[Sussex] bork bork bork

[Nik Butler]

Bork bork, bork bork bork bork bork. Bork , bork bork ^H^H^H^H

Oops sorry I had my MSN filter on there. 

So welcome to the end of week round up and  sparing opinions of Nik
Butler as he makes sense of the world that is ... SLUGS

New weeks and new commers all are welcome, especially if they involve
long weekends. So a big welcome to Andrew Guard, who delurked and
introduced himself 
	http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/sussex/2003-February/001503.html 

With a expositon on his history, from Vic20s to Amigas and then back
down the technical gradient to Windows XP...

Such technical history soon led mr Teale on a fine opportunity to
expound upon his favourite topics in our beloved Linux list, Programming
languages.
	http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/sussex/2003-February/001509.html

I therefore wonder is we could draw matrix of languages and platforms
and so which of us did what and where and with which.  When we do that
we can then decide upon which language would be best suited for handling
data entry and which database is suited for storage.


Which leads to Mr Fords,  reminding us all that he Schlepped with the
most Highly published. Of course its never a good idea to discuss
development languages between Perl and Python developers. 
	http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/sussex/2003-February/001518.html

Now all this conviviality of course was to much for the most published
amongst us and Mr Harrison was interested to know who was the grand old
wisest amongst us and where we saw our fealty...

http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/sussex/2003-February/001528.html

Looking for the alltime greats in the foundations of our computing
history and careers, 

	Criteria are:

		- Most long-term influence on the course of IT
		- Open publication of what they discovered / invented

Now I would have dropped in a conversation about Marin Mersenne 
	http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Mersenne.html

Mersenne was responsible for ensuring the open and continued dialog
between many intelligent and well written acedemics such as Descartes,
Galileo, Fermat, Pascal etc . 
He also spend a awful lot of time looking into prime numbers.
By sharing documentation and encouraging open communication he promoted
a concept that we of the internet love and treasure.. the open
communication of ideas and knowledge..

any way back to the plot.

We could have had a poll on this particular question although it
certainly showed a wealth and distribution of personalities in our
community.
- Alan Turing
- Joseph Van Neumman
- Dennis Ritchie
- Ken Thompson
- Don Knuth
- Tony Hoare
- Edsger Dijkstra
- Mitch Kapor
- John Perry Barlow
- Richard Stallman
- Linus Torvalds
- Larry Lessig

Certainly this thread showed that the Younger SLUGS are lacking in a
basic knowledge of the foundations of their inheritances... tsk tsk
<grin>


Geof Teale continued on from with a well phrased and polite apology
which in turn kicked off quite a good dialog concering System admins,
Linux in the office and real world ( where is it now then ? ) and the
overdependance on point and click GUIs for system admin.
	http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/sussex/2003-February/001553.html

Dominic actually chimed in late in the week with a genuinely Linux
related thread concerning the ability to kick of a script when the
network is available. 
	http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/sussex/2003-February/001576.html

Actually I did this this weekend with a no-ip.com account and a linux
script which you compile and run under ip-up.local. Anyway back to the
plot. 

Clearly there is more and more awareness from people that regular
internet account will benefit from a static IP especially if you wish to
actually run your own services rather then depend on another provider.


As valentines day came upon us Tom and Jon shared a little something
between themselves and us, which we all felt was very much more fun and
certainly left Mr Fautly feeling a little uncomfortable.
	http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/sussex/2003-February/001595.html

Last post from Mr Ford, revealed that Redhat and Madrake are of course
feeling the financial preasures and familial constraints of supporting
complex systems. Though we can see the light at the end of this tunnel
when we realise that Redhat and Mandrake only distribute the systems and
deliver access to source and code so were not all going to be held
hostage as we might first fear.
	http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/sussex/2003-February/001600.html


Finally in a nice rounding out of topics, Neil and Geoff submitted the
bitter and twisted rivallary that is Opera and Internet Explorer. 
	http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/sussex/2003-February/001591.html



So here in ends out the week busy for all of us I think. But for those
with partners we all survived valentines by remebering the Chocolate
<grin> you know who you were!


Nik
---

Any attempt to brew coffee with a teapot should result in the error code "418: I'm a teapot". 

[RFC 2324] by Eric Green (eric @ at badtux . org)