Meeting Notes: SLUG Mon 14 Nov - Google Earth and everything else

[Ben Scott]

Hi all,

  Thanks to Rob Anderson for his presentation on Google Earth tonight.
 Google Earth is cool.  As an inherently very visual thing, I'm not
going to try and describe everything Rob showed off.  I will point
everyone to

http://slug.gnhlug.org/slug/Members/rea/SLUG/talks/google-earth-talk

which has a bunch of bookmarks to really cool things you can do with
Google Earth.  For example, you can use a GPS gadget to log a trip you
take, feed that into Google Earth, and play it back as a flythrough of
the world.

  Also discussed were:

  Personal Linux histories, war stories, and encounters with network
management morons.  It's amazing just how screwed up a network can
get, provided you apply the proper levels of incompetence.

  ndiswraper.  Here's a tip, courtesy of Gus: If you've done the
ndiswrapper magic and "ndiswrapper -l" says everything is present and
working but "ifconfig -a" finds no interfaces, try doing "rmmod
ndiswrapper ; depmod -a ; modprobe ndiswrapper".  That fixed someone's
ThinkPad and Belkin wireless "G" card on DamnSmallLinux.  Humina
humina.

  The Novell/Microsoft thing.  One interesting theory put forward was
that the intellectual property thing is actually a red herring, and
that Novell actually has some "dirt" on Microsoft that they're
blackmailing them for.

  "XML is for people who don't understand Scheme."  (not my quote,
that just seems like such good flamewar fodder that I had to pass it
along)

  9 or 10 attended.

  The next SLUG meeting is scheduled for Mon 11 Dec 2006.  Topic TBD.

-- Ben