Who showed: ber, rien, sklarm, rwp, rickt, donner, jmiz, lenny, bub (and it was raining)
Marc opened up the discussion as maybe the newest oldest (most experienced) Unix hacker to come to the light. How do you change your shell and get it to stick? rwp explained the nidump/niload netinfo utilities. That got is to a discussion of netinfo, nis, ad and ldap.
What about X11 on OS X? That brought us to fink, osxgnu, and others and what's good and bad about everything. Depends on what you want to do, how you want to do it but there are plenty of ways to go about it. Bottom line, yes, you can run X11 it's easy and and it works.
Lenny asked about setting up an iCal server and there was some but not a hell of a lot of talk about that. Then I started rattling off mailing lists and web pages that might of general interest. The domain hosting the nutters list seemed to be a hit with this gang, many of us having survived fun-people.
What about emacs? There's a native emacs but no native xemacs. rwp brought the house down when he described how to do key-bindings across the board. donner exclaimed it was "mondo cool".
There were some complaints about function key behavior and I promised I would tell people how to toggle the function key/hardware settings mode with the FN key on the laptops. But I can't find it. My bad.
At this point donner pulled out his 2" digital camera and lead us into the perhiperals arena for a short bit. I asked if anyone minded having their names listed on the website I was going to create. Nope. The crowd wanted their pictures up to. We'll see about that. I promised to send members a pointer to the mailing list. Therefore the web site was created on Friday by opening a can of Site-In-A-Day.
Then rickt opened up a good round with "What are the must-have utilities?" sun of weather grok, asmx, cycles, windowshade, omni dict to name a few.
"Why is my machine constantly busy when I think it should be idle? iTunes is always eating 15% and if it's not iTunes it's other stuff." rwp's machine is 0% busy. Looking at my tibook I see it's 100% in Mail. Was typing notes into a mail message. rwp explains about the spell checker black hole theory. It turns out in my case Mail was just hosed. The machine was spinning out of control (and Mail didn't work) for 4 hours until I shut it down.
Donner told us about the time someone sat on the mainframe cache at IBM unbeknownst to the admins who went into a frenzy for the better part of day. It was in relation to something to the effect that rickt should make sure his boards are seated. Amazingly I don't recall ever having heard the story.
Lenny started going off about needing a cross-platform gui description language which few of us really appreciated (being cheerleader wanabees.) But we're glad he got it out of his system. No, QT is no good and here's why...
rickt being the excellent discussion leader he was obviously born to be asked "What is each of your biggest problems with OS X?" Well... The Finder search tries to index my volumes and isn't done before my next dock crash. In the meantime grep on the network volume takes 30 seconds so what's up with Finder? There was a general concensus that Finder robustnss (not just speed) was an issue. Lenny's biggest hassle is that his firewire scanner apparently crashes the system. I noted how thankful I am that 10.2 fixed the firewire hangs I was forever randomly getting. Mikey observes Terminal doesn't feel like an xterm. Even Ororobus terms don't feel like xterm. Lenny has another one. Nobody can use your machine when you're screenlocked. I.e. on XP you can apparently hide someone's session and login while their logged in. Okay. We gave him that one. He also has issues with https even with ssh. That remark however started a fistfight. Mikey and I wish we knew how to set up an airport repeater. The concensus seems to be that afp isn't too good and people should use nfs, especially if their nfs server doesn't require tcp connections.
rwp told us how to find the secure options on the finder's cmd-k to do remote mounts and then we got into firewall/nternal network/vpn issues after lenny started another fistfight with "The airport base station doesn't have a firewall."
The meeting was over at 10pm. Nobody was seriously injured. A good time was probably had by all.
ber