PLUG: The Second Gathering

Introduction

Whoa! Look at them cars at PLUG HQ! Rats! How am I gonna get me car out!

Wow! One week has past and it's time for another PLUG get together! Meeting is such a formal word! Anyway, this time round, timing was slightly off because certain members were unable to attend due to some unforseen circumstances either personal or work-related. Unfortunately at least two newbies who had earlier wanted to come (recruited by our members) again had a change of plan at the very last minute...

This week's get together is special in that we were graced with two out-of-town (Vortman and I doesn't count ;-) Linux geeks; namely Dolphin and Punisher. Both of them hail from Compaq; whereas Dolphin is a web-developer, graphics and gamer extraordinaire, Punisher is a support specialist with a very exotic taste in operating sytems and platforms (his favs are the iMac/G4/MacOS, OS/2, NetBSD, and VAX/VMS; not necessarily in that order!).

Activities

Half-Life fragging session. "Stay away from me you crazy crowbar wielding loonie!"

First off, Vortman and Dolphin displayed their prowess of their hardware platform (yup, Dolphin brought his own h/w..) by playing a multiplayer/LAN version of the popular 1st person shooter game, "Half-Life" with Punisher. This game stresses a machine's hardware incredibly, with it's near real-time requirement of 3D video, and positional audio. (if anyone want's to know more about our hardware, e-mail us :-)

Dolphin showing us a web application. "Now where did I put that file..."

Next, Dolphin demo'ed a web application which he did and explained the intricacies of server-side scripting languages, persistent database connections and somesuch stuff! After that, he showed how Compaq Malaysia had set up its internal web proxies using squid. A few were quite interested in how it was done and watching the logs being tailed was an eye-opener for them (check out squid (squid.nlanr.net) for more on proxies/squid). More on squid anybody?

More Redhat installation going on. We're still not done yet, surrender all your PC's.

Apparently there are quite a number of database developers in our little group, who seemed quite interested in the number of OpenSource databases which is floating around out there, particularly MySQL (www.mysql.org). Perhaps, we'll do more stuff on MySQL, yes?

Furthermore, there were also quite a bit of interest in open-source server-side scripting environment (not unlike ASP in the Windows world), specifically PHP (www.php.net). We had a specific request for PHP too...

Hardware surgery, "Nurse, pass me the chain-saw. That harddisk's gone, we need to amputate."

Through all of these activities, there were installs still being performed by some members who weren't able to bring in the systems during the last meetings. And of course, the more experienced members readily helped out the newbies. One of the more interesting mentoring technique displayed was the shout-till-you-get-it-right technique. Imagine, this: as you're trying to partition your harddisk for your RedHat install, three guys behind you shouts out the fdisk commands; i.e. "n!" <pause>, "p!" <pause> "1!" <pause> "no, no not 2, 1!", etc. etc. It was indeed pretty effective, this is vouched by a newbie who was "mentored" using this technique; he said that the commands actually "sticks" in his head..

Squidster cutting his cake.

Sometime later, somebody remembered that they were hungry, so as the tradition goes, pizza and coke were ordered and peace reigns once more.

Oh, BTW, some kind person bought a cake for Squidster! (it was his birthday the day before), and everybody had a share. Nice cake, thanks Irene!

Plans

Tux keeping an eye on us...

The most important agenda is to bring up the skills of all the members to a minimal starting point by which they can start exploring Linux on their own. My take of this is, to be able to traverse around the filesystem and at least a working knowledge of the venerable editor "vi", should be it.

Of course, for the more experienced members, we would gladly discuss any of the more advanced topics, provided there is enough demand for a particular topic.

Some potential topics for the next gathering:

• Crash course: Vi
• HTML Fundamentals
• Basic System Admininstration

Main story by Squidster.
Photos by Punisher, Dolphin, Vortman and Squidster.
Uncalled for photo remarks by Vortman.
Pizza by Pizza Hut.

Mon Jul 5 12:17:11 MYT 1999

Update 08/07/99: Even more photos by Dolphin.

Copyright © 1999 PLUG