February 2007 - main

ALUG library new features
by Wayne Stallwood 23 Feb '07

23 Feb '07

Taking on board some of the things mentioned by Tracy regarding the Library I have now added the facility for members to offer their own books for loan. (you are not actually donating them to the library, you keep them on your bookshelf until someone wants to borrow them) As was pointed out on the list there are probably people sitting on useful books who certainly don't want to give them away to the library but would be willing to lend them out if there is some tracking in place. All existing member accounts have been upgraded, if you have an account the library should have already emailed you to tell you this. You should see a few new buttons when you log in (some of which only appear when you have added your first book) Use Add new Item to offer books for loan. When somebody reserves one of your books you will receive an email telling you who wants it. Once you have given the book to them you log in and mark it borrowed with the Item Check Out button. Once the item is returned use the Item Check in button to return it to your collection. You can specify a loan duration if you want and the Library will then alert both the lender and the borrower when books are overdue. The Library still welcomes additions to it's own collection. I want to make it clear at this point, The Librarian (me) and ALUG do not accept any responsibility for books lost. The agreement to safely return the books is between you and the borrower.

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RE: [ALUG] Wiki
by Tracy Dickerson 22 Feb '07

22 Feb '07

What I meant was that if you edit the HTML rather than use the GUI, the HTML is all bunched up and not spaced out so that it is easy to read for those of us out there that are rookies and will struggle anyway. Sorry that I was not that clear the first time. Tracy x -----Original Message----- From: main-bounces(a)lists.alug.org.uk [mailto:main-bounces@lists.alug.org.uk] On Behalf Of Brett Parker Sent: 22 February 2007 11:00 To: main(a)lists.alug.org.uk Subject: Re: [ALUG] Wiki On Thu, Feb 22, 2007 at 10:46:33AM -0000, Tracy Dickerson wrote: > Hello, > > >From a non technical point of view (i.e. mine) I am finding the Wiki > >a > very difficult place to edit. > > I just had to ask one of the kind fellas here at work to help me add > my name to the 'Whos Who' list as there was not a option in the 'Edit > (GUI)' tab to add a line as it is not active. OK - from the Edit (GUI) type link, to add a row to the table, right click in any cell, hit Insert Row - works very similar to any other editor that does tables :) (Just checked that it worked as I expected, because I'm a "Edit (Text)" person, I like wiki markup and find it quicker and easier than using the GUI). > Please can we make this Wiki user friendly to people who cannot use > HTML. Or can we order the HTML page views so that someone like me has > a hope in hell of understanding it with a book. What do you mean by "order the HTML page views"? I'm not entirely sure that I follow! Thanks, -- Brett Parker _______________________________________________ main(a)lists.alug.org.uk http://www.alug.org.uk/ http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/main Unsubscribe? See message headers or the web site above!

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open document petition
by tom potts 22 Feb '07

22 Feb '07

http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/OpenDocument/ Tom ___________________________________________________________ The all-new Yahoo! Mail goes wherever you go - free your email address from your Internet provider. http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html

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'locate' isn't always helpful, how to do better?
by Eur Ing Chris Green 22 Feb '07

22 Feb '07

While the 'locate' command is very useful at times, especially if you have lost a specific file it's much less useful when looking for, for example, a directory which has a rather common name. E.g. I was just trying to find where I have bits of vmware installed, doing a 'locate vmware' just produces zillions of lines of output. I don't (in this case) want to know all the files which are located somewhere below a 'vmware' directory, I just want to know the location of the directory. I know I can use an RE in locate but it's not all *that* simple to come up with an RE to do it. I could also use 'find' which would get me exactly the result I want with a fairly straightforward command, but it would take ages. What I really want is a 'find' that uses the locate database, I'm surprised no one has written one - or have they? -- Chris Green

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Wiki / Webmaster hours
by Matthew 22 Feb '07

22 Feb '07

Hi all, I introduced myself the other day but foolishly forgot to include a Subject. If you missed that mail and have questions, just ask. MJ Ray wrote: > ... lugmasters have been looking > at merging/co-hosting dynamic sites, to ease maintenance: there just > aren't enough webmaster-hours to go round. If iPlug has spare > webmaster-hours, please share them! I should probably commit them for one-time projects and events rather than for the continuing running of things, but I have some spare webmaster-hours here and there. I can update static and dynamic things, install and administrate CMSs and the like, and various other things that you shouldn't trust people with when you know them as well as you know me. If anyone has a surplus of project and the cause is good, drop me a mail to say what's required and I'll tell you whether I can help. I'll keep and eye on the Wiki and see if I can be useful there. Matthew

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How to check a directory is empty (probably in bash)?
by Eur Ing Chris Green 22 Feb '07

22 Feb '07

What's the simplest (and/or most concise) way to check for an empty directory? I can't just do a rmdir as I need to check three directories are empty before I can do anything drastic (like removing the directory). Not to mention that for one application of this I don't want to remove the empty directory anyway. As you've probably guessed this is to check if a maildir mailbox is empty - to do this you need to check if all three subdirectories of the maildir are empty. I can see various rather clumsy ways of doing it but nothing neat and elegant. A Google search didn't turn up much either, just some rather arcane zsh ways of doing it which were arcane enough to be zsh only I suspect. I might get carried away and write a little 'C' utility do do it if nothing sensible turns up. -- Chris Green

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RE: [ALUG] Wiki
by Tracy Dickerson 22 Feb '07

22 Feb '07

Hello, >From a non technical point of view (i.e. mine) I am finding the Wiki a very difficult place to edit. I just had to ask one of the kind fellas here at work to help me add my name to the 'Whos Who' list as there was not a option in the 'Edit (GUI)' tab to add a line as it is not active. Please can we make this Wiki user friendly to people who cannot use HTML. Or can we order the HTML page views so that someone like me has a hope in hell of understanding it with a book. Thank you in advance Tracy x -----Original Message----- From: main-bounces(a)lists.alug.org.uk [mailto:main-bounces@lists.alug.org.uk] On Behalf Of Brett Parker Sent: 21 February 2007 23:02 To: main(a)lists.alug.org.uk Subject: Re: [ALUG] Wiki On Wed, Feb 21, 2007 at 10:37:19PM +0000, samwise wrote: > Anyway, I'm finding myself struggling a bit with the limitations of > markup inside tables. It appears there's a macro to address this sort > of thing. Is there any chance someone could install this: Markup in tables?! Hnnng?! You're not planning on using tables for layout purposes are you? (as apposed to tabular data...) -- Brett Parker _______________________________________________ main(a)lists.alug.org.uk http://www.alug.org.uk/ http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/main Unsubscribe? See message headers or the web site above!

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Wiki
by Jonathan McDowell 22 Feb '07

22 Feb '07

In the spirit of trying to actually get us to the point where we have new content rather than the ever recurring discussions about the fact no one updates the website, I have created: http://www.alug.org.uk/wiki/ It's a MoinMoin Wiki, because I'm more at home with them and they work with flat files (I'm not entirely sure MediaWiki will do this?). I haven't moved over content from the existing "wiki" (feel free to do this) nor linked it in from the main page yet (if it takes off this is obviously simple). So, get started. Should be perfectly possible for us to have various pages for the Norwich social meets, the Ipswich social meets and whatever else out there. Anyone can create themselves an account and I know there are anti spam measures out there for Moin so they can be looked at eventually if we see issues. J. -- 101 things you can't have too much of : 25 - email.

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"Who's Where?"
by ted.harding＠nessie.mcc.ac.uk 21 Feb '07

21 Feb '07

If you haven't already had a look at recent changes to the Wiki at http://www.alug.org.uk/wiki I've started a page "Who's Where?" the get a ball rolling. The idea is that people can let it be known where they're "near" (in the East Anglian sense of "near") -- i.e. the places they consider it reasonable to make a trip to in oder to meet up with others in the same relation to said places. Then local "clusters" can get in touch with each other for get-togethers. The regular Norwich meets are nice, but distant for many. The occasional meets at Syleham or UEA or Gazeley/Ashley[?] have been excellent, but infrequent. Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <ted.harding(a)nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 21-Feb-07 Time: 21:28:01 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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RE: [ALUG] Re: IpLUG - Meeting
by Tracy Dickerson 21 Feb '07

21 Feb '07

That sounds great Chris. What I was thinking was having a page where we make a list of the available to lend books with the following details - Title - Author - Publisher - Who owns the book And then for each book have a attached page where we can do a library checking out thing so we know who has the book on loan, when it was loaned out and when the owner got it back. That way we can keep track of the books and have a history to see which are the most popular etc. Maybe then we could have a talk from someone about the contents of the book so that a discussion has formed. Just a little idea. I would be happy to get that pages going on the Wiki to start with and then people can add books or take them off if they leave us for other things etc. Tracy x -----Original Message----- From: main-bounces(a)lists.alug.org.uk [mailto:main-bounces@lists.alug.org.uk] On Behalf Of Eur Ing Chris Green Sent: 20 February 2007 09:09 To: ALUG Subject: [ALUG] Re: IpLUG - Meeting On Tue, Feb 20, 2007 at 08:33:36AM -0000, Tracy Dickerson wrote: > Hey fellas, > > Thank you for a fab evening. It was good to meet new people (and old > friends.) > Yes, same here. > Would it be a good idea to have a code library kinda thing where we > place useful command line commands etc. Okay, this would help me, but > I think that we could all learn stuff from doing this kinda thing. > That sounds like an ideal wiki sort of thing. > I was also talking to Pete last night and mentioned a library of text > books that we could document and lend out within the group. This could > make a good talking point especially if someone is looking to do > something in particular. I have a few books that I doubt I will ever > understand that might be of use to others along the way (I was given > them). > I have quite a few, some I'd quite happily donate whereas others I'd want to keep but would be very happy to lend. -- Chris Green _______________________________________________ main(a)lists.alug.org.uk http://www.alug.org.uk/ http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/main Unsubscribe? See message headers or the web site above!

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