SEMiSLUG Notes

10 February 2006

Question & Answer Sessions

1. Songbird ... WTF?

Supposed to be an open source iTunes thingie, but it's kind of ... pathetic. It's not much more than a collection of bookmarks. Did we miss the point?

2. What kind of dog is Smokey (a.k.a. "The Boy")?

Pekinese, man.

3. Where, oh, where can I find a domain registrar that doesn't suck?

Msen is _very_ happy with OpenSRS. They're not as cheap as GoDaddy, but they're very good. They're the sort of registrar you'd be if you got into the registrar game. Talk to MRW if you want more information.

4. Who's seeing "Firewall" at noon tomorrow?

MJO, apparently. Juniper would like more sysadmins to show up, but some of use need to work during the day. (Juniper bought NetScreen -- "We like NetScreen," says MRW.)

5. VMware!

In response to Zen, VMware server is going to be free. The enterprise server will still cost, the the old GSX will, apparently, be free.

6. Suggestions for a meta-scheduler?

Ed's looking for something to schedule distributed processes over several machines. None of us are sure, but it seems there must be something out there somewhere.

7. I love I love I love my calendar crap! (Eh?)

I ... I'm not sure I followed this at all.

8. Why is Troy babbling (be-ee-eff-ess-ex-forteen-ay?)? Huh?

It's some Linksys VPN endpoint thingie for cheap.

"Linksys VPN == crap." Doesn't sound like much of a recommendation.

9. How can one escape the Tcl/Motif horror?

Scott has inherited a 14-year old Tcl/Motif and wants it to be ... better. ("Can it be replace with a shell script?" -- Anon.) Nothing much in the way of useful suggestions so far. If you've got any experience moving from Motif to Tk, let us know.

10. Jobs?

If you've got something interesting, let Troy know.

Try http://www.jobbankusa.com/ for a good site.

11. Woz?

Not Woz.

12. Power supply for very few $$?

eBay! Look for broken cameras, for example, to find camera PS.

(Just make MJO do it.)

13. Troy want's to __________ a supermodel. Can you help?

Tcl? With Motif? Oh ... photograph. If you know any who need a photographer, let him know. He's looking for portfolio fodder.

14. Podcasts: any good sources for the road-weary commuter?

"IT Conversations" is good. Recorded books are a nice alternative.

15. Flash photobooks or slide shows -- suggestions for software?

Troy is looking for ways to show of his photos while preventing people from downloading them easily. No real suggestions so far.

16. SNMP bandwidth throughput peaks?

Someone is looking at a stupid number of queries, but we don't have a lot of experience that is relavent here.

17. car-computer analogies.

They tend to break down.

(Look for this subject to show up on the mailing list.)

18. iiMac?

Not much to say yet.


Presentation



It's Ed! -- EMV Holds Forth on Topics That Interest Him


delicious -- a social bookmarking site

mash-up camp -- creating combinations

    Getting together to take different technologies and
    get them together.  Sometimes it interesting to take disparate
    concepts that haven't really caught on and combine them into new
    utilities.

[sorry about the lack of notes -- I was distracted by interesting stuff]



Rumor & Innuendo (No names, please)

Microsoft has called all of the big vendors to San Jose to talk about security.


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