[Lopsanj] Report from the LOPSANJ Maplewood cluster group

[Tom Limoncelli]

The cluster group that met in Maplewood was quite fun.  We had 8
people (I believe).  The conversation was so fun we almost forgot to
talk about the pre-determined topic.  However, in the middle of the
meeting we paused to discuss the topic of "tools you can't live
without":

1.  screen -- ftp://ftp.uni-erlangen.de/pub/utilities/screen/
This program spawns a shell (or multiple shells) that don't die when
you disconnect.  Ever not been able to take your laptop home because
you ran ssh from it to another machine and run a command that is going
to run for days?  "screen" lets you run the command wrapped in a
system so that you can disconnect from the process, power off your
laptop, and re-connect from another machine.  Your process was running
the whole time.  This is also a great way to stay on IRC "forever".

2.  RT (for request tracking) and "any wiki".  Life without a request
tracking system to track what your users want, and a wiki to document
processes and procedures can be a living nightmare.  It doesn't matter
if you use rt (http://bestpractical.com) or Remedy (ugh!), or trac,
just use something.  Consensus was that RT is awesome, but there are 2
new systems getting a lot of buzz. (Can someone post what they were?).
 Wiki's are similar in power.  Start writing down notes about how
things are done, and soon life is better... the service you provide
becomes more consistent, and you can take vacations easier knowing
that what you do is well documented.  We didn't mention particular
wiki packages, but this author uses TWiki (twiki.org) a lot.  "trac"
(http://trac.edgewall.org/) gives you a request tracking system
combined with a wiki and was highly  recommended.

Then we went back to our conversation which ranged all sorts of
interesting topics.

At one point, we all got our our Palm PDAs and beamed each other our
business cards.  It was about as geeky as one can imagine.  Maybe more
so.  However numerous of us learned how to beam using Blue Tooth, and
other facinating PDA tricks.  (Oh, and Doug's non-Palm cell phone
permits beaming!  Sweet!)

The food was excellent. The service was great.  The fact that we
started at 7pm worked well... we missed the crowd and I don't think
the owner minded us hogging the table (which he might have if we were
there during the more crowded time).

I think we left a 30% or higher tip.

Tom