This was originally send to some friends and co-workers. Excuse the opinions and assumptions about your knowledge levels. Hiya All, Logging in from my Hotel Room at the Monterey Marriot, fully equipped with DSL (totally free if you're using ssh only!). Just wanted to let you know the fun information I learned about what's going on in the open source world. Let me just give you the information chronologically--if you don't understand some of the TLA's or terms I'm using, ask me about them later. I'm too lazy to tailor an email to everyone who's going to be getting this message. First day: New O'Reilly Books coming out/just released. Perl for System Administrators Programming Perl, 3rd Edition (The Camel book becomes comprehensible. I've always thought this one was a bad book to try to learn perl from because it wasn't functionally oriented. This new edition keeps all the same information, but is much better, I think) Understanding the Linux Kernel! Tutorials: Beginning Python: This was a pretty good class, but I guess I find nothing so great about Python that it beats out Perl in my book. It's kind of the "OS/2" of languages: better organized than many languages, and built upon a cleaner base, but having some annoyances that make the uglier but MUCH better supported competitor win out (in this case being whitespace sensitive...ick!). PHP: On the other hand, PHP is DA BOMB for doing simple web work that isn't complicated enough to need Perl or C, and even some that isn't. There are some things in any cgi language that would take forty lines of code that take three in PHP, and it's actually MORE efficient. Plus modules for things like image and PDF generation; it's now my web development language of choice. Apache Security: This was taught by Lincoln Stein, who had done huge amounts of work with the web and perl, but most recently brought us the napster perl module (whoo hoo!) It was very informative at the end, but the security information was a little basic. Linux Security: This was simply too basic. I was hoping they'd get into things like pam, complex ssh configuration, sniffing tools, netcat, etc: instead it was your typical intro security class. Other sessions: StarOffice is going Open Source (no news for those who read Slashdot). I talked to them about a number of things, including Anti-Aliasing support (it's in there with Gnome...maybe with others later) Security for their Basic language (think Macro viruses--they claim Java is their new scripting language) and response files for installation. That's COOL. Mozilla looks like it's going well, although I was VERY disappointed by the answer I received as to how they went about evaluating and setting the standards for the GUI. The answer was basically that they made it competitive, and the "best GUI" won. I don't buy that for GUIs, and so I'm worried that even if Mozilla is bulletproof it's going to have a default GUI that's crap. Samba looks well on it's way to being ready to be a drop in replacement for Windows NT 4.0 Server by the first quarter next year. DFS support should be here by the end of 3rd quarter, and it should be able to function completely transparently as a PDC or BDC including proper print sharing by early next year. I'm not sure about active directory services, though, but DFS is a good start. The only "event" I really enjoyed was of course the "Internet Quiz Show" by John Orwant, who is a former college bowl player. The last question was something like: "President Bill Clinton recently signed into law the Digital Signature act, and did this by using a special terminal which took his name and password. The password used by the leader of the free world was five characters, all lower case, and was the name of his DOG. What was Clinton's password?" Monterey is beautiful, but I'm eager to get on to San Francisco. I had a lot of seafood and just got done biking the 17 mile drive. Should be a party for the rest of the weekend. See you all later. Jer When all else fails, men turn to reason. --Abba Eban --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: tclug-list-unsubscribe at mn-linux.org For additional commands, e-mail: tclug-list-help at mn-linux.org