Club Linux Coffs Harbour

For those that missed Sundays meet-up here is a brief synopsis of of our nerdly chatterings;

• Mike Stanton was kind enough to show us around his expansive Customer Relations Manager Application, "DAM Suite CRM" which he has developed using PHP and MySQL. It is great to see a local developer using open source technology so effectively.
• We discussed, amongst other stuff:
  • the Australian Governments' disturbing plans for filtering the Internet. Now may well be a good time to join the EFA
  • The amazingly excellent Stellarium - A planetarium on your computer. I was very impressed with the slick interface and endless tweakabilty... (is that a real word?).
  • Again with the tweaking with gedit and nano two of my favourite text editors. Unlike Mike, my brain cannot handle vi.
  • Matthew kindly showed us a few holiday snaps which reminded me of an excellent hack I recently discovered for Canon Digital Cameras. CHDK can be installed on top of the existing camera firmware to unlock heaps of hidden functions.

It is a few years now that David Chapman and I talked about trying a Linux Club in Coffs Harbour.

The original plan was to have a club so that we could encourage more and more people to the many advantages of Linux operating systems.

 With David's generosity we did set up a once a month, Sunday afternoon session at his shop in Ocean Parade Coffs and on occasion we did have a good and interested attendance. 

First of all, a big HELLO to all of you at Club Linux! It's great to still receive the monthly meeting notices and get and idea of what you're up to, and if I'm ever back over that way, like a bad smell I'm sure to turn up again. :)

It's been a while, I know, but you see I've been busy...

I've always been annoyed by slow websites, and even more annoyed by full page refreshes in the browser just to get something you didn't really want to see anyway. So, out with the AJAX!

A bit over a year ago now, I started a project to get my openPC Labs website improved before updating it. I'm afraid it's still not updated because in the process things developed into something much bigger.

I wanted to use AJAX techniques for the site to get the responsiveness I yearned for. I also wanted to fix up the navigation so that the location bar, history and bookmarks would work.

At the time, there was very little support for browser navigation in AJAX. I stumbled on one system called Really Simple History. It was open source, but a bit buggy and a bit too slow for me, I just didn't feel comfortable with the way it was done.

So I started to roll my own..... BIG mistake.... just over a year later I might be able to start updating openPC Labs!

To cut a long story short, Xanjax and xanjax.org were born.

Hi all,

I'm on the chlug mailing list, and I don't mind staying on it for the chance there might be some interesting topics come up.... However, my spam filters have started picking up the spam on the list at such a level that mails are now being bounced at SMTP time. So now the list has informed me I'm being banned due to the excessive bounces. 

Is there any chance of better spam handling on the list? Or otherwise ignoring bounces (I think the bounces would have some spam assassin headers to hint at why they are being bounced).

Yes, That quick!  My previous backyard ISP, a local unit of odd fellows that had no idea what service meant, shut me down on the 6 july.  I rang Optus and fiddled around with them until they finally stuffed everythig up causing me to cancel my request.

 

Optus sent me a letter which I recieved on 27 July, it was post marked 26 July and the letter was dated the 24 July The letter stated, amongst other things, that if there were any changes to my request for boradband to contact them prior to the 24 July.  Hmmmm! 

 

A friend of a friend offered to pay me to set up broadband internet on his old computer. Money shmoney, I foolishly thought, I'll do it for free. So I bought a $30 modem off ebay and set it all up with a reputable ISP, the computer was running Windows 98 but I didn't have to use it so that's fine. An hour to set it all up and provide a quick lesson in how to use the net and I'm done.

A bit of free help randomly thrown out into the world, leaving behind a warm fuzzy glow.

I just came across this article: Do we still need LUGs? It reminded me of our Club. I've twice raised the subject of a mailing list, ho hum. The forum here seems to attract very little interest; Peter must save his questions for the meetings. Could we at least use the forum to discuss some topics for meetings?

Does Club Linux Coffs Harbour have an IRC channel they hang out on, or a mailing list?

Or is there any way to contact a Club Linux Coffs Harbour member?

I am in Armidale, but my hometown is Grafton, and I want to participate in LUG activities where possible.

Thank you,

 

PS

What about email address lists? 

 

IRC:

irc.indymedia.org #coffscoast 

 

Well... hey, after that last meeting I got all fired up and upgraded from Dapper to Edgy and installed Beryl. So for the past week or so I've been whizzing round my 3d cuboid desktop thingy, writing my Uni assignments - I'm not sick on eye candy quite yet. It is kinda fun to laugh at all the 'early adopter's using Vista and seeing how they have to struggle to get similar affects with a brand new machine and graphics card whilst my crummy 3 1/2 year old lappy runs rings round them.

Stuff nerds to for fun hey...

I've always liked the idea of having multiple desktops but have never really gotten into them. When I'm in the Zone I tend to just do my thing until I run out of steam or can't find that 34th window I opened earlier. With the 3d cubey thing I just seem to keep going for longer and it feels much more tactile. Does that sound pervy?

Hi, just a note to say I really enjoyed my first clublinux meeting on sunday, so much so that I wrote a short article about it and posted it on Coffs Coast Indymedia.

http://coffscoastimc.org/node/193

See you all next month!