five-minute presentation on "man
page of the month", namely on the "find" command.  The group let him
off the hook, after he promised to do a ten-minute presentation on the
"find" command next month.  (Eventually we'll have a whole meeting, heh.)

Final tidbit:  Guy Pardoe tipped us off to Tiddly Wiki:

    http://www.tiddlywiki.com/
    
an undoubtedly way-cool Javascript application.  You can carry around
a single HTML file (on a thumb drive, say) and anywhere you can find a
Web browser you can plug in and have access to an interactive PIM-type
application.  A lot like a wiki (which it is).  You do have to enable
Javascript, so there may be security implications, but it lets you do
a lot for a really lightweight investment.  Did I mention way cool?

Thanks, Guy.  Another great meeting.

-Bill




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