[GLLUG] Meeting Minutes - 9 September, 2004

[Charles Ulrich]

Greetings fellow LUG members. If you didn't attend the meeting, here's
all the GREAT and COOL and NIFTY stuff that you missed:

Vital Statistics
----------------
7 people attended the meeting which began at 6:00PM and ended around
8:00PM.

Official Business
-----------------
We'd like volunteers to stand up and accept the positions of Treasurer
and Publicity Director. Both are particularly needed at this early
stage. We need a Treasurer to help us research our options for becoming
a non-profit organization. By becoming a non-profit, we'd have many more
options for meeting space and many other benefits as well. We also
desperately need a Publicity Director to help spread the word about
GLLUG meetings and activities. The LUG will be a lot more fun if we have
more people showing up, so come out and volunteer!

Curt has stepped up to be the new Presentation Director. He'll be the
new point of contact for those wishing to give a presentation on their
pet technology. So everyone fire off an email to him RIGHT NOW at
asenchi at asenchi.com and tell him that YOU want to give a presentation!

General Banter
--------------
Bill brought along his Happy Hacking keyboard. Very cool. Keyboard
habits, preferences, alternatives, and anecdotes were shared and
discussed.

CD-Rs and CD-RWs and their underlying technology were discussed. Bet you
didn't know that some CD-Rs will self-destruct upon contact with water,
or that the organic dye in CD-Rs can be destroyed by an infection, did
you? Consensus: don't buy cheap discs.

Presentation
------------
Marshal's presentation, Object Oriented Programming: It's Like Riding a
Bike, gave a great overview of the OOP methodology and sparked some
interesting conversation afterwards, such as...

More General Banter
-------------------
Learning Python and the excellent (free) Dive Into Python book:
http://diveintopython.org/

The various pros and cons of programming in Python, PHP, and Ruby.

Running several Linux machines as X terminals from a main server.

Linux video card support.

And finally, high-availability solutions in terms of both hardware and
software. It's amazing what's possible these days to keep a service
running 24/7 under any contingency.

Next Week's Meeting
-------------------
The next meeting will be held on Thursday, the 16th at AAI at 6:00PM and
will include a presentation by Michael on *, the open-source PBX and
VoIP solution.

See you there,
Charles
-- 
http://bityard.net