LESMUUG meeting notes

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Who showed: ber, rien, jmiz, striv, chien, wpm, mario and claud. Rob had an excuse being it didn't rain.

The meeting started promptly at 7pm even though the financial services guys showed up early. They always show up to meetings early. It's their culture. When there's soup. Two varieties.

We flew over some literary topics. Mostly the fact that publishers send us books to help us become better hackers. And if we should publish a review that would be okay too. For this they hold their breaths. Members can check books out for review or if they're too cheap to buy their own copies.

Last month we made fun of the book New Riders sent us, Macintosh... The Naked Truth by Scott Kelby. Well, lenny took it home and he says it was really good. We look forward to the write-up. This month we received the follow titles:

• Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, 2nd Edition by David Pogue from O'Reilly. 700+ pages of certain wonderfulness to be digested at a later date.
• Learning Unix for Mac OS X by Dave Taylor & Jerry Peek from O'Reilly. Kenny's take was it looks to be a Unix beginners book. That would make sense given the title. When we find someone who wants to learn Unix we'll try this out on them.
• Mac OS X for Unix Geeks by Brian Jepson and Ernest E. Rothman from O'Reilly. Mikey is down and almost done with it. Hopefully we'll hear a word or two from him on the subject in the coming weeks.
• Digital Photography Pocket Guide by Derrick Story from O'Reilly. Claud made off with this pocketbook. We know where he lives. We'll quiz him after Christmas.
• Mac OS X v. 10.2 Jaguar Killer Tips by Scott Kelby from New Riders. I started on it and it's okay. Two or three tips per page. If you've been using OS X you probably know most of them and can skip quickly though it but chances are you'll pick up quite a few. I can't say I'm enamored with the author's style (pot kettle black) but he loses most of the cuteness when he gets into the meat of the information. Skip the introduction. I got about 20% into it and turned it over to bub for critical evaluation.

We're reminded that members get a 20% discount on O'Reilly books and conferences if they order directly from O'Reilly and use the user group code. They get a 30% discount on books and maybe free shipping if they order from Amazon and don't tell them they're members of LESMUUG. Depending on where they work they may get a 50% discount and may or may not have to deny they're club members.

At some point iChat came into play. Mario observes:

A discussion on the intricacies of iChat took over a good part of the evening, as we covered its AOL protocol compatibility, and discovered how to chat with bunches of people at once via the "new chat" menu selection. This resulted in everyone with a laptop rushing to hone their new-found skills in an iChat marathon.

Mikey had loaned us his projector which came in very handy for the iChat nonsense. We'll have to make it a permanent feature.

Rob discovered us from his house (remember it wasn't raining so he couldn't make it to the meeting) or we discovered him. What with figuring out AOL and iChat and playing hunt the wumpus with Phil's various account names which were all the same, the actual conversation going over the wire left something to be desired. Rob dropped off in due course. In the process Phil decided to pay for his .Mac account right then and there. *sigh* If the club only got a kickback for all the Apple stuff we sell (buy.) We believe we verified there cannot be more than two parties in a Rendezvous chat but can be in an AIM chat. I'm still confused as to why I downloaded the AIM client. I was pretty sure I need it for something. And it wasn't for the stock ticker. Oh well, I'm lead to believe whatever it was is no longer the case.

Last month I had threatened to make a list of talking points to prevent awkward meeting silence. I did make a list of trivia I picked up and even though the conversations were going swimmingly I wasn't going to let my list get stale so I ripped through it. The group jammed on the interesting ones and ignored most of them.

Mario notes:

Other cool discoveries included getting a full terminal screen after typing ">console" (enter) at the login prompt, dragging graphic links to the IE toolbar, results of the "open" command, and the OS X "Zoom" feature, which drew lots of oohs and ahhs.

Pop-up ad elimination came up, and it was pointed out that these could be limited by selecting "accept only from originating server" under "Images" in IE prefs. Of course, one can never mention IE without someone taking offense, hence our jaunt to the "101 Things Mozilla Can Do That IE Can't" website.

I learned about option-clicking to position the cursor in curses apps. I also learned that I don't know how to or if it's possible to change the font size globally in OS X. That remains an open question. Feel free to enlighten us.

We need to add this stuff to the FAQ.

We went back into projector mode and visited The Iconfactory to show off iPulse, this month's featured program. The Iconfactory gave us three iPulse licenses which we drew for. If I remember correctly no one there knew about iPulse yet so it was pretty exciting. The winners were wpm, mario and jmiz. Now we're supposed to get the word out about Candy Bar.

We also handed out Office X coasters, Apple folders, and Jaguar stickers. They were all a big hit this time around. New blood. Not jaded by t-shirts.

Mario notes:

The rest of the evening bore discussions on Apple store workshops and seminars, "who came first: Sherlock or Watson?", the roots of Usenix, the merits of Objective C (vs C, C++, and A+), and the politics of Unix (in China, Russia, etc).

I plugged the program I've been working on, MailGlance, and started to do a walkthrough of the code on the basement door. About then the meeting adjourned. 9:30. Two beers, a coke, a glass of water and two pots of soup. There would have been more consumption but we couldn't stop wagging our tongues. Either that or people hid the empties. There's still some Miller Light left. And, no, no one was hurt. Check back next month.

        ber y mario