[Discuss] The state of VLUG meetings

[Patrick]

On Sat, 13 Oct 2007 22:55:17 -0700
"John Blomfield" wrote:

> I have only attended this September's and October's meetings so far, at 
> my first meeting there was about 15 and at the second about 6!  
> September's presentation I found quite interesting and picked up a few 
> new points.

Wow.  Thanks!

I felt a bit ill-prepared as things went along; wouldn't go where
I was steering it, because that's how conversations work as
apposed to essays -- and I'd outlined it more or less as an
essay.  That in itself was educational.

I think we improvised the rest pretty well though.  :-)  Great
crowd, thanks.

> As a long time Fedora user I found listening to the 
> experience of users of other distro's informative.  Perhaps a series of 
> presenters could give their albiet biased view of the advantages or 
> disadvantages of their particular distro love.

That *would* be interesting.  I'd only tried a small number of
distros before settling on Xubuntu, and it would be nice to know
some of pros and cons of a few others.

It would be nice to do that as more of a panel discussion, but in
the time-frame of these meetings we'd probably end up saying too
little about too many things.  Maybe as a follow-up to the series
you mention though.

> I have had virtually no 
> contact with other Linux users except through Fedora forums when I have 
> had a problem or when searching for answers on the web. I had hoped VLUG 
> would provide some contacts with whom I could perhaps discuss common 
> items of interest and find out what other users do with Linux besides 
> the obvious.

No, I pretty much do the obvious, plus a little tinkering.  ;-)

> 
> The October meeting was a disappointment since there was nobody from the 
> committee to chair the meeting, no agenda and no presentation.  Since it 
> was a small group I volunteered to show them the GUI applications I had 
> written which I had on my laptop. Unfortunately, there was nobody to 
> switch on the display computer so my audience had to look over my 
> shoulder at my laptop screen.  I was unprepared to give a presentation 
> so I am sure it was less than stellar!

Maybe, but now I'm sorry I missed it!

As you might have guessed from the presentation, I really *like*
a lot of the stuff you can do with Linux GUI and command-line
programs, including scripts, but the two don't seem to mesh
much.  The GUI is probably not very welcoming either, if you're
more used to the command line.  I mean they're working together
all the time, under the surface, but not in ways you can see or
modify easily.  It seems unnecessary, and I'd like to work on
things that integrate them more.

This looks interesting;
    http://murga-projects.com/murgaLua/index.html

I'd be way out of my depth trying to write, or even modify a C
program right now, but that looks more approachable.  Actually
wanted to mention MurgaLua at the presentation, point out a few
notes and examples from the documentation, but...  Well, see the
part about conversations vs. essays.  It just didn't go that way.

Don't know when, but I'd like to give or see a presentation on
MurgaLua some time.  And if it's me doing the presenting, I'd
have to understand it first, get a clue at least.  That would
take time.

> My main area of interest is in 
> program development in C and C++ using Qt library but I would be 
> particularly interested in any presentation that touched on programming 
> with any language or script.  Any insights into dealing with laptop and 
> desktop hardware and software issues (I am sure we all have our lists). 

Oh yes...

Can't decide if I've been too lazy, or too busy to figure out
wireless yet, but I know I want to shop for hardware that plays
nicely with the software, instead of the other way around.

> Referring to the earlier comments about Firefox I have been totally 
> unable to get the java JRE plugin to work, so any insights in that area 
> would be helpful.  I agree that the biggest problem is pitching a 
> presentation that is neither too simplistic nor too theoretically 
> complex for the audience is a tough call, when the audience is so 
> varied.

Well that's true.  Jargon can be hard to avoid, especially where
it's more succinct than English, but it is possible.  Cramming
your weirdest ideas into normal speech is the hard part, but once
you do, people usually get it [just trust me on that one; I've
been weird for a long time now, which is easy, but sometimes hard
to describe].

I think it's more of a language barrier than anything else, and
the worst time for that to crop up is in a computer store.  Sucks
to know exactly what you want to buy, and that it's a perfectly
ordinary off-the-shelf item, and still not know what to call it.

One minor linguistic tic that I've noticed in these meetings is
how differently people pronounce a lot of names for hardware and
software.  Makes sense, especially if you've read about something
before discussing it out loud, and I'm not complaining, just
commenting.  Me too, by the way.

> Perhaps breaking up into specialist groups for the presentation 
> is a way to go on some occasions to avoid becoming bland and superficial 
> and pleasing nobody.

I'm not so sure about that, because different people, with
different interests and levels of experience can learn a lot from
eachother.  Especially the `different interests' part; a lot of
them have probably seen the same problems from completely
different angles, and solved them [or not solved them, in which
case you'd really want to hear someone else's point of view on
the subject...].


> 
> John Blomfield

Patrick.

-- 
A rolling stone gathers momentum.