[Sussex] [SWRU] Microsoft is From Mars, Open Source is from Venus.

Sun Mar 30 21:03:01 UTC 2003

So this time I am figuring on starting my rant a little early on Account
of these 2.5k Diatribes requiring a little over 1hr 30mins to compile,
review and discuss. 

Its great that more and more people are coming out of the WoodLurk and
joining in the list and it was great to see many many more people
arriving to the SLUG meets to join in those late night debates of maths,
democracy and reason. 

Or just , get absolutely hammered as I did.

Its good to see that people are appreciating the List round up and the
feed back I get suggests that there is more than a few who now wait for
the round up to asses the threads they show interest in ... Adam Smith
himself returned to our list and kicked off some corrections about his
geophysical location.  Although I did wonder why no one realises that to
me all points are both the same and distant. Geoff, Matt and a few
others tried to put yours truly in the right ball park though. Cheers
Guys.

Well presenting again, for your delictation the man with the Chip on his
shoulder, the Silicon Snake Oil Vendor of all things open sourced and
Anti Microsoft. 

the Sussex Weekly Round Up.

So, blasting in from the past, and contributing to the future the return
of Geekcode. The C like psuedo code representing a personal profile and
a individuals technical prolification. Many submitted and reviewed and
commited to memory the importance of all those B--, G+++, R+++ etc all
the interest of public awarenes.. This thread just continued onwards and
onwards from last week but it worth following through on. The Thread
alos hinted towards the current re-employment of Gareth Ablett.

http://www.geekcode.com
http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/sussex/2003-March/002230.html
http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/sussex/2003-March/002241.html
http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/sussex/2003-March/002258.html

Gareth getting a job is excellent, although as he pointed out he will be
working on the .NOT sorry .NET framework. Now Ive done a awful lot of
ASP work in the past and the new .NET implementation for it is a god
send compared to how it used to be. Its yet another language that MS
released and then realised it was not finished. Its like the growth of
VB, not until at least 6.0 was it actually worthy of development however
so many badly written books existed education people on how to develop
and implement the vadious data connectivity and object manifestations
that code implemented by many large organisations did not even bother
with Garbage collection ( e.g set objExample = nothing ). Then MS
released the Windows Scripting Host and whoa , ive got a whole lotta
Object functionality at my fingertips. the down side... they blew away
security for a while. The Guys from the Madelbrot Set really had a lot
ot say about all that. hehehe any way the link was

http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/sussex/2003-March/002258.html
http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/sussex/2003-March/002293.html
http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/sussex/2003-March/002294.html

Speaking of Numlocks, okay okay we werent speaking of Numlocks but you
try to segway from Geekcode to Numlocks.... Anyway posting the fist no
Subject reques to the list , Jon Davis was wondering how to enable
Numlocks at boot. Something I always thought was forced in the Bios, or
am I showing my age.  John Crowhurst knocked up some useful scripts,
John Crowhurst dropped in a few thoughts about Linux local startup
scripts. I began to think that there was a global Num Lock John
conspiracy until Steve Dobson backed up my thoughts of the time witha
Bios Suggestion. And then because of that incident us SLUGS with casual
consistency headed off on a little sub thread regarding Acronyms. Though
I wondered if I use a Micro ATX board will that come with a Baby Bio
System ?

http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/sussex/2003-March/002215.html
http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/sussex/2003-March/002216.html
http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/sussex/2003-March/002222.html

So Geoff got his new super gee whiz Workstation { now im still saying
its a Laptop but its purpose has not yet been revealed } so of course he
sets out with the first task at hand to install debian
^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H no sorry it was to breed a race of cybernetic death
snakes who bite your thumb to identify you..... okay BioInformatics and
Python. Though I still think angry killer death snakes are more funny

http://www.biopython.org
http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/sussex/2003-March/002232.html

The whole Perl/Python debate, which Mark and I will save for another
SLUG meeting, carried on a little from the remarks about Silence. What
it boils down to is coding style and preferences. A long time agao I had
to take on a VB app whose develper created numbered variables using his
surname. Obfusication comes with any language but I love the way Perl
and C allow you to really make another developers life hard <grin>

http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/sussex/2003-March/002238.html

Steve, so who won the competition then , Dobson wrote to let us know
about the 25 years of O'Reilly. O'Reilly must be the secret signal for
all us dedicated Open Source geeks. You enter a Office or Home and see a
range of these books and your mind kinda relaxes and says , ahh yes here
in lies Clue. Of Course we managed to head off topic and discussed the
potential for a Slug Meet birthday location, which so far involves
Chessington Zoo, Mark Harrison deliberatley resurrectino tunes from the
depths of my hidden memories and Geoff Teale in search of Gentoo
Condoms.. though how the Gentoo can get them out of the wrappers what
with those flippers...

http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/sussex/2003-March/002250.html
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=42310&highlight=
http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/sussex/2003-March/002257.html

Tom Ellis took a break from Stalking our WebCam to visit the world of
ISO based Linuxes, in the form herin on Knoppix. Robin Shepard gave the
nod and wink to a preference for keeping this particular distro in his
CD toolkit.

http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/sussex/2003-March/002249.html
http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/sussex/2003-March/002254.html
http://www.3ait.co.uk
http://trellisnet.co.uk/nikstress.jpg

Ciaran , whose name should come with one of those useful pheonetic
prounciation guides, de lurked to say hello to the list. Adam dropped
out to be the first to welcome him.  And we all wondered about disks
components, mail clients  and partioning and it gave us all the opportunity to question Geoffs sanity.

http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/sussex/2003-March/002262.html
http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/sussex/2003-March/002266.html

Anyway Ciaran , really developed a posting habit with more questions
about Ipaqs and Linux. A subject which is guaranteed to have Mr Dobson
stir from the Cthuloid Depths of his day job

http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/sussex/2003-March/002282.html
http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/sussex/2003-March/002302.html
http://www.hp.com/
http://handhelds.org/download/bootldr/pxa/CHANGELOG

And it was the week for anniversaries new and old as Geoff pointed out
that RedHat reached 10.

http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/sussex/2003-March/002265.html
http://www.redhat.com/mktg/rh10year/

Geoff followed through on a post concerning Maths. Which leadds me to
point out that Mr Faultley has a growing concern about the continual
high brow conversation level on this list, especially in regards to
Maths. Anyway Geoff posed a quick competition question for the meet
regarding Randomness. Of Course it was a litte unclear if he intended
people to complete the competition by means of theft, or intellect.

http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/sussex/2003-March/002301.html
http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/sussex/2003-March/002305.html

And more reasons to believe that Geoff is experimenting on himself
rather than his large collection of mutated angry sea bass. 

http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/sussex/2003-March/002303.html
http://www.penguinwarehouse.com

Geoff [ geoff obviously had a lot of spare time Wednesday ] also posted
a article about the current love of Open Source and the SME market
http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/sussex/2003-March/002306.html

Steve wondered about the real legal validity of all those long winded
Email Disclaimers we all know and love .. hint hint Geoff. 
http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/sussex/2003-March/002313.html

David Chapman is having a hard time with his hard disk, and im not sure
if he found a resolution to the problem but it highlights that many of
us tend to live the life of Boy Scouts, always being prepared. With
Spares and backups and components to hand.

http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/sussex/2003-March/002326.html

Andrew Guard, wow see Andrews been kinda quiet with his new watch for
the week. Hey maybe there was nothing to report on in terms of good
technology news.  News of broadband and housing construction has for
some of my customers been old news for a long time but its funny how
many of these groups dont really understand the implications of the
technlogy and what it really means to implement.
http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/sussex/2003-March/002338.html
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/22/29957.html

Also Id like to make it clear that this thread was regarding my severe
hang over following  a really good Slug Moot wherein I consumed vast
amounts of Old Ale
http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/sussex/2003-March/002346.html

okay for a change ive actually run out of time to complete this list...
its taking the best part of 2 hours now...

Im happy the list is getting real active and talkative im going to have
to put some plans into capturing this data daily to make the collation a
little easier.

for now im stopping on friday ... and would encourage people to drop
into the Website and always pop back to the archives when you can .

Cheers

Nik

-- 
nik at wired4life.org	http://www.wired4life.org/	Wired4Life, an Answer.

Q: Divide 14 sugar cubes into 3 cups of coffee so that each
cup has an odd number of sugar cubes.
A: 1,1,12
Riposte: 12 isn't odd!
A: It's an odd number of cubes to put in a cup of coffee (groan)