[Wylug-admin] Mondays Talk, Future Talks

[Anne Wilson]

On Saturday 09 May 2009 11:18:14 Tom Hall wrote:
> As for future talks, I'd appreciate some help getting speakers for the
> second half of the year, any ideas on a stamp to the usual address.

Tom - I've not been to many meeting recently, and have been thinking about why 
that is.  Combine that with a discussion that was held (2 years ago?) about 
what the group can offer newer users, plus a recent experience of mine, I have 
come to the conclusion that there is a niche waiting to be filled, and plenty 
of people in wylug that have the expertise to fill it.

I'm thinking particularly of users that are past the first steps and want to 
increase skills on specific topics.  Things like - firewalling for the home 
LAN - how and why specific decisions are made, opening specific services, 
tunneling at its simplest level, etc.  It seems to me that there is very 
little information easily available that helps us get basic concepts without 
having to study to full sysadmin level.

The 'recent experience' I spoke of involved mysql.  I bought the Linux Format 
coding special last summer, thinking I should get my head around a bit of code 
reading, to speed up my understanding of code snippets.  Sadly many of the 
projects were windows-based - unexpected from an LFX publication - but I 
wanted to try the database project.  I followed the instructions but could not 
get mysql to work (in another situation I would have said that it was a 
permissions problem).  I did ask on the LFX forum, but was unable to resolve 
the problem.  This brings me back to the same problem - you need to understand 
certain basic concepts before being able to use such a tool as mysql.  I'm not 
talking about database concepts (I;ve done quite a bit of database work in one 
form or another) but in how mysql (or postgresql) specifically needs to work.

I've seen the same level of problem with many other things.  Webmin is often 
said to be a great tool for helping configure applications - but if you don't 
have the concepts you won't have the language and are unlikely to get the 
results you want.

I'm wondering if it would be possible to have a series of, say, 20-30minute 
talks on such subjects?  Another possibility would be to make/fake such a 
project.  I would be willing to sit in front of a laptop (mine if you like) 
following instructions and asking the silly questions that a new user asks.  I 
don't mind being the idiot user :-)  The advantage to this approach is that it 
makes sure that basic concepts are not taken for granted.

I would hope that such sessions would not only be useful to people like me, 
but might help members who have to handle support calls to understand what 
leads to questions that seem so obvious to them - an understanding of what 
pieces of the jigsaw are actually missing for the fairly experienced user.

Anne
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