MonadLUG's July 13th meeting

[Ted Roche]

Great meeting last night. Eight attended.

The usual slew of announcements. Discussed the Northeast Linux  
Symposium, based on Bill Sconce's posting to the LUG, and the Nashua  
Telegraph article about NLS. Spoke about upcoming meetings -  
MonadLUG's next meeting is August 10th and will feature Mark Witham  
doing a demonstration of SugarCRM. Should be a very interesting meeting!

Charlie Farinella gave a great presentation on screen. While a fairly  
simple and limited command, it's awfully useful for remote work where  
you want more than one terminal. Charlie showed how you could detach  
and reattach to a running session and how unanticipated termination  
could also allow for reattachment - handy for many situations, like a  
lost dial-up connection, or leaving something running and going home  
and checking on it later. Charlie had done his homework and covered a  
variety of functions: multi-screen support, switching, splitting and  
restoring windows onscreen, naming each terminal and more. A very  
educational and easy-to-understand presentation. Less intimidating  
than the man page, too!

Charlie remembered that the group had tried a "man page of the month"  
short presentation for a brief period, but we fell out of the habit.  
We've decided to try it again, with a 10-minute or so brief  
presentation in addition to a main presentation or general talk. Ray  
Cote volunteered to do a brief talk on 'top' for the next meeting.

At some point, Guy also buttonholed me for a talk on RSS, sometime  
this fall. Stay tuned.

What followed was a far ranging talk. Ray and Charlie of Appropriate  
Solutions showed off a web site of their that has just gone live.  
Based on Perl and using the Mason framework, Ray discussed the basic  
architecture, caching issues, design challenges and showed (using  
screen, of course!) some of the code they use to run the site.  
Impressive. Cisco talked about the latest Eclipse software, his  
favorite packaging (MyEclipse) and the amazing things Eclipse can do  
these days - JavaScript debugging, client and server step-by-step,  
debugging page rendering - wow!

Excellent presentation and talk! Thanks to Ken for hosting, Guy for  
running the show, Charlie for the presentatin and everyone for  
participating!


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