Highlights of the meeting held on 11th April

The Meeting -- A ring-side view

The 3rd ILUG-Cal meeting was a success -- perhaps because it was less of a formal meeting but more of a relaxed Sunday 'adda'.

It started off on a great note with the "guest-of-honour" -- Darshan (ref : "A sincere request to all members") turning up late :-) Among the promised ones, Dr. Roy didn't turn up...rumours overheard indicate that perhaps the good doctor couldn't give up his afternoon sleep....but this hasn't been confirmed by the Doc yet. Since he was the one to propose the meeting be held on 11th....his not turning up at the meeting remains one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of Y2K-1.

By 4:10 PM a casual look-around revealed to the naked eye the presence of the following linux fan(atic)s:

1. Arup Kanjilal,
2. Ayan Mallick,
3. Darshan Shah,
4. Ignatius Nayan D'Rozario (he prefers to be known as Inigo or Nayan),
5. Indranil Das Gupta,
6. Ketan Mehta,
7. Moloy Mitra,
8. Partha Pratim Ghosh,
9. Rajarshi Guha,
10. Sanjay Kumar,
11. Saptak Sen,
12. Subhodeep Goswami,
13. Suman Nandy.

The meeting started off with the members discussing printer-setup under Linux....it was commonly observed that some models of Epson Inkjets have a tendency to play truant under Linux, whereas HP DJs are the more regular guys.... A good PRINTER-HOWTO is the need of the hour. Indra had a real narrow escape when Arup tried to tell others that he was the printer-guru. Luckily of Indra, the matter quietened down quickly. :-)

As promised, Arup gave a good talk on CGI & Perl (although he stayed away from the OO aspect and other cool Perl fundas), with Saptak providing some additional inputs from time to time. Darshan was asked to give an account of use of CGI at his previous place of employment....Moloyda's fears of CGI dying a death with the JavaScript's coming of age was immediately assuaded by Arup.....the discussion wandered into XML for a few interesting moments.....the pros and cons of modperl and FastCGI were discussed briefly....the ASP technology from M$ too came into the discussion for a brief moment but it was promptly deemed unworthy of any further discussion in its present form and performance level.

It came out during the meeting that Rajarshi messes around with X programming, he was promptly got hold of and wasn't released until he promised to give a talk on the subject at the next meeting.

Moloy'da was threatened with dire consequences if he doesn't do some articles on VSAT connectivity using Linux.....he promptly pleaded guilty on grounds of being extremely busy with year-closing accounting. After some deliberation, it was decided to release him on parole and to give him a chance to make good his promise.

It was decided to ask the members for subscriptions to get the money together for ILUG-Cal domain name registration....the dirty work of keeping the ILUG-Cal web-site updated was given to Indra...he has agreed to do it.

Inigo took three snaps of the folks present, with members holding up magazines with photos of Tux. Indra will be putting these up at ILUG-Cal as soon as they are made available to him....he has discovered a new form of torture -- mail bomb any errant member with BMPs of the photos :-)

After a lot of animated and engrossing discussion, it was finally time to call it an evening. It was decided to meet again in a month's time. Since Partha'da will probably be away during that time, Dr. Roy has been designated as our new guardian angel at SXC.....so ILUG-Cal doesn't run the risk of being rendered homeless. (It is also hoped that our new guardian angel will continue to uphold the fine tradition of a free supply of refreshments to members attending the meeting :-).

HTML version of the posting on ILUG-Cal@egroups.com