WWW talk

[jabr at bcslnx.bcs.org (John Abreau)]

>> Jabr,
>> 
>> First off, did you get X running properly on your new box?  If not,
>> perhaps you could bring it to the next meeting & we could hash it out there.
>> 

I've actually been too busy the past week to work on it. I have X working
in 640x480 mode; if I have no luck getting 1024x768 working, then we can 
certainly work on it after the presentation. I was planning to bring the
machine anyway, with httpd running on it, and hopefully with Netscape
functioning. We'll be working on the BCS web pages this weekend, and
figuring out how best to maintain the content so it's kept up-to-date
in as automated a fashion as possible.

>> About the WWW talk, did you ask Rich Braun from pioneer if he would
>> do the talk?  I thought his talk on what Linux could be used for was quite
>> good.  Since pioneer does just that, I would think he would be more than
>> qualified to present on the topic.  Perhaps we could ask him?
>> 
>> 		Dan.
>> 		dan at palette.com

I think Rich could give a good talk on WWW. However, one of the issues
we discussed at one of our volunteer meetings involved the many pitfalls
new groups often run into. One of them is that the core activists tend
to get overworked and burned out; I don't want to see that happening.

On the other hand, we put this topic in the Calendar because the deadline
arrived before we discussed it much, and we knew that we could do a WWW
presentation ourselves if we were unable to locate a speaker.

I've heard from two guys in New Hampshire who Jon Hall referred for the
WWW talk. One fellow expressed some reservations about travelling that
far for the meeting, but he's offered to speak if we can't find anyone
closer. Another fellow hasn't committed to anything yet, and asked for
more details about what the meeting would be about, and what we were
looking for in a presentation.

I envision the following:

At 7 PM we start the meeting with maybe 5-15 minutes for announcements,
depending on what we have to announce. Perhaps a report on the upcoming
BCS Megameeting in April, and what we'd like to do at our group's booth.
I originally allocated the early part of the meeting to Q&A, but it
was suggested at the last volunteer meeting that this is best done after
the main presentation, as Q&A tends to run very long, and ends up
absorbing all available time, to the detriment of the rest of the
meeting.

We start the WWW presentation with an overview of what WWW is, along
with a little of its history, mentioning CERN and NCSA. We follow
this with a review of a few servers, browsers, and tools, and a tutorial
on installing and configuring the NCSA httpd under Linux. Then, if my
machine is doing X properly, perhaps I'll demo the BCS web pages.

Intro, History, Servers, Browsers, HTML Tools, Demo. That's the essence
of what I see as the presentation. I'd appreciate any other perspective
on this, as well. We'll nail down what's actually doable at the
volunteer meeting on Wednesday, Jan 11.

--
John Abreau / Director, BCS Linux & Unix Group / jabr at bcs.org
The Boston Computer Society / 101 First Avenue, Suite 2 / Waltham, MA 02154
Voice +1 617 290 5700 / Fax +1 617 290 5744