LESMUUG meeting notes

Notes from the December meeting 7pm.

Who showed: ber, mario, rwp, mikey, mappel, trey, bub, donner, josef and elizabeth. It didn't rain but it was the day after Christmas.

I've been a total slacker and put off doing the notes for weeks so I've pretty much forgotten what happened. But I do recall it being a fun meeting and I don't recall any injuries with the possible exception of the Titanium Powerbook. But those are obsolete now anyway so no real harm done.

The person calling herself Elizabeth challenged the group to determine the best mail client for OS X. That was too easy so we declined to come up with an answer. Then we talked about PF keys. Huh? Key mappings. We mumbled something maybe about QuicKeys.

Rob wanted to show us searchling, so we goofed around with mikey's projector and brought that up/down/over. I was underwhelemed but then again my brain had been adled by playing way too much Sims. I see now that it was macoshints pick of the week back at one time. I'm lobbying (starting right now) to make macosxhints the official hints site of lesmuug. We could send them (Rob Griffiths) a bucket of money every once in a while for encouragement.

Mappel asked how the attempt to become an Apple reseller was going and I explained the process where you call Apple and get transfered around a lot and eventually disconnected then you send mail asking for more information and give up on ever getting a response at which time you get an email with a login/password and are directed to a website where you can download a PDF questionaire which asks among other things your Dunn & Bradstreet number. At that point I decided I didn't want to be an Apple reseller until maybe some other time. You need to move $100K of merchandise annually. That's the easy part. By the way if you go to the D&B website with Safari it says at the top "This site is not yet optimized for Netscape 6. Please use a different browser." Dumb and Dumber.

Then rob showed us iTerm which was pretty good. In the ensuing discussion we figured out you can zoom Terminal windows in and out with CMD-+/- too. That was a joyous discovery for some.

At some point we started to look at the Xserve in the laundry room via Apple Remote Desktop but it wasn't working too well. Rob discovered my wacky DNS configurations were screwing things up and when he removed the Xserve as a DNS server things straightened out. Then we were able to determine the blower speeds from our laptops. You can read rpms and degrees remotely but not decibels which are the most amazing of all.

Trey wanted to know how to mount tar files but nobody would tell him so he's convinced it can't be done. So am I.

I think rob showed us how one can mount an ftp site and access it in a manner similar to how one mounts and accesses a remote filesystem. Mikey noted one cannot write into the frp site mounted this way. I think I tried to explain why that was but lost the ability to reason or talk.

So I went over my "boring" list. The list of conversation starters for when the meeting gets boring. Hmm... Did you know you could drag files and folders into an open/save panel? Yes, everyone knew that. Did you know you can hit ESCAPE to abort a drag and drop? Ho hum. I gave a complete biographical introduction to Wilfred Sánchez in order to throw weight behind the fact he's written a adduser script. That was a little bit of overkill. I then rambled somewhat about IP over Firewire and GUI scripting.

Perhaps it was at about this point in the meeting when people started roaming around the building looking for soup. They came back with green split pea, we think. Whatever it was people seemed to enjoy it.

Mappel started a discussion about DOM trees that went completely over my head.

Mikey took the floor and demoed Sherlock, which I had never used until after that demo. He also showed us how to back up our commercial DVDs to disk and view them from disk. And he reviewed Mac OS X for Unix Geeks by Jepson & Rothman from O'Reilly. If I remember correctly the review was like - It's a good read. It assumes you know certain things and if you do then it's a bit lightweight. But you'll learn things anyway and it's only a couple hundred pages. In any event the book is available for members to check out themselves. With any luck I'll get mikey to write down what he actually did have to say about it. There was also rumblings about openLDAP.

Trey asked how one programatically hides/reveals a button or window with Cocoa. I said I knew the answer and promised to tell him after the meeting. But I didn't so I couldn't but I will. Alas.

Mikey pulled a TiBook in need of an airport card installation out of his hat. We only spent a little time looking for a torx driver when rob pointed out the job required a phillips. So we let rob take the case apart and install the card. This seemed to motivate mario because he then pulled an airport card out of his hat and started to install it in his iBook. The good news is he had a screwdriver and managed to get the screws under the keyboard out. The bad news is you aren't supposed to remove any screws to install an airport card in an iBook. Nevertheless he ended up with a working wireless connection. Maybe next month we'll have a session on "Power tools and when not to use them."

The evening started to wind down so to liven things up an open bottle of Rolling Rock was knocked over onto rob's tibook after which most of us left the scene. Meeting adjourned.

        ber

Dramatic Reenactment