Meeting-20081213

WPLUG will have a General User Meeting and presentation on Saturday, December 13th, starting at 10am at the Wilkins School Community Center.

Schedule for the Day

9:45am - Setup
10:00am - Business Meeting starts
10:30am - Featured Presentation
Noon - Meeting ends, everyone out. We are likely to go to D's 6pack for lunch.

Speaker/Presentation

Greg Alheid will be speaking about shell scripting.

Questions about shell scripting (pre-meeting):

Who asked

• Question(s)

Beth Lynn Eicher

• How do you decide that your text processing task is too complex for shell scripting (with awk and sed) causing you to use perl/python/ruby instead?
• What are the advantages of bash over other shells?

Jon Daniel

• Coming from someone who has mainly done development in C/java/php, what kind of features/strengths do shell scripts have over writing a php/python/perl script to accomplish the same task? Is it anything other ubiquity?
• What are the major differences between the shells (sh/bash/tcsh/csh)?

Jim Harris

• I have multi step shell instructions to update a friends Linux box ... how do I put it in a script so that they can click on a button or should I put it in a crontab and how?

Your name here

• Your first question
• Your second question

Bonus Event

Contest: Who's got the best .bash_profile or .bashrc? Here's how it works:

1. Create a login for yourself on the WPLUG wiki if you don't already have one.
2. Create a wiki page User:Yourlogin/.bashrc or User:Yourlogin/.bash_profile. For the contents of that page, add [[Category:.bashrc]] to the top of your entry.
3. Put a single space before each line if you don't want the wiki to try to format your file (or surround your entire script with <pre></pre> tags).

Here's an example:

User:Mhs/.bashrc

If you use csh or zsh or fish or whatever, that's great. Just make sure its in the [[Category:.bashrc]] so it shows up in the list. At the meeting, we'll go through them, and informally grade them for style, flamboyance, utility, etc. We'll take a vote to see who has the best one, and the winner will get either a $15 gift card from a coffee shop, or all the Visual Basic references on my book shelf. If we can get together some more swag, there may be a prize for least obfuscated, most obfuscated, etc.

You don't have to attend to win the best prize -- bragging rights. But you do have to attend to win any of the tangible prizes.

One rule -- for this competition, you can't cheat and look at other peoples posts on the wiki to bolster your own entry. We're on the honor system. However, after the competition, we'll consider all entries GPL, and anything you can steal is fair game for the next competition, whenever we have it.

Meeting Minutes

The regular monthly meeting of the Western Pennsylvania Linux Users Group was held on Saturday, December 13, 2008, at 10:30 AM, at the Wilkins School Community Center, the regular presiding officer being in the chair and the Secretary being present. The minutes of the October 4 and November 22, 2008 meetings were approved as read.

The Chair reported that he intends to seek opportunities for WPLUG to engage in community outreach in the coming year and requested that members contribute to such activities where they can. He also requested that members provide any input or suggestions they may have regarding meeting venues as soon as possible.

The Secretary reported that WPLUG currently has 22 members.

The Program Committee reported on potential installfest meeting venues. Northland Public Library in McCandless is interested although their schedule is quite full, and the Andrew Carnegie Free Library in Carnegie is a possibility although network access may be difficult.

It was moved that the start time for General User Meetings be changed from 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM. After debate, the motion was adopted.

The meeting adjourned at 12:05 PM.

(Approved on January 17, 2009 - VK)

Meeting Staff

If you would like to volunteer to assist with this meeting, please add your name to one or more of the categories below.

• Host: Beth Lynn Eicher
• Co-Host: Your name here
• Donuts: Vance Kochenderfer
• Setup: Beth Lynn Eicher (bringing projector)
• Clean Up: Vance Kochenderfer, Your name here